A few years ago, when my brother’s girlfriend was pregnant, my mom called to tell me that nearly the entire carton of eggs in the fridge had double yolks inside.
OK?
“It means your brother is going to have twins.” (Obviously.) That idea popped into her head with the first egg, but she kept going. Two yellow yolks plopped out of several eggs.
People were obligated to eat a lot of eggs that day, and an ultrasound later showed my brother’s girlfriend was pregnant with twins.
Now, my favorite aunt – my mom’s baby sister and a kindergarten teacher as innocent and kind as a kindergarten teacher – is asking me how to reach Stevie Nicks by fan mail.
“The song ‘Landslide’ has helped me a lot during this. I would like to tell Stevie how her music has helped my soul. Any ideas how? I’ll send her a special envelope so it stands out. I love you! I’m going to make it through this.”
^An actual text from my actual aunt.
A few weeks ago, she awoke panicked from a dream that my uncle, her husband of more than 25 years, had been cheating on her.
Had she called anyone but my mother, they would’ve told her that it was a just a dream. It probably means you’re insecure about work or something. Have you been watching The Laci Peterson Story again?
But she didn’t. She called my mom. And my mom gave her an ominous, “well, keep your eyes open.”
Later that day, my aunt found an extra float in their pool and Malibu Rum in my whiskey-drinking uncle’s liquor cabinet. He admitted he’d been fucking his secretary for months (cliche, I know) – including the night she dreamt of it.
Mom says she knew he was cheating as soon as she heard her sister say, “hello” on the phone that day.
My mom – A Southern Christian Woman – laughs when I call her a witch. She prefers words like “intuition” or “providence.” But there is something to be said about a woman’s instinct that is mostly out to help fellow women – like there is some unseen feminist force that’s pushing us to politely tuck each other’s spiritual tags back into our dresses when they slip out in public. To brush the hair from our eyes.
I had a dream, too. In college, I dreamt that my boyfriend cheated on me with a girl I had never met – someone that, as far as I knew, was his first high school girlfriend and long gone. When I woke up, the dream bothered me so much that I pulled up her Facebook page, enlarged a picture of her face and turned my laptop around so she could stare at him while I measured his reaction.
Yeah, he acted a little freaked out. But who wouldn’t? I’m not proud.
I found out 6 months later that he had in fact cheated on me with her one drunken night after a big fight – only days before the laptop incident.
I knew that. I saw it on his face that night, but I suppressed it. I would’ve sounded crazy, I thought.
He called his best friend after my weird Facebook intimidation tactic and told him about it. They joked that I was a witch.
Historically, we were called witches because we were smarter than men. We called them out. We stood up for our injustices. We were different and went our own way. Or at least, we tried.
As much as I would like to believe it, the women in my family have no real super powers. Trust me, I have stared at many a pint of Häagen–Dazs in my day, and none have levitated toward me.
But I do believe that some of us are a little more tuned in than others. That’s because we’ve had women who have fostered our intuition. I know the power of it and its purpose. I know what that old woman told my grandmother at the carnival decades ago and how it made her feel. I know that her best friend called her crying in the middle of the night about a knot in her stomach that she worried was somehow tied to her son’s safety just minutes before she got the call that he’d been killed.
My friends joke about me being a witch because I always guess who’s going to date before they’re dating and how the movie ends. But when I tell them my stories and tell them that they have it too – that they need to just listen, I see it in them. I know that they’re trying to follow it.
I’m not sure why it seems like my clan’s main ability is to unveil cheating scoundrel menz, but I’ll take it. It might sound superficial. But I chalk it up to generations of bad luck with bad men, and leagues of strong women who only made it through because of – you guessed it – other women.
No matter what you call it, A Woman’s Instinct is there. It rises from the hot cups of coffee you share and hovers over the room when you find yourself together, chatting with all your closest women – your mother, your grandmother, your sisters, your cousins, your aunts and great aunts.
It’s there when you run home for refuge and drop your bags and let out a cry that you’d held all the way up until that point. It’s there in their faces that say “welcome home” when they could say “I told you so.”
