Wrong Number

When I was 19 and looking for the Great Love of my Life to marry, my mother was still in the early days of her psychic powers. I consulted her like an oracle, often and eagerly. I pestered her for reviews of current crushes to see if they were worthy candidates. I had her look into the future to describe the man I’d finally choose to fall in love with. So she did. She described in great detail the big house I’d live in, the kind laughter of my husband, and the large, jeweled, heirloom ring he’d give me as an engagement present. It all came true—for my best friend Kathy. She married her boyfriend just a few months before I married mine, I was her maid of honor, and the details fit down to the sparkle in her (heirloom) ring.

Mom had seen correctly—but she’d misinterpreted. Both events happened around the same time, Kathy and I were close, and I'd even dated her husband before she fell in love with him. I was a member of the wedding party and I got to walk around in the big house of Mom's vision. So it's not surprising her wires got crossed. It was something she would hone over the years and get better at when dealing with clients. Perhaps less so with me, her daughter, for whom she had hopes and dreams; it was harder for her to "see" for her family with the same detachment and accuracy.

Romance is always a popular topic for prediction. It's probably what most women want to know about, whether they’re looking, suffering, escaping or embarking on. I've said before that, during the early years of my marriage, a dependency on my mother's visions put me in harm’s way. And it did.

My family lived in California at this point. So my husband and I, and our new baby, joined them there after he resigned from military life in the UK. The differences that existed between my husband and I in terms of values, cultures, and upbringing had already created cracks in our marriage. He didn't want to go to counseling and he was uncomfortable talking about it; I, patterning myself after my maternal role model, already had one foot out the door. Frankly, I'd had it there for a long time, only I was terrified to take the next step.

As my marriage crumbled, I sought desperately for my next Rescuer. So I consulted my longtime Oracle, and Mother described him in detail: tall, articulate, passionate, intelligent. With a very fast green car. Someone I had known in other lives. Someone with whom I would experience passion and romance. This eroded my marital commitment even further and gave me a fierce hope.

Though I could not imagine how I would meet such a man. Every day, my husband went to work and I stayed home with an infant—but with no car, very little money, and no social peers. We'd bought a modest house in a blue-collar neighborhood; to me, it may as well have been on the moon. (FYI, I had a strong intuition NOT to buy the house but it came too late and we were committed.) For friends I had the choice of a woman with a tribe of children and a smelly house full of sticky furniture or a shy, quiet Asian mother with a toddler girl, who was new to our culture. They were both lovely women in their own ways; it was me that was the fish out of water. I spent my time pushing my son's stroller to McDonald’s or bumping over parched, drought-stricken fields, soon to be developed. I felt like I was in hell. Where was I going to meet this prince? At the local golden arches? The cut-price supermarket? The dry, thorny meadows? You had to know where the princess lived before you could climb her tower and set her free. And I wasn’t likely to run into anyone.

My mother’s psychic ability seemed a lifeline to me in these unhappy times. She disliked my husband anyway, and was glad to predict a new love in my future. (He, in his turn, recognized the enemy when he saw her, so the feeling was mutual.) When I could escape to my family, she and I spent hours shopping, lunching, and spinning dreams about my life to come. She was totally sympathetic and indignant about my situation and my husband. And, miserable subordinate that I was, I told her everything. Even when I knew I shouldn’t, when shame flooded me, I confided in her—knowing she would never forget or forgive, even if I did. A hard word exchanged, the nasty mood of an hour or two, might pass and be resolved between me and my husband; we did have our happy moments, when we were kind to one another and tried to be committed to our child. But Mom would not move through that transition with us. She would keep a detailed emotional ledger on every complaint I made and she would hold a grudge forever.

I knew this. She had grudges against people who had been in their graves for decades. A comment from her mother-in-law, who thought Mom should get up and serve her husband regardless of Mom's pregnancy, was still brought up with indignant fury as fresh as the day it happened—despite the fact that this woman died when I was a child. Mother had a fierce tenacity toward any slight. So it was symptomatic of my toxic co-dependency on her, my immaturity, my desperate need for approval and for "being on her side" that I so inappropriately shared my unhappiness with her. Even when I knew both my husband and I would suffer for it.

