I just listened to an episode of a new podcast, Woo Woo with the comedian Rachel Dratch. I love Rachel Dratch. Her memoir Girl Walks into a Bar is probably the book I’ve reread the most over the last five years. For some people that one book might be, I don’t know, the Bible or maybe something by Brené Brown. But for me it’s Girl Walks into a Bar. Dratch’s story of becoming a Saturday Night Live cast member in her 30s and a surprise pregnancy at 43 has been so comforting to me. “Maybe things can still happen for you,” it seemed to say.
In her podcast, Dratch has friends on to share their paranormal experiences. The tone is mostly fun and good-natured, and it got me thinking about the part that “woo woo” has played in my own life. For a time growing up, I was obsessed with all of it. I loved the TV show Sightings, all manner of ghost stories, and psychics. While I now approach such things with what I hope is a healthy dose of skepticism, I do still enjoy a good story about the unexplainable. I can’t really do aliens or anything too scary, but if you want a judgment-free zone to share something delightfully bizarre, I’m your girl.
In second grade, our teacher thought it would be cool to read to us from a book about alien encounters each week. I guess because that’s what you did in 1992? I have no idea, but it scared the absolute hell out of me. One story was about a couple being abducted and undergoing all these weird medical experiments, and another one was about a guy who was driving home and got beamed out of his car. I’m pretty sure that, when the aliens returned him to his car on the side of the road, he found that a year had passed. Which begs the question, where did this person live that his car wasn’t impounded after a YEAR on the side of the road? If it wasn’t stripped for parts by then, I’m sure the battery would have at least been dead. How did he get home? That’s the REAL story here! Anyway, I was so sure that I was going to get taken by the aliens. And I decided that one was probably living in the bathtub behind my shower curtain. Which is interesting, because a friend from college once told me he thought a bear lived behind his grandmother’s shower curtain as a child. Shower curtains must seem very otherworldly to kids. Luckily, I now bathe without fear, but alien stuff still kind of gives me willies.
I think I must have picked up the fascination with psychics from my dad. He dabbled in psychic readings for a time before I was born. My dad’s father died when he was five, and his paternal grandfather had abandoned his very young family. I think my dad was hoping to learn more about them, the two men he’d never gotten the chance to know. (Eventually, we did learn more about his grandfather from Ancestry.com, but that’s another story.) I found my dad’s copy of a book about unlocking your psychic abilities once. I tried reading it, but the first chapter was mainly a lot of stretching exercises. To be honest, I’m not even that good about stretching when I work out, which is a very legitimate reason to do so. I don’t know, I guess there’s never a bad reason to stretch, so thanks to the Psychic Community of the 70s for encouraging that! But I gave up on unlocking my psychic abilities pretty quickly.
Then I dreamed that I was on a passenger plane that crashed into a cornfield. I woke up and turned on the news to find out that it had actually happened. If you ignore the fact that Orville Redenbacher was on the dream plane with me, it’s kind of uncanny. Shortly after, I predicted John Candy’s death. I was watching an episode of Camp Candy and just got the feeling that he wasn’t long for this world. I thought I might be a little bit psychic after all, until my friend Maleah snapped, “We all knew John Candy was going to die, Amy—HE WAS FAT.” That seemed pretty harsh, and I hoped poor John couldn’t hear it, wherever he was. But maybe she was kind of right. Eventually, I began to spend way less time thinking about mysterious stuff.
Then in college, there was an older student in my math class. And by “older,” I mean probably like twenty-five. She’d grown up in Atlanta but her parents were from India, and she was just so sweet and lovely. One day, she told my friend and me that she’d been studying palm reading. “Do you want me to read your palms?” she asked. “I could use the practice.”
We agreed and, after class, the three of us sat down on the steps in front of Walker Hall. I didn’t bother asking how she was learning about palm reading. Maybe someone had been teaching her, or maybe she’d just picked up a how-to book from Waldenbooks at the mall. Did she feel like she had a gift for this or was it just for fun? In my mind, it was mostly a party trick.
“It says I’m going to live to be 100, right?” I joked as she examined my hand
She frowned. “No, not quite.”
“Oh.”
“You’re going to be married twice.”
“Does my first husband die? Because I’m the kind of person who would stay and try to work things out. I would never get a divorce.” I said this with the conviction found in most people who have zero life experience.
“Well, it looks like you’re going to. He doesn’t die.”
“Oh.”
She continued. “First, you’re going to marry someone you meet here.”
“Oh my gosh, it’s Chris, isn’t it? We’ve kind of had this Sam-and-Diane thing going on since the start of sophomore year…”
“No, you don’t know this person yet. And it’s not someone from school, but they do live here. You’re going to get married and fight a lot over where you’ll live. Then you’ll get divorced and be married a second time. There are two people in the world that you could marry and be happy, and as long as you end up with one of them everything will be okay. And you’re going to have two children when you’re a little bit older, a girl and a boy.”
I’d grown up believing I couldn’t get pregnant. Who had told me that? A doctor? My mom? Me? My health class textbooks in school? All of the above? I’m not sure now. But, for some reason, I assumed God had made me this way because I wouldn’t have been a good mother. In high school, I remember my friend Ryan referring to something as barren and I quipped, “Like my uterus!” I’d meant for it to be funny, but the look he gave in return was one of such pity. “Oh, sweetie, that’s so sad,” he’d said.
I’m not sure why, but the part about children in my future came as a shock. I mean, I guess most people end up having kids, so why wouldn’t a fortune-telling game include that? But it was like, suddenly, my insides split open and I could see all the future generations nested within myself. It wasn’t dead in there like I’d imagined, but filled with flowers.
“Can you tell if they’re my biological children?” I asked, more quietly now. “Or do I adopt? I don’t know if I can have kids.”
“No, your hand doesn’t tell me that.” She smiled and moved on to reading my friend’s palm.
I took out a piece of paper and wrote her prediction down, then stuck it inside a journal back at my apartment. I forgot about it after a while, until my first marriage (if you could even call it that) quickly began falling apart at the seams. When I found it again one day, her words helped give me the courage to move forward. During our parting, my ex-mother-in-law made a comment about my not being able to get pregnant. “You don’t know what I can do,” I said calmly, and felt my future children cheering me on.
Almost everything from my palm reading has come true so far. The one exception being a second child. I’m 39, the age my mother was when she had me, probably the biggest surprise of her life. I suppose it’s not impossible, but does feel pretty unlikely. A lot of years and money and magic and science went into conceiving our daughter. I can’t imagine going through all that infertility stuff again while she’s still so small, or once I’m in my 40s. Never say never, I guess, but I think another baby would have to just happen. It would be a very welcome gift from the universe, but forcing it doesn’t feel right. Struggling with infertility is a full-time job (I’d imagine the adoption process must be too), and I just want to enjoy this beautiful season of my life and give my husband and little one all the love.
Still, I can’t help myself from holding on to some of our daughter’s more gender neutral baby clothes, just in case. Because, then again, I am only 39. And maybe things can still happen for me. For all of us. I sit and look at my hands, wondering with joy what the future might hold.
