When I was forty years old I called my 75 year old Irish Catholic mother and said I had good news and bad news. "Give me the good news first," she said. "Well, I'm not pregnant!" I replied. I was joking, but based on the fact that I wasn't involved with anyone at the time this was a good thing. "That wasn't funny when you were twenty and it isn't funny now," she commented wryly. "Tell me the bad news then." "I'm working full time as a psychic," I told her (the one and only time I have referred to myself as such.) And without drawing breath she replied: "Well, it's about time!" So much for my shock value! I was the one picking myself up off the floor!
It appeared that as a small child I had often been known to wander off by myself when we were visiting castles or old places. While other kids collected dolls or trains, the family joke was that I collected "ruins." Once safely ensconced in the back of the car on the journey home, I would sit and tell my teddy bear about all the people that I'd met, and what had happened to them. Except that it had all happened in the long distance past! My father, an ardent historian was able to confirm my stories.
"Why on earth didn't you tell me?" I asked my mother.
"Oh we just thought if we ignored it, you'd soon grow out of it…"
Apparently not!
Growing up, people would gravitate towards me and tell me things they had never ever told anyone else, feeling better for doing so. On the way home after a party I would comment that so and so seemed really disturbed and I felt something was awry (these were neither people I knew or had talked to) only to be told that they were a great couple and had just brought a house… planned a trip… were looking to have a baby… Within a couple of weeks I would hear that they had broken up.
I always seemed to "know" things. Mostly I put it down to plain common sense. That which I could not explain I simply shrugged off.
At a painful turning point in my life a friend of mine, who was also going through a rough time, decided we should do something fun. The options were going to a strip show or having a reading. Based on what I am doing today, I'm rather glad that the "reading" won!
When I sat down with the psychic she asked me: "Why are you here?" I am utterly ashamed to admit that my response was: "You tell me, you're the psychic." (thankfully she forgave me and we still connect from time to time all these years later) "No, I mean, why are you here?" she insisted. I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about and started to think of how to politely tell her I'd changed my mind. "You can do this perfectly well yourself. You are far more intuitive that I will ever be," she told me. Still extremely skeptic I asked her why I wasn't doing it, then? "Because you don't want to!" She went on to tell me that by the time I reached forty, I would be working full time as an Intuitive. I left her house and never gave it another thought. She was, however, right.
© Shena Meadowcroft
