Okay, teenage years - once over quickly

Okay, here goes, my teenage years - once over quickly.  Being a teenager was utter misery.  Not only did I have breasts and begin menstruating before everyone else of my gender at school, my abilities were getting stronger and stronger.  It was really driving me to distraction, and that's putting it kindly.  Between 8th and 9th grades, I grew to my current adult height - 5'10'' - which made me one of the tallest kids in school.  That's right, one of the tallest kids, not just one of the tallest girls.  In fact, 3 other girl friends and I were, till the 10th grade, the tallest in our grade, even in high school.  Yeah, that didn't bring on any teasing and tormenting at all.  Each one of us confided to the others that it would be sooooo cool to be able to shrink down to the size of a cheerleader and be popular for a change.  That didn't happen either.  Instead, we all grew breasts, got our periods, and in general were a mess till the rest of the girls caught up with us, at least as far as the periods  arriving that is.

The closest I came to sharing my frustrations with my "gifts" with my friends was sitting with a bunch of girls in the womens' restroom at church telling scary stories, ghost stories and trying to levitate one of our group using "Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board" for a chant to encourage that to happen.  When we actually levitated the girl about a foot off the cement floor, an adult stuck her head into the restroom to see what was going on - "CRASH!!!" down she came to the floor in a heartbeat, with a lump on her head to prove she hit the floor hard.  Laughing and giggling we scattered to the winds as best we could so as to avoid any adult questions.  When we talked about it later with one another, one of the girls asked, "Did you all see that man standing there watching us?"  I nearly said "yes" but stopped when another girl said, "Yeah, right, there was a man standing there watching us!  Where was he, in the sink? You have gotta be nuts to believe that!"  But, there was a guy standing there, near the sink, watching everything we were doing and shaking his head in disbelief.  No way in the world was I telling anyone that I could not only see him, but, sometimes, I could hear his thoughts as well.  Nope, not telling a soul.

Ninth and tenth grades were okay, mostly.  Tried my best to fit in with the few friends I had, and pretty much kept my mouth shut about hearing voices of folks not present and all that sort of thing.  Junior and senior years at high school were the absolute worst ever.  I finally was allowed to date, sorta.  Had to have a chaperone for the first 6 dates because my folks thought me so naieve as to "give myself away" to the first boy that would even think about kissing me.  Never had those thoughts, but, they didn't care.  Teenage hormones scared the crap out of them, so, I got to go on chaperoned dates.  Yep, that really made me a laughing stock and put me utterly out of the realm of dating.  When they finally relented because I wasn't being asked on dates, I dated a wonderful fellow who "sorta" accepted the paranormal - ghosts, spirits, and that stuff, not hearing and talking to them.  It was fun, but, frustrating because I could hear relatives of his trying to communicate with him.  Since he didn't want anything to do with that stuff, I got to pretend it wasn't happening.  Hated that part.  Being someone I wasn't just was miserable.  Things didn't get any better the next year either.  In fact, my gifts were being so "pushy" that I began wishing them away every day.  Each time they would rear their heads, I would wish them to go away... till finally they did.  My head was quiet. I didn't sense anyone "lurking about" anywhere, ever.  I was alone in my own skin, in my own world, and, as much as I had thought I would like it, I wasn't so sure I did. 


I finally knew what it was like to not have my "gifts" turned on all the time.  Hmmmm, really quiet, have to really pay attention to what other people say and do and not have anything else to rely on but that input...  Although I wasn't really comfortable without my other input sources, I let my gifts go, hoping they wouldn't ever rear their ugly heads again.  I was tired of having to pretend I didn't see, hear, smell, taste, feel things that no one else was aware of.  It was nice to be able to be "normal", only it wasn't.  But, my desire to be "normal", "regular", "like everyone else" was so strong, I deliberately ignored my gifts whenever they tried to break through the various barriers I had erected to them.  It was an uncomfortable time emotionally for me, but, I perservered because I thought it would be better to be "normal" than "weird".  I was wrong, but, that's a story for another time.

"That book is dumb and getting breasts is a pain in the butt!"

The summer between the fifth and sixth grade years at school just stunk to high heaven as far as I was concerned.  Mom decided I was developing my breasts way to much for her comfort, so we had to have "The Talk" and I had to go brassiere shopping for the first time in my life. 

