GUEST BLOG POST - Your Inner Vision by Rochelle Jewel Shapiro

I’m writing on my way to the hospital for my grandson’s birth. Sonograms have taken the thrill away from psychics like me for predicting gender. Still, good news is welcome from anywhere.

There’s so much I’d like to tell the soon-to-be parents, but I stay in their good graces by keeping my lips zipped unless asked, so if you have a few moments, I’d like to tell you what I’d tell them. Believe that your child is on his own special path to a bright future and hold fast to it, no matter what.

That’s just what I had been determined to do when my son was born, but once he started school, the bright vision I'd held for him became as blurry as a windshield streaked by worn wiper blades.

In pre-school, his teacher phoned to complain that he was noisy during transition. I chuckled. “You should have heard me screaming during transition when I was in labor with him,” I said. She didn’t chuckle back. Instead, she rattled off a list of complaints. He dumped sand in the water table and water in the sand table. He festooned the bathroom with toilet paper and hid so long in the closet that she almost went crazy until she found him.

She’s crazy, I thought.

But in elementary school, the complaints kept coming. He didn’t do his work in school and rarely turned in his homework. Though he read encyclopedias at home, he was in remedial reading at school. It must have been as exasperating for him as it was for me.

Once, in the middle of the day, the doorbell rang. I looked out the peephole. No one was there. The bell rang again. I opened the door. Charles, a second grader then, stood there in his snowsuit.

“What are you doing home?” I demanded.

“There was a substitute teacher,” he said and continued nonchalantly to the kitchen to pour himself some milk.

Despite having crossed major streets and risked being snatched by a pervert, he didn’t think he had done anything wrong. He moved to the beat of his own bongo drums.

I took him for hearing and eye tests. I took him to a neurologist, a psychologist, a learning disabilities specialist, a tutor. I gave him time-outs, took his favorite toys from his room, and cancelled play dates. Nothing helped. At home, he made costumes, clothespin figurines, strawberry carton towers scaled by plastic soldiers. He amassed a fund of knowledge about whales, the stars, and dinosaurs. At school, he only amassed poor grades and complaints. No matter what teacher he had, how stimulating the curriculum, he didn’t like tasks appointed by others. He wanted to do only what he decided upon.

My neighbors would say, I bet you just came home from your son’s school.” They weren’t psychic. They saw the tears in my eyes from hearing, “He’s such a nice boy, but…”

Then, when he was a junior in high school, he took a job in a local music store. There an angel in the form of a bratty rich girl turned his life around.

“CD Boy,” she’d say, snapping her fingers, “get me this. Ger me that.”

He figured if he didn’t buckle down in school, this would be his future—minimum wage and maximum scorn.

He managed to pick up his grades enough to get into a state school and while there, took a job in the outside world each semester to motivate himself to stay in school.

Today, he’s a well-respected, affluent financial advisor with family and friends who adores him. The moral, I guess, is that if your child isn’t doing well in school, don’t ever believe that he hasn’t a wonderful future. Get him the help he might need, but the biggest help you can give him is that no matter what his problem is, hold fast to your bright vision for him. It will come about somehow in ways you couldn’t have predicted..


Rochelle Jewel Shapiro, author of Miriam the Medium (Simon and Schuster), is a psychic who works by phone like her fictional character, Miriam. Shapiro’s psychic gifts have been written about in Redbook, The Jerusalem Post, Newsweek, The New Times (Lives), and more.  Visit her new site http://www.rochellejewelshapiro.com/  

 

The Psychic Sister...by Liimu

OK, so I'm a week late...but only those of you who are truly following along noticed that, right? And I can blame a lot on preggo brain, you know. I fully intend to milk that side effect for all it's worth.

Okay, so we didn't tell our kids we were pregnant until we saw the heartbeat at week 9 (though I am hard-pressed to understand how they didn't know as I was bursting at the seams wanting to tell them and constantly dropping hints). But they didn't. I know they didn't, because when we finally told them they burst into such authentic screams and shrieks of joy, there's no way they are those types of Oscar-winning actresses...yet. My 7 year old actually started to cry tears of joy.

