I think my mom was, in general, very perceptive about these areas. She was sensitive in how she approached them, thoughtful in when she applied them. But not always.
Her marriage to my stepfather went sour early on. Our relationship to him as teenagers went from cordial to combative, more because we were used as pawns and forced to take our mother's side in everything than from us confronting him. They fought a lot and bickered constantly. Maybe he did start it by being jealous and suspicious (well, he married someone that he couldn't control—a factor that strongly attracted him before marriage, but infuriated him afterwards); maybe he was the first to break the sanctity and have an affair (more on that in a minute). But instead of being adults and seeking help and trying to work things out, they just went nuclear and—boom!—it was like living in a Nevada atom bomb test facility.
One of my mother's very first psychic experiences happened when my stepfather was at sea. They'd been married about 2 1/2 years, and she was missing him. But as she looked at his photo, she heard the word, "Maria." Loud and clear. It intrigued her, but it also enraged her. She was sure her husband was cheating on her. So the next time she wrote, she added, "Give my regards to Maria." Just that. Wow.
I can't recall what, if anything, he said in his letter back to her. But when he returned, he denied everything. Told mom she was crazy and all this psychic stuff was bullshit and corrupting. She almost bought it...until she found a photograph of him standing next to a lovely young woman, a priest, and some older people. Until he took her aside in the base chapel and confessed to her that he'd caught an STD. Then he had to own up that Maria was real, her brother a priest, and the photo her family members—who'd all enjoyed his company while he was in port.
Nothing was the same after that, of course. Lots of opportunities for Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff drinking and backbiting.
Okay, but here's where the TMI stuff starts to come in. A psychic told my mom that her husband was going to die in a car crash. He was sporting a lovely little Austin Healey in those days, and drove like an Earhardt. The atmosphere at home was corrosive, and all of us walked around on eggshells a lot of the time. When we heard that sports car's engine purring as it entered the garage, our butts clenched shut. We kids scattered like rabbits. Mom sharpened her nails for the evening bout.
After this prediction, mom (and I'm ashamed to say, myself) started hoping we wouldn't hear that engine anymore. Every evening for a while, we waited for him NOT to come home. For him to crash and burn somewhere. For him to die. And every time we DID hear the Healey in the drive, our hearts sank. This went on for some time.
And it was so ghoulish, so morally wrong. To hope for someone's death. Even though it's understandable that people in abusive situations might do so. We didn't hope for our mom's death, just his. Because then it would all stop. But what a stupid way to stop it.
I understand why we took that stance, mother and me. We were both passive-aggressive, feeling helpless and somewhat hopeless in the face of a volatile situation; we couldn't see any way out. My mother's method was always to look for another man to bail her from one situation to the next. She was incredibly capable of some things—she'd had her own local news column, radio show, modeling and charm school (yeah, it was the South, they still had charm schools in the 60s); she organized fashion shows, charity balls, her own kids, her own home. But when it came to men and marriage, she absolutely wanted to be Rescued, princess-like, and sheltered and pampered. For ever after. She never thought of stepping out on her own two feet.
And guess what? At that point in my life, neither did I. I was deep into the Sleeping Beauty/Rapunzel psychology, and I felt—in the face of my mother, her marriage, and my ability to earn a living—weak, helpless, unskilled, miserable, and deeply desperate. For someone with half a college education and no trained skills, there was only one goal: get married and have kids. Artistic talent wasn't going to cut it. It's what my mother expected, it's what I expected. The sooner, the better.
But still...that psychic, whoever she/he was, had a lot of nerve to make that prediction and share it with my mother. It just innervated her further.