One:  "The Talk" in our neighborhood consisted of a mother handing her daughter a book (well-worn) to read that was a story about a girl who went out on a date with a boy, rode around in the back seat of a car while out on a double date, got to "French kissing" him and ended up with a baby.  Then the mother would say, "If you have a questions about this, just ask me" while silently praying that the daughter would be so confused she'd not ask any questions EVER.  That book went around the neighborhood to every girl that even looked like she might now have breast tissue or was growing hair under her arms or near her "privates".  None of us learned anything about menstruation from it, except that somehow French kissing lead to babies and that riding in the backseat of a car wasn't approved of by our parents.  Otherwise, the book was pretty useless. 

Two:  Bras were brassieres and they were very serious business.  Moms said so.  "You growing up now.  You have to have a brassiere."  Now, for those of you who have never had to go through this part of "womanhood", this can be a real jolt to your sense of who you are.  One summer you can take off your shirt and just play bare chested like everyone else (read that , the boys) because it was 100 degrees in the shade.  The next summer, you cannot, under any circumstances, remove the first stitch of clothing even if you are in danger of heat prostration because your Mom says so.  The boys weren't treating those of us whose mothers had deemed us in need of brassieres any differently.  That was the pervue of our adult female parents. 

My transition to "womanhood" came all in one hellish week early in June.  Mom had a bunch of the neighbor ladies in for cards, snacks, and to bring their daughters over so we could all be introduced to the "wonders of womanhood" together.  One, the girls and their mothers she invited over were as embarassed about the subject as she and I were.  Yeah, this was gonna be a great experience - NOT!  So, while our moms feasted on sandwiches, punch and played cards the 5 of us sat in the backyard in lawn chairs pretending we were getting suntans in our shorts and middie tops and passing around "The Book" and reading chapters of it aloud to one another...  and laughing our butts off from embarassment and from confusion.  At one point, Pam's mom leaned out the patio door and asked us if we had any questions yet.  Huh?  Questions about what?  Not one word in the book about vaginas, ovaries, cervixes, penises, sexual desire, intercourse or any of the other things "The Talk" is generally supposed to cover.  Just a weird and convoluted story about a girl kissing a guy and getting pregnant.  For all we could figure out, once you got breasts riding in the back seat of a car with a boy got you a baby and that French kissing was something our moms didn't want to explain to us.  The kissing part sounded intriguing, but, if there was no description of it, how could we figure out if it was wrong?  Other than that, the book was pretty useless.

The only common link between all of this foolishness that the five of us could determine was the extra fat on our chests that only 2 of us - me and Pam - were getting.  We decided right then and there that "that book is dumb and getting breasts is a pain in the butt!" by unanimous vote.  We even elected Pam to tell our moms the result of our voting.  The result of that vote was our moms taking all of us out for a brassiere fitting enmasse that very day!  Great, shopping for a brassiere, dying of embarassment, having someone else besides your mom measure your chest naked, and then bringing a whole slew of brassieres into the dressing room for you to try on.  Yepper, great experience, especially when all you were in the same huge dressing room together.  Yikes! 


What does all of this pubescent stuff have to do with being psychic as a kid?  And, what did it have to do with making that summer stink to high heaven?  LOTS!  One, I really knew what the Moms were all thinking and feeling even more acutely than I did before.  Constant fretting and worrying everywhere and about everything the girls and I did from dawn till bedtime and even after we went to bed.  The constant worrying and mental jabbering was overwhelming.  Combine that with the beginning of estrogen invading the bloodstream and it is a total chaotic mess.  I so didn't care that Mrs. V next door worried that her only daughter might see a penis before she "was ready"  - whatever that meant.  Nor did I care to know the innermost thoughts of any of the other moms with whom my parents interacted.  Good grief!  Puberty brought out the worst in their thoughts that's for sure.  And, then there were the thoughts and feelings from the girls themselves.  OVERLOAD!!!  And try as I might, it seemed like closing up shop for the night got harder and harder every minute.  I so wanted to go back to the summer before.  It was much easier and so much less confusing mentally and emotionally.  The changes in my body were changing the way my gift was working and I really didn't like it much.  It would have been so nice to be able to turn it off and just walk away and leave it sit there by itself.  There were times I felt almost psychotic from all the "stuff" swirling in everyone else's heads and in mine as well.  And there was no one to talk to about it at home.  Changes weren't fun and I really wanted this one to go away.  Little did I know it was going to get worse for me, much worse, before it began to get better.

Yepper, that book was really dumb, totally useless when it came to learning the facts of life, and getting breasts was a giant pain in the butt!

