Collect Calls and Spirit Guides

I get a lot of questions about “guides” from clients who frequent my studio.  Friends and clients alike want to know how I connected with them in the first place, how I realized they were, in the classical sense, “spirit guides,” and why any of us need them at all.  Each one of those points has a whole different answer, each worth exploring, but, for today, I want to address one: how I met my spirit guides.

More specifically, how I met my first.

Right off the bat,  you should know, guides are like everything else; they come in all shapes and sizes, from all over the earthly, spiritual, and ethereal planes, and they come into your life in the most unexpected ways.  Sometimes, you move through so much of your life with a spirit guide right there with you and never know it. And sometimes, you discover there was one with you all along simply because you learnhow to spot them.

One of my spirit guides was physically present in my life until just a few years ago when she left this earth and now, she’s with me still, I just have to reach out to her in different ways.

Her name is Angie Abromitis, but to her grandchildren she is known simply as Grandma.

In my life I have been lucky enough to know all four of my grandparents.  Until I was nearly 10, I had my mom’s parents and my dad’s parents all alive and a major part of my life.  For a time, I lived near my dad’s parents and I spent a lot of time with them out of need and geography. My dad’s father, Red, died when I was in the 3rd grade and we moved the following year to the same town where my mother’s parents lived. It was in this town, in this new place where my mother’s family took center stage and it  was in this time period where my grandmother, Angie, became my champion and protector.  

Betty and Red, my dad’s parents, were still raising children on some level when I was in their care.  I saw their younger kids go to prom, graduate from high school, and go off to their post high school lives.  The younger of my aunts at that time all stayed at home until marriage so they were still living with Betty and Red.   Having so much happening around them all the time with so many people coming in and out of the house, it created a space for me where I wasn’t the focus of all the attention or the center of anyone’s world; there simply wasn’t time for that.  Instead, I was a part of it all. And that’s what I was used to. And I grew up loving that.

At Jack and Angie’s house in Hackettstown, though, well, it was a whole different ball game. 

Sure, there was other family around but, when my brother and I were spending time at their house, we were the center of their world and the sole focus of my grandmother, Angie’s, energy.

If you had to have a champion for the awkward and insecure years of your life, there was no better candidate than Grandma Angie.  Man, Grandma knew what was up.  

When we lived for years without tv, my grandmother would hear our sob stories about missing The Smurfs on Saturday mornings and worse yet, our beloved Pee Wee’s Playhouse.  

“They’re cruel!” she would exclaim as she ushered us into the living room and sat us down in front of a TV that not only had cable, but “Home Box.”  

“Let’s find you a show.”

Ah, it was good to be heard.  

My grandfather was often around but he was like a silent figure in the background.  He had nicknames for us (I was either Zelda or Matilda, depending on the day) and handed out candy on a schedule as predictable as the train lines that he worked on and he gave us instructions for how to make him HighBalls.  And yet, he was quiet and had a system of being in the world and not of it that came from a deep sense of duty to provide for his family and a hefty amount of sadness endured in his own childhood. Really, whatever the reason, Grandma wasn’t concerned.  When my brother and I arrived, Jack was moved out of our way so that we could be the sun that the stars would orbit around while we were there.  

At home, my mom gave us snacks of sugar free candy from the health food store and 100% fruit ice pops.  At Grandma’s my brother and I each got our own bag of Orville Redinbocker’s Flavored Microwave Popcorn. My flavor choice was always Sour Cream and Onion and my brother’s was Carmel Corn.  To wash down our freshly popped family sized bowls of popcorn, we were given iced cold cans of Coke Classic or Shoprite Brand Orange and Grape sodas. And, if we had to spend the night, we always got Dilly Bars from Dairy Queen, to boot.

Of course, nothing beat the breakfast.  A stack of pancakes, fried eggs, and piles of freshly fried bacon was brought to us in front of another movie on “the Home Box.”  Grandma made sure we always felt tended to.