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Ironically, my mother did something similar to me years later. My first marriage had ended and I was in love with—well, let's call him Mark. I'd met him through my mother and we'd started dating hot on the heels of my crumbling marriage. Still on the SB/R track, I was leaping into another relationship so I didn't have to be out in the cold world of the un-Rescued for more than 5 minutes. After Mark and I had been together for a year, we decided to get married. I was crazy about him, he had some lovely qualities: charm, intelligence, and the ability to listen and converse about feelings and emotions that was rare in a guy. We could talk for hours. We could sort out why I felt the way I did and what to do about it. We read books together, loved art cinema, sci-fi and fantasy, animals...He was 10 years older than me, fiercely independent, and a real mentor. He also fancied himself a bit of a bad boy, a hint of danger, and I was stuck on him big time.
My mother, always quick to smell a threat, went off him pretty quickly. Maybe being a bit of a flim-flam charmer herself, she knew one when she saw one. In addition, she saw someone who was teaching me to be OK with telling her "no" when she made selfish, unreasonable, demands. Or tried to drag me into her dramatic chaos. So, by the time we announced our wedding plans, maybe she just couldn't keep it to herself.
I went to her for a career reading. I was doing temp secretarial work all over Silicon Valley, and I wanted to know if I was going to settle into something more permanent. Money was tight in my new relationship, and I was hoping for better. Instead, my mother told me, in no uncertain terms, that my new marriage was going to be a bust. She said Mark (who, when I met him, was in a lucrative job but soon quit it to become an entrepreneur) would never succeed. That I would never have the kind of home I dreamed of, surrounded by plush furnishings and antique pieces, or a comfortable lifestyle. Not with him. That I would be scrabbling for money, that he would prove not to be my Prince, and that the marriage would not last.
Stupidly, I went home and told Mark what she said. I demanded that he help prove her wrong. And it changed our relationship. Over the next four years, I watched every move he made. I was often his critic instead of his supporter. When I saw him waver and lose interest in a project, I harangued him about commitment. When he moved on to something else, I bullied him about not taking a power position. When the bills piled up, I nagged him about responsibility.
I was afraid, so afraid of losing the dream I had about our life together. And I wanted Mom to be wrong.
But underneath the yummy romantic aspects of our relationship, and the warm, comforting mentorship, Mark and I wanted two really different things out of life. He wanted to be free, a high-flyer, someone who struck it lucky, made it big, and then parlayed that into something else. He wanted to start it, get it running, then sell it and retire with tons of cash. He was, at heart, a gambler. But like all addicts, it was always the "next one" that would help him strike it rich. It wasn't about buckling down and working hard to make "this one" succeed and endure.
And emotionally, he was no Rescuing Prince; he was Peter Pan—immature, irresponsible, careless, in the moment. And I was, at my core, desperate for security, stability, shelter. Like Wendy, I was sometimes shocked at how he could forget about me or anything that he'd promised. After five years, I realized I was already standing on my own two feet, doing everything that needed doing, without his help. He had mentored me well, I had drawn strength from it, and I believed I could do it myself. With a lot less stress! I hated the nagging bitch I had become, pushing him. We went to counseling, but the conclusion was inevitable. We were done.
So, in the end, my mother's prediction came true. But it was still terribly wrong of her to tell me. It influenced me, it hampered me; maybe the outcome would have been the same, but would the journey?
I've only had one other example of this kind of TMI predicting: while I was married to Mark, his brother dragged a self-professed psychic to our house one evening. She had the brass to tell me that I would die in my 50's of drowning in a sailing accident. Just like that! I was floored and more than a little shocked at this information. I admit that I looked at sailing—which I've done maybe a handful of times in my whole life—with less appetite than before. And the thought of drowning, for someone who grew up around the beach, makes me shudder even now.
As it turns out, she was full of shit. But just like my mom, she had no damn business telling me such a thing. Why? Because we all have to walk our paths in this world. Death, failure, sickness, loss...they are with us, they are certain to be a part of our lives. Whether we know about them in advance or not, we have to make the journey, with enough burdens on our backs. We can't live each day steeped in our mortality and we can't make a marriage knowing it's doomed. We have to push those fears away and find the joy in our days. We need hopes and dreams right down to the last second.
Some people might say that only God knows the moment of our death. Well, the good news about God is that he keeps his mouth shut. Psychics should take a lesson from that.
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