And it’s the very thing that you feel when a coworker touches your arm or asks if you’re OK when you haven’t said a thing about what’s going on. It’s when you can’t help but feel your friend’s pain like it’s your own. And it becomes a problem when the signs and bad feelings aren’t just about your own life.
Do you tell? Do you leave it alone? How could you expect her to not get mad when you’re pushing her to act on your “bad feeling?”
Earlier this year, someone besides me called my mother out about her witchiness. A guest pastor at her church – a woman – was preaching about how she had awoken in the middle of the night with an urge to visit a certain area she had never been to in her new neighborhood. In the early morning hours, she drove to a street busy with drug dealers and sex workers. Now she holds a special service for those drug dealers and sex workers every week – separate from her normal Sunday sermon to accommodate their night shifts. It’s always packed.
The pastor interrupted her story to proclaim that there was another woman in the building who had the same gift as her – the gift of simply “knowing.”
When my mom ignored her, the woman described her outfit. “You, back row, black shirt.”
“Do you want to tell us what your gift is?”
She didn’t. She shrugged it off – said there was nothing special about her.
It doesn’t matter what you believe in as long as you believe in women and in yourself.
Tags: feminism, folklore, mackenzie mays, magic, witches
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Yeahhh, this sounds familiar indeed.
I like how this ended with a reversal of the most common response with a (female) clergy member giving positive attention to your mother’s “knowing”
Oooo this is so good. I wish I had that kind of intuition. Mine is usually my own anxiety about something but then it turns out there was nothing to worry about in the first place.
Aw, I love this piece! I notice this sort of “women’s intuition” thing happens a lot when women are particular close with one another. I don’t think either my mom or my grandmother is particularly perceptive in this way, but my best friend and I have always had weird premonitions about things happening to each other.
I wouldn’t profess myself to be especially good at reading tarot cards, but I’ve always messed around with them in a non-woowoo, “this can give me alternative viewpoints on a situation!” way. My best friend, who is more superstitious than I, was having problems with her current boyfriend called and asked me one day out of the blue to do a reading for her. I did, and the cards basically suggested that her boyfriend was going to do something that would cause her close friends to think very negatively of him. That weekend, my friend went to the birthday party of a mutual friend in the friend’s home, and her boyfriend ended up getting extremely drunk and aggressive and broke the toilet, sink, cracked the tile in the bathroom, etc. The friend whose apartment it was had to pay for everything to be fixed since her boyfriend was between jobs and couldn’t afford to pitch in. Naturally, that didn’t go over well with her friends at all (I am also happy to say she has since broken up with this guy), so now she jokes that I should open up a phone psychic business.
EDIT: This friend actually just texted me as I was typing this response! The text was “Dude we have to try aerial yoga”, but still.
Sign up for the aerial yoga and report back, please.
I’ve had long talks with my aunt about this. We all seem to have it. My great grandmother could tell – from Ireland, on the phone – that my grandmother and grandfather were divorcing before my grandmother every opened her mouth.
My grandmother could do similar.
My mother hates it, ignores it, crushes it. It makes her feel raw and exposed. The one time she didn’t she knew her best friend had died. My aunt uses it in her work.
I don’t know. I’m a sceptic, really, but I know I’ve seen things with no explanation and I know that I’ve got *something* that could be described as a kind of emotional psychicness. People like to talk to me because of it. I’ve called friends based on bad feelings and always, ALWAYS been right.
I think we pay more attention to threats of danger, making us more perceptive to info on “bad” things over time. Which makes it burdensome, since it always seems to be bad news. The trick is to notice the other stuff, the positive intel. It’s a different feeling. Electric on the skin, with arm hairs standing on end. Or pleasant buzzing. I used to completely ignore it writing it off as nonsense and daydreaming without a second thought. I’ve sinced wised up: it is most def not nonsense.
*men tend to be better than women at a thing*
“well of course, that’s just the way the world works.”
