The writer's blog

My mother could read my mind.  I am not exaggerating.  She could literally read my thoughts.  But then, when I was older, she had to stop doing it, because I could read hers too.  She was a Matakite, and I suppose I got some of that by virtue of her being my mother, also my father’s father was Matakite too.  So, I suppose it came down both sides. 

Some people don’t think I loved my mother, but I did.  It was an angry bitter kind of love because she wasn’t the kind of mother I thought I wanted.  She wasn't a very demonstrative person, and I needed the sort of stifling huggy smothery mothery love other kids rejected from their parents. 
The kids who told their overanxious mother not to kiss them at the bus stop, or fight their way out of parental hugs, or get adoring dads to drop them off around the corner from school so their peers didn’t see them. 
Well, I never had that kind of mother and I wanted one.   Maybe its true that humans always crave what they don’t have, greener grass, sweeter water, blah blah blah. 

My mum, Young and breathtakingly beautiful

I grew up in a house filled with magic.  Real magic.  Not the bullshit magic fed to us from tv, films, or books.  In our house people could hear thoughts and they could say with certainty what the future would bring.  In the 50’s my father told his classmates and teacher that man would walk on the moon in the 60’s and was laughed at, probably caned, they used to do that a lot in Private Boarding Schools. 

All kinds of people came to our house to hear their futures and get advice.  So many that we never got to watch tv, as they would wait in the living room while my mum gave readings in the kitchen.  Where the one TV was.  Yes, this was the late 60’s and 70s, so one TV with one channel, and it is in the lounge.  Back in those days, manners were everything, so we could not watch tv if we had visitors.  So that tv was usually off.
My mother was amazing when it came to knowing the future and speaking for the dead.  And it was real.  I don’t care about people saying baa, humbug, there is no such thing. ‘There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’   Hamlet.  I lived it, I saw it and I am it. 

I am not saying she talked to the dead, she spoke for the dead. 

There was a lot of God in our house too.  Which was weird when Mum is a Matakite, and Dad is a staunch Atheist, but God lived in our house. 

We were all christened, and had the requisite two God parents, I actually have no clue who mine are now.  We were told God was watching us all the time.   Which made me think he must have an awful lot of eyes. We had to swear on the bible a lot too.

My mother helped people.  That is what she did all her life.  She helped people who were dying or grieving the loss of a loved one.  She helped people feel strong and confident enough to reach their dreams.  She helped people heal themselves.  She helped people find their own magic. 

I miss my mother.  I miss her weird ramshackle phone-calls when she would tell me all the things that were happening but not necessarily in an order I could understand.  I miss being called ‘dort’ short for daughter.  I miss her style, her beauty, and her verve.  I miss all the things that used to annoy the fuck out of me when she was here.  I miss her ability to light up a room. 

She and I spent a lot of time not talking to each other. Years.  It was my choice, not hers.  She was away most of the time building a life and business for herself on the other side of the world and I was trying to find out who I was, as an independent human being, in New Zealand while suffering bouts of mania and depressions thanks to the “gift” of bipolar. 

The problem was, I am capable of magic, the same magic she was, but it affected me in a totally different way.  When the ancestors in my blood came alive and started talking to me inside my head, and asking me to do things for them, what do you think the Pakeha doctors made of that. 

I was stuffed full of pills for years that did me no good.  It didn’t make the magic go away.  I still had it, but I had no control over it with drugs nailing down my defences.  I talked to God a lot.  I love God, him/her/the universe, whatever God is to anyone, a single entity or a pantheon, who cares.  I talked to God a lot and the answer I got back was, ‘If you don’t know what to do, do nothing.’  So that’s what I did, nothing, until I did know what to do.  

I made up with my mother.  It was rocky and weird as we were very different people although the same person.  I see so much of her in me and I am grateful for it.  I wish I looked more like her, but hey, you can’t have everything aye. 

I miss her. 

Now all the magic is back but I do very different things with it.  The magic pours through me onto my laptop.  Where I write stories.  I can tell if they are going to be good or bad by how much I give up control of the process.  If I ever try to direct what is happening it doesn’t work.  I channel, just like she did, I channel my characters who are waiting, ready to burst forth onto the page and become real.   

Sometimes I write things that I later discover actually happened in the past, or happen in the future.  I am never shocked by it.  It just feels like it was meant to be in that story.  The story is telling stories.

That is my magic.  That is real magic.

Love A