Growing Up Weird

Well, we have established that I grew up a bit differently than a lot of other kids my age.  I talked to my dead sister, I heard thoughts eminating from other peoples' minds.  I saw people who were dead...   and I saw and felt things that weren't physically there.  Not things like a chair, or a book, or even a person.  No, nothing normal like that.  I mean like clouds of emotions, the presence of "something" other that what was physically present in the room with me - with the family - with friends.  I felt and saw"stuff" just like you could reach out and put your hand on it, felt and saw stuff.

We lived in a really neat house.  There was a gas fireplace in the living room, a landing at the top and bottom of the staircase that went upstairs, a great porch with a porch swing out front, a creepy walk-in attic, a cozy kitchen, a spooky basement and the dining room had a great big window you could stand at and see the entire back yard.  It was an awesome house.   I have such fond memories of that house.  My first memory of seeing and feeling something no one else saw was in that house.  It was the day of my sister's  funeral.  Back in the 1950's kids didn't go to funerals.  It just wasn't done.  So, my dear Granma babysat the 3 of us - my brother, my new baby sister and myself.  It is a clear distinct memory for me.  Granma was standing at the dining room window looking outside at the backyard and telling my baby sister about the birds at the bird feeder and the clouds and all the kinds of things one tells a baby.  Moving from the living room into the dining room to talk to Granma, I saw a HUGE black semi-transparent cloud filling the room behind her and the baby. It felt icky and heavy and really sad. When I asked her "Granma, what is that?" pointing at the by now GIGANTIC cloud of darkness, she looked at me with the most puzzled face and asked me what I was looking at.  "That's a cardinal.  This one is a sparrow," she told me thinking I was asking about the birds.  When I protested that I wasn't asking about the birds, she asked me what I was talking about.  "The cloud, Granma, the cloud.  What is it?"  Thinking it was the fluffy white ones floating in the sky outside, she proceeded to try to explain to a not quite 6 year old about real clouds.  "NO!!!!! The one behind you, going all over the room!!!!"  "There is no cloud.  I don't see what you are talking about," she patiently explained.  "But, Granma, there's a great big black cloud in the room I can see through!!!!"  "Sweetheart, Granma doesn't see it.  But, if you do, well, I guess you do," and off she went to change my sister's diaper.  Just like that.  Basically, it was like she lovingly "humored" her granddaughter because she herself didn't see or feel what I had seen and felt. 

That evening, after the funeral, when Mom and Dad came home, Granma told them about me asking about a dark cloud in the dining room.  She told them she thought it was probably just a trick of the light coming through the windows in the dining room and that it was nothing to worry about, just me grieving the death of the sister I adored and tried to entertain whenever I could.  How do I know this you ask.  Well, having missed my folks all day, I snuck down the staircase after I was put to bed to listen to them talking to Granma. I just needed to hear their voices to feel comforted that they were home. They were in the dining room and their voices were easily heard from the staircase in the living room.  It struck me that then that what I saw was something that the grown-ups thought was weird, unusual, odd - whatever.  Not even 6 years old and feeling weird, feeling different from the rest of the world because I saw and felt a dark cloud that no one else saw or believed that I really saw and felt. 

Weird continued on from that day.  That was the night Lis started talking to me at bedtime.  That was the day that I started perceiving emotions and the ways they can manifest themselves in a household.  That was the day that I knew in my heart of hearts that I was always going to be considered a bit weird, different, odd or whatever.  It scared the crap out of me to be that different.  It was exciting to be that weird, but, it hurt that no one believed me...  or, as I found out many years later, that they believed me, but didn't want to say so out loud.  My folks were too busy trying to maintain normalcy in the household and grieving privately to have time for a kid who saw things, felt stuff, heard people that weren't there...  they didn't have the time, energy or inclination for me to be "weird".  I didn't understand why I was having all of these things happen to and with me.  They didn't understand or have the patience to either.  We were a mess.  I was growing more weird by the day.  None of us knew what to do with me...              and it stayed that way for a long time.

Why don't people talk in their heads?

You know what's really hard to comprehend when you are 6 years old?  Why folks living in their own skins  don't talk to you like the dearly departed do.  Seriously.  When Lis visited me and we talked, we talked in our minds and sometimes aloud.  That seemed perfectly normal.  We would just think things and understand what each other was thinking.  I knew that folks in their skins talk with their mouths.  Where the confusion came in after I discovered I could hear thoughts was that the living don't very often realize mind to mind communication is possible.  If I asked Mom and Dad once, I know I asked them umpteen million times, "why does so and so talk nice from her/his mouth and say such mean things in his/her head?"  The response was always one of "what are you talking about?  Hush, go play.  Stop dreaming things up!" and so on.  Typical parent responses to what must have seemed to them to be foolishness and a neurotic response to a sister's death.  It was far from it.  I was really serious.  It truly confused my 6 year old brain when I could hear the thoughts of others (especially adults) as clear as day in my mind and the words that came from their mouths were so entirely different in tone and meaning. 