*women tend to be better than men at a thing*
“SORCERY”
can we make reading the toast required for male schoolchildren? they don’t have to be allowed to comment, but they need to hear female voices early and often. it’s too late for most men, but the future still exists.
What about a hyberbaric chamber of female voices for the older men?
if you build one, sign me up. sounds like a valuable way to spend time.
I should know better than to read comments when I’m eating Sriracha sauce. I just laughed and snorted some in. I’d be mad because OW, GODDAMMIT, but this comment is too good to be mad at.
I love Captain Awkward for many reasons, but ALSO because one of her main suggestions for helping guys who want to date women and are bad at it to spend an entire year seeking out media created by women.
This was so good. I could happily read pages and pages about women/witches/etc, and your writing is lovely.
Yup yup yup
I am always here to celebrate witches! This is awesome!
I don’t have this at all–I’m pretty dense–but I really appreciate people who do. I want to hear more intuition stories!
Figgie, I’m right there with you on the density.
I think there is a humming buzzing network of readable information that we don’t actively acknowledge – body language, traits and changes in them, patterns – and that people more in tune to these are our witches. I try to be mindful myself, though I’m not as observant as I’d like to be.
I’ve also noticed that those “more in tune” are very very likely to be women.
I mean, if you’re working with the idea that the intuition is coming from things like body language and patterns of behaviour and emotions and such, it makes sense women would be the ones who are noticing them because they’re the half of the population that are socialised to constantly be aware of and accommodate the emotions of others.
I loved this article, and also I am pleased to be reminded, thanks to the photo, of the amazingness of Curly Hair in that movie. I like to think it was a metaphor for their Untamed Natures.
Also echoing figwiggin–more intuition stories, please!
I am eerily good at predicting which thing a person will die of. I did it with both of the grandparents I knew who died. It’s not even just that I think they’ll die of whatever illness they have, but that I can almost tell it multiple years before it becomes a problem.
I don’t like it.
Yes, the question of what you do when the information is there and not personal is one we struggle with a lot. It is hard to stay quiet, but on the other hand, that person did not ask to hear what I know, and it seems like a sort of invasion of privacy.
Also, it is kind of blowing my mind to have this very ordinary article about this thing in our lives which has always been an enormous painful secret. Wow. Thank you for writing this.
I am VERY PRO a Toast open thread on supernatural/intuition stories. Maybe around Halloween?
Haunted thread!!
Yes, yes, YES!
I am gathering up my ghost stories in preparation, oh yes, yes I am. My ghost stories are horrific.
I am sitting here promising myself this very instant to trust myself and that inner *witch*! She has turned out to be right many times. Loved this piece, thank you.
Yes, this is my mom too, but mostly she used her intuition to inhibit my teenage dirtbaggery. We even had a conversation about it once – she’s a very practical, non-superstitious person who firmly believes that there’s a strain of “the sight” running in our family. I’m not sure I have it (I think I might just be the regular kind of observant), but I’m not going to write it off just yet.
Once I went out, during the day on a weekend when my mom wasn’t home, with an ex-boyfriend whom I was totally still into. I hadn’t even hung out with him in months, but my mom called me on my cell phone and asked if I was with this particular guy. Completely out of the blue. Amazing.
OH MAN.
my mom has the same eerie tendencies to just … know. (when i was younger, it seemed to my sister and i that she Knew All The Things About Everything, which went a loooong way in dissuading us to, say, skip school and hang out at mcdonald’s with the COOL KIDS, but whatever.)
when i was 16, i was working my first job as a camp counselor and had my first kiss with a dude that was about 21. (definitely not something a self-respecting mom would be terribly pleased about.)
but here’s the thing: when i got home 15 minutes later, she confronted me on everything. EVERYTHING. she knew it all! location, age of Mystery Dude … even his name. THE WHOLE THING WAS RIDONKULOUS AND REALLY KINDA UNDERLINED THE WHOLE DON’T-GO-TO-MCDONALD’S-THING.
so, yeah.
psychic moms FTW.
mmm, the last few years of my life have created some interesting intuition stories. would love to hear others’ too – adding on to the chorus of “intuition open thread” requests!
