The Knowing: Awake in the Dark (24 page)

From the beginning, Elizabeth did not forget when a wrong was received, especially if it was dished out by her brother. As a toddler, she once cold-cocked him in the side of his head with a cowboy boot, while he sat, unsuspecting, watching television. Apparently, days before he’d pinched her taking away a toy that belonged to him, leaving her squalling on the floor. Her retribution wasn’t swift but it was measured. Now, years later in Scotland, she plotted her revenge for his mistreatment by being the “good child.”  She followed rules and completed her studies while she watched her brother lie, break rules and rebel against authority landing him, time and again, in hot water. Thus, the good girl-bad boy dichotomy was born in Scotland.

Months after we arrived, my mother, having taken early retirement, came to Scotland and moved in with us. I was excited to have my mom for support and much-needed help with Elizabeth and Raine. We’d begun to build a relationship with one another through my ordeal with Aaron’s arrest and trial.

“Nita!” My mother called from the top of the stairs, “Raine needs his school jacket and tie and Elizabeth needs more knee socks picked up at Marks and Spencer today. I’ll take them into Edinburgh and get them.”

“Ok, thanks Mom. I’ll have to work until nine tonight. I’ll see you later.”

We fostered a new respect together and I felt free to discover who I was without disappointing her. She supported and encouraged my abilities and pushed me to learn about them. It had happened a few months before our move.

“You’re not crazy,” she said to me one night when I revealed stories of having
pictures
and hearing voices. We sat Indian style on the floor face to face and drank our second glass of wine and talked late into the night. “Your psychic.” My mother stated.

“But, how do you know?” I asked.

“Because, I’ve read about it and I have always
known
things myself.”

“Really? Like what?”

“I don’t know,” she said and paused. “Like, I
knew
your father was cheating on me. I get feelings about people and I’m usually right. I
know
things about them that I shouldn’t.  I’ve always believed in past lives because I remember one of mine. I was an Indian and I had a horse that I felt so connected to, it was like he was my brother instead of an animal. I’ve known it since I was a child and Boots confirmed it for me in my reading. I have just always
known
.”

“Why didn’t you ever talk about that stuff?”

“I don’t know.” she paused. “I did a little with my friends. I didn’t as much with you girls. I knew all of you had some ability, but I didn’t realize how strong your gifts were. You need to give readings and open a center one day.”

I was floored by my mother’s response. I felt validated and like maybe I wasn’t crazy after all. It would be a friend of my mother’s to whom I gave my first professional reading.

I never imagined that my mother would not only support me but believe in me, too. It was a new experience for us both.  After that night we talked about our experiences and our past without needing to judge each other. We forgave and moved forward.  We began a healing process and built a relationship based on the present instead of the past. We grew close and I got to know my mother as a woman for the first time.

When she arrived in Scotland we lived in the flat I’d rented. Later we’d move into a house I was able to buy. The flat had an occupant we hadn’t known was there. Off the kitchen under the stairway there was a pantry where we kept some canned goods, cleaning supplies and the rubbish.

Occasionally, when the pantry door was opened, a foul smell like a rotting animal would linger, seemingly out of nowhere. After a few weeks of that, the rotten smell became more constant and I
knew
there was something in that pantry that wasn’t a dead animal or rubbish responsible for the offending odor. I could feel it. One morning when I pulled the door open, a wall of energy rushed toward me that felt like pressure pushing me backwards followed by the stench. I stepped back in surprise and with my heart racing I screamed, “Okay enough! Get out! You are not welcome here.”

The smell disappeared instantly and I
knew
I’d been right, but that wasn’t the end of things. We began to hear loud banging late in the night that came from the crawl space above us, and sometimes from the stairway.

The noise would wake the children and, Raine would call out in a frightened voice, “Mommy, what’s that noise? It’s scaring me. Is someone on the stairs?”

“It’s ok, Raine, go back to sleep. It’s just the house,” I lied.

The pesky invader continued to stink things up. I meditated and prayed and filled the house with light and asked for angelic help to rid the space of the malicious intruder and eventually, it left and not long after, we did too.

I secured a loan and bought a house that was a short train ride from Edinburgh. It was a “listed” building which meant it was historic. It’d been built in 1798 and was located at the bottom of the Pentland Hills. It’d been completely refurbished on the interior and was situated on an acre of farmland that held the remnants of a stone carriage house at its borders. The views were breathtaking.

I vowed I would never go back to the states and I felt truly safe for the first time in years.

I refused to let other people’s fears and limiting beliefs belong to me.

I landed a job at a four-red-star hotel as an assistant manageress. I’d been working in the hospitality industry since the age of seventeen and I was well versed in service. Several months later I was hired to open a pub and bistro, from the ground up and manage the property for a large brewery in Scotland. I hadn’t carried such responsibility alone in the past, but I was determined to make things work. Failure was simply not in my vocabulary.

On my first day, I met my district manager at an abandoned stone building whose top floor was once a popular pub that boasted of serving Robert Frost his daily brew while he visited Scotland. I was given a chair, a phone and a phonebook, in an empty room with only the skeletal remains of an old and deeply scarred bar.

“There yi are luv,” my district manager said with a smile. “Let me know how yi go. You’ll need ti find a chef for the bistro below, as well as staff. We will take care of the opening inventory for the pub. No worries there.”  And with that, he was gone and I had to figure it out for myself. Fortunately, I did.

The most valuable item I brought to Scotland, was a dog-eared book my mother had given me years before named, “You Can Heal Your Life” by Louise L. Hay. As a teenager, when I attempted the positive affirmations suggested in the book, my stomach lurched and I’d think,
you’re such a liar and so full of shit,
and I’d stop and look away, disgusted with my reflection.

