The Book That No One Wanted To Read

Motherhood and Clairvoyance

Nothing is more science fictional to me than making a new fresh animal inside your own body from scratch, so it was a lot for me to also accept that children read minds. I didn’t believe me at first either but the evidence keeps growing. The first example was a few weeks before quarantine. I was trying to decide whether to go to Palm Springs to see a friend despite growing concerns about a possible pandemic. I hadn’t voiced this to anyone but found that in my notebook Olive had left me some stickers with a few key phrases.

Sunny Days, said one, over a drawing of a yellow sun. Get up and Go, said another, with a little van tumbling down a rocky road. She was about 3.5 and was four years away from learning to read but it was not the last time she spoke to me using phrases and pictures that somehow mirrored my own internal landscape.

Then there was the time when I was in the parking lot at the grocery store and I couldn’t start my car and needed to get a jump before picking Olive up from preschool. When I arrived at pick-up, one of the parents in the co-op said that Olive had uncharacteristically been upset that day, about an hour before, when she couldn’t get the faucet to stop running in the bathroom, and she called out for me repeatedly from the small wooden shelter. File that under weird. 

What about that time I was thinking about whether she might miss her old friends when she changed schools, and she sighed out the name “Isadora.” without any context. Or the time I was thinking about the northern lights only to have Olive ask me a question about the phenomenon at the very same time. Or when she woke up from a nap asking if we were going to the beach, when I had been wondering about taking a drive to the ocean while she slept. 

This kind of seamless attunement isn’t always online and it isn’t always ideal. A few months ago, for example. I woke up in the middle of the night from an unsettling dream where I was running through an unfamiliar house, searching for a forest green photo album that I loved looking through as a kid. We kept it in our hallway closet and inside there was a picture of my dad and my mom in a convertible, both of them long haired and smiling. The whole album was full of images that captured a lifestyle they had willingly and unwillingly given up years before I was born. In the dream, I searched for the book unsuccessfully, getting more and more upset until I finally collapsed in a heap of sobs that woke me up with their longing.

I opened my eyes and registered that I was awake. About two seconds later Olive opened the door to my bedroom, almost still asleep, murmuring: “I’m here, I’m awake.” It was 3:40am. The obvious explanation for her standing in my doorway would be that I shouted out in the middle of the dream and that had woken us both up, but it seems unlikely because it wasn’t that kind of dream. Plus she’s 8 and she always sleeps through the night no matter what, and also I’ve never shouted out in the middle of dreams and I have had nightmares before: the kind that might have warranted yelling.

Given the prior evidence I hope you will agree with me that she read my mind through the shared wall between our bedrooms. 

I’ve always been obsessed with clairvoyance and telepathy. In third grade it was the topic of my science fair project. I bought a deck of those cards with four symbols and tested everyone I knew to see if they could read the bold black image when it was still flipped over. I kept careful track of the percentages people got correctly, and for some reason I also sorted the results by gender. My three paneled poster did not claim I had proved it possible, but I remained fixated on a photo I saw in my research of two people, sitting on either sides of the same wall, drawing a similar abstract picture in graphite on paper. Different enough to be different, similar enough to be miraculous. The woman in the picture was said to have read the mind of the other participant, which enabled her to draw an image with the same symbology. No part of me came up with the possibility that the photo of the two people might be false. Instead, I imagined that the skill she had was one you could foster. 

Earlier still, I have a memory of my grandparents. They used to do this trick they were both in on, where my grandfather would put a card on his forehead with the image facing inward and my grandmother would sit across from him and say whether or not it was a picture card or a number card. It completely captivated me: the simplicity of it and also the accuracy. How did she get it right EVERY time! The answer to this mystery was that he’d look at the card before he drew its surface to his forehead and would kick her under the table whenever it was a queen, jack or king. I don’t know which version of the story is better; my belief or their truth. I don’t know how they kept a straight face! But every time we’d visit them I know I’d request this trick and sit staring at them both at their table in the kitchen trying to find out their secret.

“Maybe she felt that you needed her,” said my friend.

“That is not the story I want for her,” I said. My whole job as a mother, as I had defined it, was to have her not worry about me ever at all.

“I’d read that story,” she said.