This was GREAT!
My mom always goes to the metaphysical side of things. Odd noise? GHOSTS. Strange feeling? SPIRITS. Figure something out? PSYCHIC GIFTS. I love her so much, you guys.
Most of my intuition stories tend to be mundane, “take an umbrella, it’s going to rain, I don’t care what the forecast says” type intuitions, but occasionally I have a strong one about something bigger. Like the time I had this strong feeling that I needed to get tested for a relatively rare autoimmune disorder that runs in my family, even though I didn’t have any symptoms and my doctor didn’t think there was any chance that I had it – and of course, the test was positive (my doctor sounded so surprised when she called me with the results).
Most of the strong intuitive types that I know are women, but I know a couple intuitive men, most notably my husband. He’s known ahead of time about a couple pregnancies in our circle of friends.
I asked a doctor once whether I should be tested for an autoimmune disorder that runs in my family, and he said not to bother unless I had symptoms, because with that genetic history I would almost certainly test positive for it but it would probably never manifest itself. If I may ask, have you developed symptoms?
I have Celiac Disease, which doesn’t work quite like that, at least as far as I know. The initial blood test I talked my doctor into wasn’t definite – it just showed a high probability that I had it. But the follow up intestinal biopsy found a type of intestinal damage only caused by Celiac. Because I follow the treatment (a strict gluten free diet) I haven’t developed any symptoms.
I totally get this sometimes. My real special witchy power is I can sense (usually smell) sickness on people a few days before they start feeling ill or have any other indication of illness. My ex liked to joke that I was causing the illnesses with my hoodoo voodoo but I only use my powers for good.
Smelling sickness is a thing! Perhaps your nose is especially sensitive. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/1401…
With my ex-partner,and with my son when he was growing up, I could always smell when they were getting sick. I put it down to familiarity and a caretaker’s hypervigilance.
…just for my own peace of mind, do you have a favorite instrument or two, and are they unusual instruments? And if you had to disappear from society and begin a new life in a major European city, which city would it be?
what on earth does that smell like??? Tel me please!
My mom used to have it with her sister and my grandma. Once we showed up unannounced at my aunt’s house (3 hours away) because we were on the way home from some other thing. We hadn’t called ahead–cell phones were not yet a thing–and my aunt had made double the normal amount of food because “I just had a feeling we’d have company tonight.” My mom and grandma would regularly have trouble with phonecalls because they would be calling each other at the exact same time, causing them to get busy signals. When my cousin’s wife announced her pregnancy, my aunt, between sobs, told them that she had a dream about it the night before. I myself have no powers except always knowing when my sister is lying through her teeth. Which is a pretty weak witchy power.
I had a tarot card reader chew me out last year for not trusting my witchy intuition and making more use of it. That was a new experience. Apparently she could see it. So instead of someone being like, “oh yeah sure” or even, “ooo meeee tooooo” I was getting the equivalent of a come to jesus talk about making the best use of the advantages I’d been born with and not taking it for granted. I almost yes ma’amed her in response.
“Know what you already know” became the way I finally made peace with the witchy stuff a couple years ago. Like cleo said, sometimes it’s just ‘close the windows today, it doesn’t matter if you’re in a drought and the forecast is 100% sunny, just close them today’ and sure enough, pouring down rain. Sometimes it’s much more significant and real. Knowing that I already know a friend of mine lost her job before I call her. Knowing that I already know my boss has walked into my office looking for me when I’m not in the vicinity. Walking into a room and getting a flash image of who was in that room recently.
Deciding to “know what I already know” cuts down on all of the dumb arguments I can get in with myself about how whatever the thing is can’t be possible and even if it is how would I know. Let’s just check, lets spend 15 mins arguing with myself in the morning about what different weather websites say, lets just discount that I know what my boss is up to from the other side of town, and all the petty back and forth that I’ve wasted my own time with before. 9 times out of 10, it rains, I get an email from my boss seconds after I had the image of him walking out of my office aggravated, my friend picks up the phone saying ‘omg i’m so glad you called me,’ and so on.