Now, food wasn’t the only way Grandma made me, specifically, feel loved.  Grandma was there to save me when my own parents wouldn’t or couldn’t. Once, when I thought aloud about joining the swim team and my parents dropped me off at a practice ten minutes later, my grandmother answered the payphone call to come get me.  Upon my very first dive in the pool to warm up, something that was entirely foriegn to me, I was seemingly attacked by a much larger, much stronger swimmer. Apparently when you dive in the pool to warm up you’re supposed to start immediately swimming so that the swimmers standing in line behind you can follow suit.  The swimmer behind me landed on top of me, sent me underwater, and tossed me around with her kicking thighs of steel.

We’ll, it was about 3 weeks into the season and my very first day of doing this...ever, so I wasn’t exactly clued in.  

If you need catching up here, I was a chronic quitter in a family of super-joiners.  My brother, who signed up for everything and became an expert at it all, would only quit momentarily  and that was only if a ref was making bad calls. If he decided to walk off the field, the entire staff of coaches and my parents would lead him back because, even as a child, Pat was too good to let go of.  And, we all loved him for that. Yes, even me.

But, for me?  Well, I kissed a lot of frogs to find something that I liked and nothing turned into a prince.   I had a legendary track record of quitting everything.

Even still, when I stood at the payphone at the town pool dripping wet and feeling the burn of water in my nose, it was no surprise that my parents decided to make me go through the entire practice instead of coming to get me out of that torture immediately.  

“Pleeeeaaaasssseeee come get me!”

I was being summoned back to the team by unfeeling coaches and kids who took this way too seriously.  And I would not leave that payphone until someone rescued me from this nightmare.

Grandma.

Who turns down a collect call from their kids when they’re begging to be picked up?  Parents of quitters, that’s who.

Who accepts a collect call from a barely intelligible  caller named, “mrsa, Grandma PLEASE!”? 

Damn straight, you know who!

“Will you accept the call?”. 

Grandma sure will. 

Grandma walked down her street and up the steps that led through her neighborhood and to the town pool promptly upon hanging up the phone.  In her knee length skirt with her short sleeved blouse tucked in, she marched through the entrance, gave me a big hug, and said, “let’s go” loud enough for the coaches to hear.  And with her trademark squint-stare and condemning tone, she let them know that they had wronged me. Back to Grandma’s I went.

“Your parents are cruel.”

Hell yes they are,  Grandma.

If my cruel, abusive parents declined my calls, I knew who would pick up.  Time after time, Grandma saved the day and rescued me from mean teachers, horrid clubs, long walks home when it was just not fun to walk but my captors forced me to anyway, and food I was being forced to eat that was just not delicious.

Once, I’m pretty certain she went along with a total charade of mine because she, too, did not like the school nurse.  The exact details of why I decided to perform my Oscar worthy “asthma attack” scene in school escapes me but I’m certain it was either because we were doing the Presidential Physical Fitness Test in school and I was meant to run and do sit-ups, or that I simply didn’t do my homework- again- and I was headed for detention.

But Grandma was never a questioner.  There were no “why’s.” She simply knew I needed saving and came and saved me.  So when the school nurse called my grandmother in for my “attack” because my parents were out of town and that nurse suggested I might be just fine, my grandmother removed me from school and brought me to the ER to be checked.  No childless spinster with a job caring for children was going to make a suggestion as heartless as this one to my grandmother.  

Though we never spoke of it again, I swear that day my grandmother removed me from school and drove me straight to the ER just to put that nurse in her place.  From then on out, I was given space to recoup after having asthma attacks in gym, during math, and when I forgot to do my homework and was being asked to hand it in.

Grandma’s tireless protection of me went far beyond my awkward years.  She was there to cheer for me when I surprised the hell out of people and did stick to an activity for more than a week.  She was there to shop with me when I wanted to go to the local mall and didn’t have a driver’s license yet. She was there to take walks with me on lovely summer afternoons just to enjoy the weather.   And, she was there to diet with me as I grew into a young woman and was desperate to drop ten pounds before heading off to the first of 6 colleges.

 At the one and only Weight Watchers meeting I ever attended at a local church that summer before college began, I went with Grandma and signed up.  But Grandma insisted on paying my registration fee, my supplies fee, and my weekly fee. All I had to do was step on the scale.  

