Whole Life Times: All in the Family?

April 2006 | BackWords

All in the Family?

by Mary Frances De Rose

According to Charlie, my childhood best friend who is now a psychiatrist, my mother was “incredibly spooky.” While those are not exactly “fightin’ words” (nor do they qualify as a medical opinion), I was quite puzzled—and more than a little peeved—by his characterization. To me, my mother engaged in very normal mom-like behaviors: nurturing our family, working for social-action causes, and (at the risk of making her sound Stepfordian) baking perfectly round chocolate-chip cookies.

But when I thought about it, she did exhibit some unusual talents. For one, she often walked toward the phone before it rang. And she psychically knew when someone called while we were away from the house—a handy-dandy skill in those days before voice mail and caller ID. Her telepathic abilities did not end with telecommunications. She could accurately predict the weather weeks in advance. My father said it was like being married to an “articulate, flesh ’n blood Farmers’ Almanac.” Had my parents been interested in accumulating wealth, I have no doubt my mother could have made a killing in futures trading.

Her prescient mind came with a heart of gold. She had tremendous empathy for the plight of the disadvantaged and a sixth sense when it came to the feelings of children. God knows, I could never hide anything from her, and I learned early on it was futile to try. I remember coming home from school one afternoon and my mother was sitting on the sofa, sobbing. She told me she had just dreamed my dad was in a car wreck—but she assured me he was okay. Thirty-five minutes later, my father walked in the house, a little bruised but otherwise fine. He seemed less stunned by the auto accident than he was by the all-knowing reception he received from his wife.

One of my mother’s premonitions went well beyond spooky. Soon after her funeral, I found a journal she kept during college. In it, she predicted she would probably die at the same age as her own mother. I pulled out a calculator. She was correct to the exact day.

In many ways, I’ve become my mom. I advocate for vulnerable people, research current events and occasionally bake cookies—albeit irregularly shaped. But, unlike her, I seem to be lacking in any sort of real psychic ability, intuition or sixth sense. To compensate for these deficiencies, I have one cell phone, two voice-mail numbers and three e-mail accounts. I keep elaborate records of everything—in triplicate.

People who know me well know I’m no crystal ball bearer. When my colleagues hear I have invested in a stock, they take their money and run the other way. I correctly guess the sex of expectant friends’ babies exactly 50 percent of the time. I never have an umbrella when it rains. And, unfortunately, death and betrayal, even when there are many telling signs, always take me by surprise.

I wonder if intuitive powers, like some endocrine system disorders, skip a generation. If I had had a daughter, would she have been like her grandmother? Are predictive abilities X chromosome-related? Beats me. I know only that I have spent my life in a terra firma-bound, stupefying, intellectual fog—a state reinforced by my many years in and around logical positivist graduate schools.

Nobel laureate and DNA co-discover James Watson said that intuition is logic. If that is true, can intuition be taught just as logic can be a subject of instruction? According to the literature, intuition can be “developed” or “nurtured,” but not taught. We are all born with it. And as further evidence of its nascent presence, each of us should be able to find at least one instance when we inexplicably just knew something.

I believe that. It happened to me.

A while ago, I had the discomforting sensation that my father had a terminal malignancy, based solely on my trembling visceral reaction to a magazine cover photo of a cancerous lung. Two weeks later, his doctor confirmed my worst fear. Clearly, one such “success” does not a medical-intuitive make (and I gladly would have given anything to be wrong in this instance). However, this prophetic event piqued my interest in mystical matters. After years of diligently honing various hard scientific skills, I wanted to develop the other side of my brain.

The movement away from my lifelong reliance on Cartesian logic has been very slow in coming. Somehow I thought this major perceptual shift would happen as a simple act of will: I think, therefore I intuit. But old habits die hard. I was not ready to abandon the (false) security provided by elegant logistic regression equations or the pretty pie charts representing data from double-blind studies. Now I think …no, I feel I am prepared to make the necessary leap.

My mother often invoked the saying, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” At one time, her confidence seemed almost quaint. In retrospect, I believe she was simply right. My well-developed, 20-20 hindsight—the frustrating, forehead-slapping flipside of foresight—indicates I should have started this education in earnest years ago. Yet this painful realization actually may be the first lesson in my new area of study.

Therefore, hopefully better late than never: The student is ready.

Mary Frances De Rose is a freelance writer. This is her first contribution to WLT.

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