Soon after Poe came on the scene as my guide, my life became busy, so busy that my guides became like lost stuffed animals pushed into a toy chest. Between schoolwork, dance classes, sports practices, friends, an ailing mom, and my great need to be out of my haunted house as much as possible, along with trying like mad to be seen as normal, I shunned and attempted to ignore most anything paranormal or metaphysical. Until I had kids myself. Then it was as if the toy chest, or Pandora’s Box, was once again opened.
Poe didn’t abandon me—I abandoned him, along with the remainder of my spirit guide gang. But it was Poe who I would often find sitting with my mom as she cried and worried. Sometimes I would see him holding her hand, as if trying to console her sadness and gloom. Both my mom and Poe (in life) had lost their parents and siblings, and both of them would surround themselves with the depression that they couldn’t see the rainbows through the fog. I couldn’t tell if Poe’s sympathy helped my mom, but I never believed that it hurt. I saw a similarity between Poe and my mom and wondered why he wasn’t guiding her. They both loved family, they both worried about money excessively, and they both loved music. In fact, Poe would often tell me that I needed to play the piano.
“Oh, Kristy, look at your lovely fingers. Those are piano-
playing fingers, there.”
When I inquired to my mom about taking piano lessons, she would make excuses about how the house was too small for a piano and she didn’t have the money for the instrument or the lessons. Ironically, right after my piano suggestion my dad bought me a drum set and took me for lessons.
At twenty-one years of age, I married my high school sweetheart, who disbelieved in the very person that I was. So I tried with all my might to keep the lid tightly closed and padlocked on the gift that I had. I silenced any mention of spirit guides. That was until I was pregnant and had a two-year-old daughter of my own. Then it became harder and harder to ignore and hide.
“Mommy, remember when we died?” my two-year-old daughter, Micaela, asked me nonchalantly as we both sat down on the carpet, playing a memory game.
Everybody thinks that their child is a genius, but Micaela was so far ahead of everyone in her age bracket that it was scary. She learned how to crawl out of her crib when she was just over six months old, began walking when she was nine months old, and was talking in sentences before she should have—her first word money, the second daddy. The pediatrician, an elderly man with years of experience, would laugh and shake his head, saying that in all his years he had never seen anything like it and wished us luck with a loving pat to our backs.
My eyes slightly squinted at her as I attempted to answer the question. “Micaela, mommy is right here. I’m not dead. Do you even know what dead is?”
Micaela flipped over two matching cards and looked up at me with her big, blue eyes. “Dead means that you leave your family and spend time with Jesus, Mommy.”
“But I’m right here, honey. And Jesus, well, he is in our hearts, but I am spending time with you right here, right now.”
She shook her head, beginning to get agitated. “Mommy, you died in the fire and daddy saved me and my brother.” She pointed to my three-month-old pregnant stomach. “I was burned, though,” she said, lifting her long, blond ponytail and turning around to show me her birthmark.
Micaela was born with a strawberry patch right by her hairline in the back of her head. “Mic, that is your angel kiss, not a burn.”
Micaela giggled, “Angels don’t kiss, Mommy!”
We didn’t know the sex of the baby, but I had a strong feeling it was a boy. What got me was that as a child I had a fear of fire. I would scream if we went to a restaurant that had candles, and I couldn’t leave a room that had a fireplace going, afraid that an ember might jump and start a house fire.
“Where did this happen? Where did Mommy die, Micaela.”
“Japan.”
It was almost as if the memory acted as a release for her because she grabbed her baby blanket, crawled up on the couch, and fell asleep—something very unlike my daughter.
When her dad got home, I asked what shows he was watching with her, trying to convince myself that she subconsciously saw something that made her weave a story like that.
“Uh, Barney and Blue’s Clues,” he responded, puzzled.
Not quite certain how to approach the subject of her conversation, I just dove right in. His response was exactly as I thought it would be—one of disbelief and amusement, most of which was aimed at me for processing it as something possible.
“Yeah, I thought it was odd, too,” I said, leaving it at that until a month later. When I found out that I was having a baby boy, I briefly revisited the conversation.
“Don’t you think that it is odd that Micaela knew I was having a baby boy?” I asked my husband over lunch.
“She had a fifty-fifty chance, Kristy,” he responded skeptically.
It wasn’t just her past life memory or the prediction of a baby boy, but just as I had so-called imaginary friends that drove my parents nuts, so did Micaela. But being that I was a medium, I could see them. When kids babble on and on and point, most parents laugh and think it’s cute, or wonder if their child might be talking to angels. Well, I could actually see who she was talking to.
My own childhood experiences with spirit activity and guides began to flood back as the toy chest that I thought I had locked was pried open. But this time it was not for me, it was for Micaela. I didn’t know who to talk to about it, and I was a bit frightened. So I did exactly what worked for me before—nothing.
When Connor was born, I knew that the marriage was over and done with. Although my husband didn’t tell me in so many words, his actions spoke loud and clear. My guides, including Poe, tried to help me keep my sanity intact by offering comforting words, but I was devastated. I rationalized the divorce with the idea that maybe we could fall in love again and remarry. It wasn’t easy to sign divorce papers when I thought I was still so madly in love with the man that I was divorcing. Connor was two years old and Micaela four.
I was uncertain how I was going to survive with two small kids, no job, no college degree, and a house filled with spirits, one a famous author, another an Irish beauty called Tallie, and Alto, a Native American. My only idea was to wait for the men in the white coats to come and take me away.
But they didn’t, so I had to make it work and learn to integrate what I felt at the time was crazy into the reality of the current situation.
“You will write, Kristy,” Poe suggested.
“How did that go for you?” I snapped, meanly.
I know that it didn’t serve me any good to mistreat my guides, the only people in my life who had never really abandoned me or let me down. It was me who decided to shelve them and go it alone, but I was frustrated and sad.
“Playing dirty, are you now? We know that you are upset and we know that you are hurting right now. I promise—it will get better. And by the way, I didn’t write for money, but because I loved to write. The money part was a technicality.”
But I wanted things better right then. I wanted my family back together, and I wanted to not hurt so badly.
To make matters even more complicated, both Micaela and Connor were seeing spirits. They were refusing to sleep in their rooms, so we were all camping out in the living room on a large sectional couch. And when their father found out, he had a fit.
“Enough with the ghosts, Kristy. Enough with thinking you can see and talk with them, and you better not get our kids involved or I will … ,” he sternly commanded, “I will take them away from you.”
This time, though, I couldn’t ignore it and I wasn’t going to allow my now ex-husband to mold my identity. I allowed it once and that about did me in. Plus, I knew that seeing so-called imaginary friends wasn’t going to get the kids taken from me. At least I prayed that it wasn’t.
So I did what Poe recommended. I wrote. And I found a job that allowed me to write newsletters, web pages, and copy. Just after Connor was born, I had star-ted a company writing personalized Santa Claus, Easter
Bunny, and tooth fairy letters. It helped with some mo-ney and it helped me to fine-tune my psychic abilities by channeling information for the letters. It would come together. I just didn’t know how long it would take. Or how long I could wait.