As we listened to the leaders talk about spinach pies and how to handle the dreaded barbeques of summer, my grandmother nodded along and recommitted herself to the plan.  She had been doing it for as long as she had been feeding me bacon and Coke Classic and she was always working the way an alcoholic desperate for change would work the 12 steps. I was surprised by her then when, on our way home, she said I didn’t need to do Weight Watchers.  “Marisa, you’re gorgeous,” she would always say to me and anyone who would listen with her faint Brooklyn accent. And she said it again that day.

“Yeah, this seems kind of intense, Grandma.”  Grandma didn’t want me in that world of constant self-doubt and deprivation.  She had been in that world all her life and she wanted more for me, better for me.  Grandma never asked me to go again nor did she ever bring up.  

Grandma gave me more than just the contraband that my parents had forbidden in our world.  She gave me a safe harbor. She loved me no matter what, was there no matter what, and she said “I love you,” no matter what.  And she was beautiful and sharp witted and so much fun to talk with.

Yes, this might get sappy here.  I do have a tendency to wind my thoughts back to these places, I agree.  But, you don’t get a spirit guide if your spirit guide is still at her WW Local 191 meeting, do you?

When Grandma learned that she had cancer, the bad kind, she didn’t fight it.  And, despite the fact that she was kind of a bit neurotic about aches and pains her whole life, she just gave into the idea that her time was coming to an end and let the last weeks of her life move by with a quiet grace about her.  She stopped doing the cooking but we all still congregated at her house to eat at her table with her. She stopped being able to leave the house and we all came and sat in her living room around her. And she stopped being able to really see but we all came to be in her presence to let her know we were all still here and that she was so very loved.

Grandma embraced the eminence of death so much that she welcomed the visit from my 5 children for the sole purpose of kissing her goodbye.  My young kids each sat around her like normal, though they were aware that this wasn’t a normal visit. Even so, they played with the buttons on her recliner, changed the channels on the TV incessantly, and ate the snacks that she pointed out to them remaining in the cabinets.  And then she said goodbye to them and they to her.

“Goodbye Gigi, we love you!”  They all yelled that together as we left in a rather festive tone because it was too hard for me to leave on a serious or somber note for her, for my kids, and for myself.  Boy, did my children love her.  

One of the privileges of my life, besides being rescued from the clutches of the town swim team, was to be with Grandma during her last two days alive and to sleep on the couch next to her hospital bed the last night of her life.  

The weekend she died, I arrived at my grandmother’s side because my mom called and said it was probably getting close to the end.  My aunt needed a break from being at my grandmother’s side just to get some needed rest and privately process what she had been seeing- her mother dying— and my mother was going to be there alone.  So, I drove out to stay with my mom and to help care for Grandma through the night.  

It was uncertain if Grandma had been able to hear anything over the last few days when I had arrived.  She was in the phase of death where the visits from dying relatives had already happened and the confusion over whether the people in front of her were her children or her dead siblings had subsided.  She simply went quiet.  

When I walked into the house and up to my grandmother’s bed for that last weekend of her life, having heard that she stopped speaking anymore, I grew terribly sad for this end.  I leaned over and kissed my grandmother on her forehead and said loud enough for her to hopefully hear somewhere in her failing body, “I love you, Grandma.”

Without moving, without showing a sign of being conscious in her body she responded.  

“I love you, too, Marisa.”

And that was it.  She never spoke again and she died about 40 hours later.  

I think a spirit guide is more than just a benevolent being that yanks us back onto the sidewalk when we’re about to get run down by a speeding car.  I think they are more than just beings that exist on a plane that we can’t see until we die and get to meet officially.  

I think a spirit guide is someone who sees your true nature at birth and sticks around you long enough to make sure you never forget how loved you are, how special you are, and how much you deserve to have candy and soda once in awhile.  There are other kinds, yes. But there’s something about grandmothers and this one in particular.  

In my studio, when I do a healing session on someone, I reach out to my spirit guides.  I have a few, and my other grandmother, Betty is there among them. When I stand over someone’s body on my massage table and I pray to be a channel for messages meant to heal and I pray to be a tool used to bring peace and love to the person before me and the world around me, I ask my guides to come and be with me.  I ask them to protect me, to aid me, and to help me.  

And, as in life, Grandma always answers the call.