The fifth house is the house of children and Saturn is the planet of old age. This makes Saturn in the fifth house super weird. What’s a super old person doing trying to hang out with the kids?

Of course, an old person hanging out with children is completely normal. That’s how you solve the issue of childcare and senior care in one go. Old people are supposed to hang out with children. They’re great at supervising play, teaching, and can reach things that kids can’t reach. Kids are great at helping out with tasks that need physical energy like cleaning up or simple cooking prep. The only thing that old people and kids can’t do together is lift heavy things but they can also lift things of moderate weight if they work together.

Weirdly enough, I once worked with a senior center that operated out of a building that was also a childcare facility. Both the senior center and the child care facility had a lot of space issues because they didn’t allow the seniors and children to share space even though they were always trying to hang out. Just an observation.

Anyway, I’m getting sidetracked. This article is about people who have Saturn in the fifth house or those who grew up playing with a lot of elders.

There’s something about people who grew up playing with their grandparents or with the generation of people who are older than their own parents. People who grew up playing with their grandparents tend to be exposed to more kids. They see a bigger context around themselves because they were also playing with cousins or neighborhood kids. They know more people and they deal with age differences in their friendships.

Saturn can be a constructive planet. This is the planet of old age and maturity. Having it in the fifth house is like having an older guardian around when you are learning the risky art of play.

Of course, Saturn is also the planet of sorrow. It’s a malefic for god’s sake and malefics hurt at least some of the time. When you bond with people who are old when you are young, you learn what it feels like to lose a close attachment at an earlier age. That’s Saturn too.

Saturn has a reputation for being a negative nancy. We imagine that Saturn sits around and tells you “No!” like some kind of disciplinarian who has nothing better to do than try and catch people when they’re having fun. Yeah, that can be Saturn. Older people should tell kids no because kids get into all kinds of things that can be dangerous. I think what Saturn looks like in the fifth house can depend heavily on whether you are a day or night chart and whether Saturn is helping your chart structure or disrupting it.

Sometimes, only sometimes, people with Saturn in the fifth house have a certain reluctance around play. They don’t think they deserve pleasure.

Does that mean that people with Saturn in the fifth house don’t play at all? No. People have to play because play is how we, just like cats and dogs and monkeys, learn in life. We are not horses who are born knowing how to run. We have to play to learn the skill of being human. I’ve noticed that people with Saturn in the fifth house can go to two extremes. Either they refuse to see themselves as playfully creative at all or they pursue pleasure like a hedonist at the end of their life. Sometimes, they do both together.

What do you do when you are denied something? You get obsessed with it. You want it even more. That’s Saturn in the house of pleasure. Grief can make people pursue pleasure more spontaneously and more directly too. A lot of people have a lot of sex immediately after losing a loved one. You realize that you can die so you want to feel alive all the time.

People with Saturn in the fifth house are hedonists. They are restrained so they work to undo the ties.

I’ve noticed that people with Saturn in the fifth house are quite competent at creative expression but equally competent at denying that they are creative at all. They have a lot of creativity. They’re leaking creativity, in fact. However, they don’t feel like they’re in control of it or like they are the ones who get to make creative decisions about their own self expression. They make excuses a lot, saying that they just like this particular aesthetic or flavor or composition because of circumstantial or social reasons but they don’t give themselves credit for their own inventions.

I think that has to do with self control. We tend to think of self denial or restraint when we think of discipline but discipline also has to do with giving yourself credit. Discipline has to do with knowing that you are the one who is making your own decisions and living with that knowledge.

In the book The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, she has this exercise that I always think of when I think of Saturn in the fifth house. The exercise is that you have to write a letter to your inner critic, the critic who is always penalizing your creativity and self expression for you. I wish that there was a section in the book for the inner critic to write a letter back. I think that critics are often just worried. Creative critics are often worried about self control and the art of making choices.

There’s something interesting that happens when people fear a lack of playfulness in their lives. Saturn is a malefic who likes to minimize and reduce and, in the fifth house of pleasure and play, it can for sure create the appearance of a reduction. When people fear that they themselves are not playful enough, they tend to feel envy. They start to see other people as so much more creatively competent to diminish their own choices. When people fear that other people are not as playful as they feel inside, they tend to feel a lot of shame. They fear that they’re just too much or too messy and that other people will see their self expression as a type of excrement. They don’t want to poop in the open.

That’s why queer people feel so much shame, because we are trying to exercise a sexual liberation that the world tries to kill off. That’s why queer people will feel envy, because we fear that we are not playful enough to be queer. There’s envy and shame—regret is the third one. We tend to feel regret when we realize what we have lost. Regret is the hardest grief related emotion because it makes you realize what you can’t change because time has already passed. Queer people have lost a lot of life so we mourn the regret that we feel about our playfulness using our playfulness.

People with Saturn in the fifth house are challenged to allow their envy and shame to speak out loud. What happens when you make sense of your envy, when you understand your shame? You have to let these things speak so that you can hear them.

So, that’s Saturn in the fifth house in a nutshell. It’s the sad clown who misses playing with grandma. It’s the hedonist who feels envy due to not feeling playful enough or shame due to not feeling too playful. Or, regret because they understand the playfulness that they have lost. It’s the artist who understands that discipline isn’t about self punishment but about the reality that your choices and actions do a lot to impact the world that you live in. Because that’s creativity. To be corny, that’s what we call owning your creative expression.