My psychic child may not be psychic, but the faith is still there

Ok, so maybe my son isn’t psychic. He predicted Arizona to win the super bowl. I think he was off because he’s not much of a pro ball fan at this point. If he were, though, I’m sure he would have nailed that prediction.

My husband Rick anchors four hours of the morning news here and pretty much the only time I see or hear him on TV is on those days I’m driving my son to preschool. Rick’s show is followed by Mike and Juliet and last week they had Sylvia Brown as a guest. She is a bona fide psychic. I mean, really. She wanted Arizona to win but said the Steelers would get it. See? She also predicted that in 2009 Brad and Angelina would split and Britney Spears would have some kind of illness and Barack Obama would get us out of this economic crisis. So I’m going to be keeping track this year to see if her prophecies come true.

Sylvia Brown sees dead people, and that fascinates me. I’ve seen her on various TV shows. I love to watch her tell people what their deceased relatives are saying. Fascinating! Six and a half years ago a British psychic not unlike Sylvia Brown came on my husband’s show. My husband is quite the skeptic but I insisted he ask her about my mother. It’s not like me to pursue psychic readings. Really, the thought terrifies me. But I guess it was the hope of hearing something from my mother that made me press him. It had been three years since she died and the wound was still quite sore to the touch. My husband reluctantly agreed. He called me that morning and told me that after the interview he walked the psychic out and thanked her for coming. She said, “What did you want to ask me?” And, a bit startled, my husband said he wanted to know about his MIL. She said, “I see a woman standing behind you. She has long, golden hair and she is – I’m sorry to say this – but rather portly. Oh, she just rolled her eyes when I said that.” So my mother! For two of the last three years of her life she was put on hormone therapy to starve the cancer. It worked, but the meds made her gain a lot of weight. Having been weight-conscious all her life, she was mortified by it.

The psychic went on to say that my mother has seen a lot of moving of furniture (we had just moved into a new house weeks before) and painting of rooms (yup, did that too before the move). She said my mother wanted him to know that she could breathe freely and that she was not in any pain. This was significant to me. When my mother died I had to know what caused her death. I’m not sure why I wanted to know that little detail. The cancer was eating through her organs, but I wanted to know if death came because of organ failure or was it because her heart just gave out or did the fluid buildup in her lungs ultimately drown her? It was the latter. While under that morphine unconsciousness with the oxygen tube blowing in her nose, she simply lost the ability to gasp for air. I suppose dead people don’t breathe, but knowing that she was “breathing” fine up there in the other life and not in constant, excruciating pain gave me some peace. My husband had a dozen ways to dismiss that reading as coincidence. But it was deeply comforting to me.

And then the psychic looked straight at my husband and said, “And she knows about the baby.” My husband said, “What baby?” And the woman smiled and continued, “She knows about the baby and she’s very happy.”

I asked my ever-skeptic husband to explain this one. Just two days earlier – a solid week before my period was scheduled to come – I took a pregnancy test. It was positive. We had told no one.

I ended up miscarrying two months later and a few months after that I got pregnant again and nine months (actually, 40 weeks is more like 10 months but who’s counting?) later we had Truman.

Strange as it sounds, I have always been comforted in these years that followed my mother’s death, that she does know about her only grandson. That somewhere up there she is looking down and gushing over with joy. And knowing her, she’s probably laughing her head off because Truman, like me, can talk hours straight about nothing and is completely incapable of sitting still for more than 20 seconds. “Paybacks,” she’d say. “Paybacks.”