My children would sometimes complain about the way my gifts affected them. After one of my sons passed his driving test, he was keen to be out and about in the car as much as possible, despite having little experience. He didn’t have a car of his own and when I lent him mine it was with conditions attached, the main one being to avoid a notorious road near where we lived which was an accident blackspot. He could get anywhere by using slower, less convenient roads, but I always worried that he would take the easier, and more dangerous, option. One night he borrowed my car as usual and promised that he would, also as usual, avoid the treacherous road. During the evening I got an awareness that he had used that road. I was in bits while he was out. I sat in the lounge with the lights off, just waiting for the phone to ring, wondering if there would be bad news.
When I heard the car draw up and he walked in, as quietly as he could, the relief was enormous. I didn’t say anything to him because I was in such an emotional state; in fact, he didn’t even know I had been waiting. I went to bed and slept soundly, but the next morning I was absolutely furious because I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he had broken his promise and driven on that road. I marched into his room and gave him hell for it. Lying there, half asleep, with a ranting mother giving him a row for something she had psychically ‘seen’, he admitted it all.
‘Is there anything you don’t know?’ he asked me, wearily.
‘No! Nothing at all!’ I said. But I was lying. There is plenty I don’t know when it comes to my own family, and that’s hard. Just like any other parent, I want to know that they’re all always fine, that they’re safe, that they’re well, but I don’t have that luxury as I can only see part of the picture. Maybe the children of psychics have more problems to contend with than most teenagers, but it was difficult for me as well.
I get snippets of information, but that’s all. When I was pregnant myself, I didn’t pick up anything about the babies. My neighbour was pregnant at the same time and when she told me she was having twins my response was one of horror. ‘I’d die if that was me,’ I thought. But just afterwards I had a scan and I remember looking at the screen and wondering how on earth the baby had moved from one side to the other and why there was still a shadow of it where I had seen it to begin with. It was only when the sonographer explained that I was having twins myself that the penny dropped, and of course I was delighted once I’d got used to the idea.
When my sister was pregnant, I told her not to bother with a scan as she was having twins. She said that was nonsense. As a midwife, she’d know. But I was right with her too. It was only with my own pregnancies that I saw absolutely nothing.
I have never had a sense of the babies who were coming. When I do readings for pregnant women, most of the time I’ll be able to read the child’s personality or character. With my own, I was in the dark. However, at the time I wasn’t as aware of my talents as I am now. I was also very busy with life. As my own children grew up my gift started to get stronger, so perhaps if I’d had my children later in life I’d have picked up more signs.
Pregnancy and motherhood tend to make women reflect on the relationship they have, or have had, with their own mothers, and that was certainly the case for me. The child you were is growing into a mother who will nurture and care, and that in itself is a stage of your personal journey. When I was pregnant I would often imagine the type of parent I wanted to be, and I vowed that I would shower my children with love and warmth. I would never be distant or unsupportive, as my own parents had been with me. It brought back the way I had felt so alone and out of place in my early years, never knowing what to make of the things I saw and heard and sensed. When my mother died, I was twenty-four and a mum to four young children. A stage of my life had passed and it was time to come into myself. That is when I went back and looked at who I needed to become and how I should develop. Pregnancy is a time of reflection for all women, and I was no different in that sense, but it was motherhood and the death of my own mother that really developed my gifts.
I have always known whenever my children were upset by something they weren’t telling me about, or have done something that they shouldn’t have. Reading this, a lot of you will say, ‘But most mums feel that way – it’s mother’s intuition.’ If those are the words in your mind, great! I hope they are, because that is exactly what I’m trying to get over. We all have this ability, we all have the potential to harness this natural talent.
How many times have you been in a different room from your toddler and just known when you need to go through and check on them? And how many times has that been the very moment when they have stuck a bit of Lego in their mouth or decided to poke their fingers in the DVD player or make a move on the dog sleeping in the corner? Do you really think that’s coincidence? I don’t, and I know I’m not the only woman in the world to have this intuition. We all have it, but we aren’t aware of the number of times it works. We just think we have some unidentified, unnamed ‘link’ with our children.
Even cynics will have experienced this, I’m sure. Why not take a moment to recall all the instances you can’t quite explain? The times when you didn’t want someone left alone with your child even though there was no clear reason not to. The times when you didn’t want them to go on a trip but didn’t know why. There was a reason; you were being sent a message, you were being given signs. At those moments you are in touch with your intuitive side, even if you are not normally that ‘sort’ of person. Female intuition, in particular, is very strong and it gets stronger when you have a child (unless there is no bonding, which happens in some sad cases). That is the very core of intuition or psychic awareness. Tuning in to your child’s inner needs is incredibly basic and incredibly precious. It should not be under-rated and should always be acted upon. The more we act on our intuition, the better it will be for our children.
A funny feeling
How many times have you heard someone say they wished they had acted on ‘a feeling’? How many times have you heard someone say that if they hadn’t gone in to see their child at that moment, they would have fallen or choked or walked out into the road? All of these are indicators of how much help we can receive on our journey through life if only we listen and act upon the talents we are naturally blessed with. As mothers we have that ability – and as children we have it in an even purer form.
I remember doing a reading for a woman called Liz, who talked a lot about whether she ‘believed’ in things ‘like this’. (I always find it funny when I hear this; if folk really didn’t ‘believe’ then I can’t see why they would ever contact me in the first place!) Such individuals often don’t seem to see the relevance or importance of what they are telling me, and that was the case with Liz. She was the mother of three children, and grandmother to eight.
‘What a week I’ve had,’ she told me. ‘My youngest grandson, who’s only three months, was taken to hospital last night. My daughter was going to bed and just before she closed her eyes she felt she had to go and check on him. He’d been fed and he wasn’t crying, but she had this feeling that she needed to look in on him. The poor wee thing had stopped breathing, and if she hadn’t gone in that moment who knows what would have happened?’
‘Why was he taken to hospital?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ said Liz, ‘just to see if there’s anything wrong.’
I could have told her that her mother’s intuition saved that child’s life.
‘That happened to me once as well,’ Liz continued, ‘with the same daughter I’m telling you about.’
‘Is that right?’ I said. ‘Did anything else like that ever happen with your kids?’
‘What