It’s like “know what I already know” is just the most efficient, least drama-filled, economical way of treating the witchy intuition. If I’m wrong, no love lost. If I’m right, I didn’t waste my own time bickering with myself.
My family has this witchery, too. Sometimes it’s manifested in non-verbal responses, other times it’s very specific. I don’t know why, but I’m always surprised or full of disbelief when it happens.
I feel like I’ve been developing my inuition as I get older (I was an observant little kid but I was a miserable adolescent and adulthood has been strange), but there’ve been a lot of moments where I feel a bit uncanny; mostly revolving around feeling how the I love are doing when they’re not near me…
The thing that gets me, though, is the sudden, resonating attachment to people you just met. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s overwhelming.
How do you develop it? I’ve found meditation is the one thing that works for me, but it’s hard to make the time when things get busy
The more stressed out I get, the less intuitive I am. Or at least I don’t notice it.
For us, definitely meditation, and the busier things are, the more we need to make the time for it.
The sudden resonating attachment is very familiar; for us it is often a trauma bond. Very double-edged.
I really love this story. Makes me think of Alice Hoffman books. Sometimes I just love to roll around in the plot of an extraordinary woman novel, ya know?
I always like to imagine that this sort of thing if rooted in a deep unconscious sense of smell. That maybe you dreamt he cheated because he smelled like guilt. But also picking up on subtle visual cues and making good predictions (like how the movie ends or who likes who) could seems supernatural. I think it shows the amazing power of the brain to fit seemingly unimportant prices of information together.
It’s interesting…in my family, it’s my dad who believes in the slight supernatural, the intuitions, the unseen that is sometimes seen. My mom is the down to earth, evidence-based, pics-or-it-didn’t-happen (metaphorically) type. And because for a whole host of reasons* I have a lot of issues with my dad, I feel like I have gone out of my way to reject and pooh-pooh his beliefs. But I sometimes wonder if I’m missing out on a little bit of magic by doing so.
*Just mundane human imperfection stuff; nothing horrible
In my own life, I have two memories wherein I had a strong feeling about someone. The first was when, as a teenager, I met my future stepdad for the first time. Afterward, I turned to my mom and said, “He’s the one.” I just knew. And maybe it was simply that he treated me with respect and courtesy as a fellow thinking being, rather than condescending to me as so many adults do to teens, but I knew without a shadow of a doubt that he was the man for my mom. And happily, I was right!
The second time was less happy. I was working in a homeless shelter, and there was a guest who all the other interns liked. I could not stand him. No one else could understand why, since I usually got along great with the guests. I couldn’t even put a finger on it myself, except that I felt like his charm was intended to be utterly manipulative and self-serving. And then one day he violently attacked one of the caseworkers when she wouldn’t or couldn’t meet some demand of his. It was extremely scary. But it taught me to always trust that little voice inside me that tells me when someone is bad news.
Of course, neither of these is as extraordinary as knowing someone is pregnant with twins based on egg yolks or that a dream means a man is cheating, so I can explain them to myself as the product of my unconscious being very good at reading micro-behaviors and trying to alert my conscious accordingly. But maybe that’s what intuition is, at least much of the time.
Aw, the thing about your stepdad is sweet and awesome.
🙂 Thank you. And now I get to never miss an opportunity to tell my mom “I told you so,” so, you know, double victory.
Love this article. Sorry there are so many awful men around. The egg yolk thing is amazing. The article reminded me of this story http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/nov/… about a woman whose husband persuaded her to continue hiking against her better judgement, where they got attacked by a bear.
It’s happened to me once, many years ago. I would have been about 20.
A friend of mine — not a super-close friend, but a young woman in my social circle, whom I really liked and with whom I occasionally got together for coffee chats — called me up. “You wanna go for coffee? I’m doing some errands and I can swing by your place and get you.”