The wisest thing my mother could have done would have been to tell me nothing about the future; to urge us both to counseling; to tell me that marriage is always hard work and that swapping one Rescuing Prince for another is just trading one set of problems for another. But how could she say any of that when she didn't know it herself? How surprising is it that I emulated my only role model, one who spent most of her life going from man to man, looking for just the right Rescuer to get her through life without fear or harm or want?

It's not healthy to be dreaming of a stranger while you're married to someone else. It's cowardly to wait for a rescuer instead of declaring your own freedom or, even better, working on the relationship you hold in your hands. I considered myself a smart person but that didn't mean I couldn't also be a foolish one.

One day the phone rang. When I answered it, there was a mix-up between the man who was calling and myself. He asked for me by my first name, then started trying to help me remember him. And I’ve lived so many lives, in so many places—well, I just suck at remembering names, faces, events, people, details. My head spins sometimes when two threads of the past come into juxtaposition. 'Don’t you remember?' my brother will say about a childhood event. 'We did such and such with so and so. It was important. You were there. You felt this way.' And I won’t remember any of it. So when I couldn't recall this guy on the phone, I didn't immediately conclude that he was a stranger. Eventually, we figured out that it was all a misunderstanding. He'd misdialed. We didn’t know each other at all. It was another girl of the same name. I hadn’t erased him from my overfilled memory banks, I’d just never known him.

And that's when the harm occurred. That's when the potent New Age brew of clairvoyance, reincarnation, karma and destiny led to a conclusion as flawed as Mother's prediction about my wedding. Maybe I’d known this man before, in another life. Maybe this was the universe delivering to my doorstep. Maybe this accident was really Fate stepping in, and I was talking to my Rescuer on the phone!

I'm going to digress for just a moment. Years earlier, when we moved to Virginia Beach, Mom had a client who was in love with a bus driver. During her reading, Mom gently probed the details of this relationship. The woman confided to her that she based it on the local paper's daily horoscope. Every day, she read her horoscope and applied an interpretation of it to her (quite imaginary) love relationship with the bus driver. Every day, he drove by her house. Well, yes...because that was his route! He'd never said anything to her, aside from the normal pleasantries as she entered the bus. The rest was all in her mind, distorted and made to fit, because of her belief in a newspaper horoscope. Mom and I shook our heads in amazement; how could a woman be so delusional?

I can tell you how because I did it myself.

I talked with this stranger on the phone. More than once. For hours. Laughing. Sharing. While my husband was at work. It wasn't long before he wanted to meet me. Wrapped in my dreams of longing, colored by my mother’s predictions, I agreed.

We discussed arrangements. But my stranger-prince wanted me to come to his apartment. We could swim, he said. Bring my suit. I wanted to meet at my mother’s home, around people I knew. Meet my family, I said. He didn’t like that. He demurred, urged, demanded. I started to tremble. I started to feel fear and to hear deception in his voice. He wanted me alone. He wanted sex. He wanted me away in his world, where no one could see. I argued with him and said no. I told him never to call again. I hung up, shaking.

I realized that I had almost allowed my illusions, my need for rescue, my dependence on prophecy, to potentially put me in the gravest harm. It’s ironic that my mother didn’t foresee this danger. But this was a situation I had NOT shared with her, and she was not always good at foreseeing danger in my life. Not even the greatest of them, which came later and which I've blogged about (read Didn't See It Coming).

Fortunately, I had never given the guy my address and this was years before Caller ID. He knew only my first name. He never called again and after a while, I started to feel safe. But I also felt sick because I'd been stupid, and only my common sense reasserting itself had helped me dodge a bullet.

Years later, Mom's prediction about the man in my future was proved right. I did meet a passionate man in a fast green car. Right in the hallway of her own home. Face to face, green eyes looking into my brown—and it was like lightning striking. Metaphorically, I jumped into his arms and demanded succor. My Prince at last! My rescuer!

In a way he was, but not as I imagined. This is life, not the Hallmark channel.

I divorced and married my new guy. In retrospect, I value the spiritual gifts he gave me, the journey we made together, for it was part of the learning and healing that led me to self-worth and independence. But I would pay the highest price for this "rescue." My first husband became an implacable enemy. As a result, I would lose most of my son’s childhood, the sweetest part of my motherhood. I would experience the greatest loss I have known in this life.

I would also learn that the only person who was going to rescue me was myself, and that was as hard and stoney a road as any storybook quest.