With that in mind, there were some really weird goings on from almost the moment we found out.

The morning we found out we were preggo - my daughter wakes up and wants to tell me her dream. She is not one to regularly share her dreams, so this was weird in and of itself. She says, "I dreamed you had another kid who was saying I wasn't your kid. He was saying HE was your kid. And I said, 'No...I'm her kid...and Amelia (my 6-year old) is her kid and Autumn (my 3-year old) is her kid...but you? I don't know WHO you are." I was like, whoa. That's weird. But whatever.

A couple weeks later, same daughter (Devon) comes home from summer camp wanting to show me some cat's cradle type thing. I'm like, ok, whatever go ahead. She puts her hands together with string all around them, twists them around and through and tells me to pick three fingers, 1, 2, 3. I do. She says, "It's a boy!" I'm like, "What? What's a boy?" (At this point, remember, she still doesn't even know we're pregnant.) She does it THREE MORE TIMES and each time, I pick different fingers and each time, it "says" it's a boy. Then she says to me, "How many kids do you want?" And I say, "Four." So, she does it four times. First time, boy. Second time, girl. Third time, girl. Fourth time, girl.

Two weeks later, less than a week before we tell her the big news, she says she had a dream we had a baby boy. When we finally told her the news, I point-blank asked her if she had known or had any inkling that we were pregnant. She insisted she had no idea.

We have three girls. If I have a boy, she's psychic. No lie.

I Wanna, Wanna, Wanna - by Cyma

I want to have a baby. The problem is that I’m over 50, am in that “time,” have two young children and two older stepchildren. I have, as they fondly say, a “full plate.”

But, something has stirred in me so deeply that I can’t just ignore it. In fact, it isn’t going away. My desire is even greater than it was 10 years ago when my husband and I tried, and tried, and tried to have children. Something is different. Unlike in previous years, when a pregnant woman entered a room, or walked by me, I now care. In fact, something stirs inside my belly and my eyes linger longer than I’d like on her protruding belly. I feel like I’m missing something. I don’t want to save it for the next lifetime. I want to have it all, now.

This is really unusual for me. Ten years ago, I may have wanted my own children, but I think that my own and my husband’s ambivalence made for a circuitous dance where the man and woman not only don’t touch, but they fail to even make much eye contact. What I mean is, when the sperm saw the egg, I think they fled in various directions, sometimes coming very, very, very close to tango-ing, but, instead, doing the herky-jerky. I say this now with humor. I refused to contemplate or truly investigate this then. We both believe that all things happen for a reason. We believe that God gives us what we need and can handle. We said that it just didn’t happen, and that was the end.

So, what’s happening now?
Working on my three- year project, a book about new mothers over 40, has helped instill in me a sense of confidence I never dreamed I’d possess. Add this to the complete and utter surprise of being not only a new older mom, but a good new older mom, and I’m almost haughty with confidence. I mean, I spent a lifetime believing that I was truly incapable of even being a mom; I always believed I was simply damaged goods. I didn’t want to hand this trait right over to my progeny; I certainly didn’t want people to see what a failure I presumed I’d be.

So, here we are.
My shaman/teacher/psychic says that I’m pregnant with hope; blossoming into my own. She’s also referencing my impending menopause as a benchmark for starting over. I believe that starting over won’t be after the fact, but what I do before the “after the fact” happens. You know what I mean.

Completing my project - surrounding myself with women of all ages who followed their hearts, their dreams and their passions - makes this topic harder to deal with. The old norms aren’t the new norms anymore. And, even for me – a traditionalist at heart - I often fail to see my iconoclastic ways (two generations of children; my youngest coming at age 48) as pushing the envelope, helping other women recognize that age is no longer a barrier to reaching for and catching hold of your dreams - whatever they are.

What I do know is that I always tried to be like everyone else. I really, really tried. And, in trying, I missed my footing, my desires and my dreams. I was lost. Now, playing catch up, I’m not sure how to proceed - except to follow my heart. Stay tuned………………………..