“Sure.”
“I’ll be there in 5.”
As I got into her car, I casually asked her what was new. Then, before she had opened her mouth to reply, I looked over at her face, and I knew. “Oh my god, Angie, you’re pregnant!”
“Um, well…”
“I’m right, aren’t I? You’re pregnant?”
“Well, I’m a little late… I was on my way to pick up a test.”
“You’re pregnant, and you’re having a boy. Has your husband figured it out yet?”
“No, I wasn’t going to tell him until I knew for sure. I — what makes you think I’m pregnant?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m imagining it. Let’s go buy that test.”
20 minutes later, we were back at her house. Now, it was the early 1990s, and the modern “wand” style of home pregnancy tests was new to the world. Whether out of necessity (we lived in a small town), choice (my parents had ignored all of my childhood entreaties for a chemistry set), or just distrust of the new, we bought the older kind where one would pee into a little jar and then mix her urine with some other chemical and wait for it to change colour. It involved little bottles and droppers, a test tube, and rubber gloves, and there was a delightful aura of old-timey alchemy about it. I whisked Angie and her jar off to the bathroom and went about setting up my lab. Did I mention I was very young? I was way too excited about the whole procedure to be squeamish about handling my friend’s urine.
She came out and handed me a jar of yellow liquid. I transferred a few drops of it into a little bottle of potion. I swirled them together, and we watched as it turned blue.
“How did you know?” she asked again.
.
“I don’t know, but I knew. And you’re having a boy.”
And she did.
That was the first and last time I really experienced women’s intuition first-hand.
Every single person who guessed my daughter’s sex before we found out guessed correctly. I know that there’s a 50/50 chance, but probably a dozen people confidently said “yep, she’s a girl” and nobody thought she was a boy.
Oh, also my mother e-mailed me more than a week before my due date and said “The Duchess has had her baby, it’s your turn!” and I promptly went into labor within a few hours. MOM.
My mother, a very practical devout Catholic, is totally a witch. She thinks about calling one of her sisters and they all immediately call her. She had an uncanny knack for knowing who was calling in the days before caller ID. And on the day her first grandchild was born, she said to me, “I think your sister is in labor right now.” Pre-internet, no way of knowing, totally right.
I have it a little bit, but only with family members. Well, I also knew for years where I was going to meet my husband, but I kind of rigged that one by scheduling our first date there.
I have had prophetic dreams before, and it kind of wigs me out. The first time I remember it happening I was about 12 and the night before a choir concert I dreamt that a girl who was preforming a dance solo would have a really bad injury to her leg while on stage. The next day in the middle of her piece she tore a muscle in her groin and collapse. Her scream pierced my heart. I started crying and thought it was my fault for not saying anything before hand about my dream. (Which, obviously nothing would have changed because who would have believed me?) But I still felt guilty about it for a long time.
I don’t usually remember my dreams, but when I do, they are either extremely outlandish (floating blue cows) or hyper realistic. I have learned to take the hyper realistic ones very seriously, though not always literally.
what on earth does that smell like??? Tel me please!
How do you develop it? I've found meditation is the one thing that works for me, but it's hard to make the time when things get busy
🙂 Thank you. And now I get to never miss an opportunity to tell my mom "I told you so," so, you know, double victory.
My mother is much better at this than I am. Nine times out of ten when I call her, she was just thinking about me when the phone rang. There was one time that her timing basically saved my life – apologies in advance for any triggers. I’d had a nervous breakdown in college, and was in process of getting my affairs in order, so to speak, when she called. I answered and said hello, and she said “I’m on my way.” I couldn’t have been happier with her intuition then.
As for me, the closest I ever got was when I was a teenager. My mother and I were on a trip visiting her family, and I woke up in the middle of the night feeling like I needed to go HOME and I needed to go NOW. I didn’t say anything, because I couldn’t explain it, and I’ve regretted it ever since, as my father (who was back home) died of a heart attack two days later.
KB knows. http://youtu.be/r6NvNBpwQj0