So, confused and totally clueless, I learned to listen to thoughts and hear the words of others - children, adults, teenagers, old folks, even critters and pets.  I just didn't ask my folks about it after a while.  What was the use in that?  After all, they weren't hearing other peoples thoughts and hearing different words coming out of their mouths.  How could they begin to understand what it was I was experiencing?  They apparently couldn't do those things, so how could they explain the differences between how things worked when you can have those experiences and when you can't have them.  I learned at an extremely young age to trust my instincts and those little thoughts that dashed quickly and quietly through my head about events, places, animals and people.  It kept me from harm at least once that I remember, and made me, in many aspects, a shy child who made friends with great difficulty and didn't trust many people of any age for a very long time.

To this day, I am able to pick up on thoughts that others are having.  No, I don't go around eavesdropping on other folks thoughts.  That's rude, impolite and unacceptable unless permission has been granted to do so.  But, I do know when friends are ill, worried, in trouble, happy beyond all belief and the like.  The vibrations and thoughts that come to me from them call their names in my mind with a different type of vibrational tone and quality to them that give me a clue as to what is going on with that particular person.  So, for example, is Sally Sue is having an especially happy day, I'll hear "Sally Sue" over and over and over again in my mind in a bouncy, high, wind chime type vibration in my mind until I finally talk to her or she calls or visits and tells me the great news.  And, because I learned so young to trust my instincts and believe the thoughts that I felt and heard, I have, as an adult, retained that trust in my instincts and learned to read the subtle body and facial language clues that most folks ignore because they speak as loudly to me as minds do and are as truthful as mind speaking as well.

My sister died and I became psychic

I've been trying to come to grips with the fact that I am a "psychic" for quite a long time now. Actually, most of my life would be more like it. I hear people who are not physically present. I smell smells that no one else smells. I feel the presence of the dearly departed and of spirit guides, angels and others. Using the word "psychic" to describe myself is a concept so foreign to me that it might as well come from the planet Uranus because "psychics" are those folks who do the lecture circuits and help police solve murders and mysteries - not me.

I am the oldest of 3 the surviving kids my parents raised. One sister died before I was 6 years old.  She was born with a tumor that turned out to be a then incurable form of cancer, Wilm's tumor.  She was the dearest, sweetest little sister a kid could have.  I remember her as a special angelic girl. She was also horribly sick for most of her life as I remember it.  When she died we kids were told that Lis went to live with Jesus and God in heaven and that we had to be very good children so we could live there with her after we died when we were much older.  I asked my folks several times why I had to wait to see her when I knew she was with us and trying to talk to us every day.  That went over like the proverbial lead balloon.  My butt sat in a chair in the corner for several hours over a period of days for that thought.  It was a truth, but, still, not something either of them wanted to here, let alone learn that I was experiencing it.

What really got me into trouble though, was my insistence that Lis was visiting me at night after I had been put to bed and told to go to sleep.  She really was coming to visit me.  I saw her.  I hugged her.  I laughed with her and sat talking on the bed with her from about 3 days after her death till she told me she wouldn't be coming back to visit any more because she had to move on.  For those of you curious as to how long she visited - 42 days - 6 weeks - the time it takes to go through the Buddhist Bardo of Becoming - that's how long she visited me every night.  That is also how long my parents would swat my backside once or twice and tell me for the 2nd or 3rd time to "hush and go to sleep for cryin' out loud already!"  Daddy told me once he did see her - one time - but, that I needed to stop saying that I was talking to her because Mom was so upset at her death my talking about seeing Lis was tearing Mom apart.  Mom never did see her.  Nor did she think it was a good idea to be sitting up on the bed every night talking to Lis about death, dying, what both of them felt like to experience, what it was like in heaven, what I would be when I grew up, and the fact that I would be something special to many people and be able to help them just by being myself.  That last bit didn't make sense to me then.  I'm still trying to figure that out all these years later.

So, to put it plainly.  I wasn't even 6 years old yet and my sister died.  I became aware that I was psychic.  It's an odd combination.  But it was just that.  She died and I became what I am now, psychic.