Now, years later, I realized I had debilitating and negative thought patterns that ran in my mind day and night. I began to hear my thoughts affirmed,
I am weird and don’t fit in. People don’t like me. I am ugly. I am a bad mother. I am cheap and stupid. If people knew the things I have done, I would disgust them
. On and on the thinking process went. So, each time I had a hateful thought about myself, I replaced it with a loving one like,
I am beautiful. People are drawn to me.  I am a good mother, and I love and approve of myself. I am not crazy. I am worthy of love.
I taped my affirmations all over my house and I carried one in my wallet. Every time I passed a mirror, I spoke a loving statement about myself and blocked out any negative response. Sometimes, tears filled my eyes as I spoke my affirmations. My throat closed and I fought the urge to look away.  I wanted my children to learn to love themselves and I knew it had to start with me.

Over time, with perseverance - I began to like myself. It was the beginning of love for me.  I embraced a transformation of who I
knew
I could be - that was born first with Raine and then with Elizabeth. I discovered that being a battered child, drug addict, neglectful mother or victim of rape, did not have to define me. Rather, all my experiences were purposeful and I could find strength and meaning in them. I could decide who I’d become.
You can create your life, you can. Who do you want to be?

Scotland was my home now and the girl I’d been before disappeared, she belonged to another life I no longer lived and I believed I’d never revisit. I would, however, revisit again and again in an attempt to heal and forgive myself. The process would take decades of conscious exercises to release self-doubt, blame, rejection and hate.

But to begin, I listened more attentively to the voice within and I learned to trust in the flow of life. I recognized that the voice I’d heard for so many years came from me, my divinity, my intuition or god consciousness. It was my connection with God. It was my very soul.

Once I started to meditate and converse with the
light-body,
that I now called my father guide, I no longer saw it hovering outside of me. It was the decision to change that began my transformation. A simple decision to heal and forgive. The key was in the learning and the ability to trust, and if I could believe in myself and my process, the understanding would follow.  That was where I started.

One afternoon nearly a year after my mother had moved to Scotland, we stood huddled against the icy wind on a train platform waiting for the Waverly to deliver us into Edinburgh. My mom decided to return to the US, and had already purchased a ticket for her return flight. She wanted to stock up on items she couldn’t buy in the states before she left. Her neck was wrapped with a thick scarf that covered her mouth as she spoke. “I’m going to stay with Maggie, Ronnie and the kids until I can find a place of my own. I certainly won’t miss this weather,” my mother said, with a smile that lit in her eyes.

I’d recently accepted a new job as the manager of a trendy restaurant in the city of Glasgow, which I was to start two weeks later. I was sad to see my mother go, but had no intention of returning with her. But as my mother talked of her plans, I heard the voice.
If you stay and don’t return with your mother, you may regret your choice.
The voice went on.
It’s time to go now, time to go home.

Hell no,
I thought.
I’m never going back!
But I
knew
the voice was right and although I didn’t want to go, and I was terrified with the idea of it – for some reason – I had to. I reluctantly sold all I owned again and bought three one-way tickets to California. Maggie would have a house full.

Sleeping homeless people crowded every open doorway and overhang. They lay on tattered cardboard mats and newspaper - the lucky were wrapped in blankets or sleeping bags and others huddled under layered clothing - their heads covered in wooly caps. Sidewalks and gutters saturated with urine brought to mind an outdoor latrine whose smell could not be escaped in the damp morning air.

The San Francisco sky was heavy with fog that left a cloud of moisture clinging to my face as I walked to Pete’s for my morning espresso.  As I approached the street corner, a homeless man sat up and leaned against the doorway of where he’d slept. Jumbled in a heap beside him, in a filthy burrow of despair, was fishing net stuffed with clothes tied in a tight ball, a torn plastic Safeway bag that brimmed with crushed aluminum cans and his bedding in a tangled mass of guarded treasure. His feet were bare and blackened with street grime, his toenails shockingly yellow and long and the odor of his unwashed body wafted toward me carried in the mist. Webbed with deep cracks that looked raw and painful, his swollen hands shook as he carefully opened a pint-sized bottle that contained his salvation and lifted it reverently to his lips.

I watched the man and thought -
What a shame -
Poor man, what a waste. -
The voice was immediate, -
Who are we -
It asked –
to judge our brother? Perhaps a hundred people pass by him today, forever changed by his presence. Can it be his gift to us? Does he live exactly as his soul intends? How can we know?
I was stung with the arrogance of my thoughts and felt embarrassment spread to my cheeks. I believed my thoughts were compassionate and didn’t see the judgment in them. Instantly, my critical opinion and limiting thoughts were exposed. The homeless man stared blankly into the street - caught in his own reverie as I passed - but after that morning - when I found myself in judgment of others - thinking that I knew a better path for them - I remembered the voice and worked hard to let my judgment go and look within to discover what my real fear or self-judgment was. I found that every time I judged another, it was my own limiting thoughts that needed change.

That was just one way my gifts helped me grow and develop. After that moment, I watched with surprise, my own judgment that seemed to be constant and vast. I was self-critical, had little compassion for my own plight and carried heavy judgments about myself and others.  Having the Clairs impacted my life in other unique ways. I’d developed a different filter in which I saw the world. I didn’t feel like my life happened to me, leaving me helpless and without choice, rather, I understood that every event had meaning and held a specific lesson for me. My life was a series of soul agreements, mutually beneficial, even the traumatic ones. Even rape.