B00AEDDPVE EBOK (28 page)

When I was doing the
Donny & Marie
television show as a young teenager, my mother gave me the idea to write a book for girls called
Marie Osmond’s Guide to Beauty, Health, and Style
. As my mother explained it to me, she was getting hundreds of letters from girls from broken homes where the mother had to work full-time. The girls had so little time with their own mothers, they needed direction on even the basic matters that they should have been learning at home, like how to keep their clothing in order or even how to shave their legs. My mother’s tender heart ached for these girls, who seemed to have no one to guide them.

As I mention in my 2009 book,
Might As Well Laugh About It Now
, even Elvis Presley would call and talk for hours to my mother on the phone. He had lost his own mother a few years earlier, and when he met my mother backstage at a Las Vegas show, he asked if he could call her. The calls would last for over an hour, with my mother pulling the phone into another room for privacy. As a little girl, I would often try to sit next to the door, or casually walk through the room, to see if
I could overhear what my mother was saying to Elvis Presley. As soon as she figured out I was there, she would shoo me away. A few years later, my mother grieved the day she heard of his death, heartbroken that such a tenderhearted man and huge talent had passed away so young. I asked my mother what Elvis would say to her when they talked. She told me that he would ask her for advice, talk to her about God’s wisdom in the Scriptures, and tell her his deepest concerns.

Of course, no one in our family got to hear even one detail about Elvis’s questions or concerns, because my mother never shared any of his private information. His trust in my mother was immense, but his intuition was on target. He knew he was putting his trust in the right person. Always, following one of their lengthy phone calls, a huge bouquet of roses would arrive for my mother. She was happy to be there for him, but it wasn’t because he was Elvis Presley. She would have done the same thing if one of the stagehands in Vegas had asked if she would listen to him.

My mother was a good listener, which made her a great healer.

No matter where my mother lived, she tried to be socially connected to her community. She would chat over a backyard fence with the neighbor, in the hallways of the church, or in the aisle at the market.

She knew who was going through a hard time, because she asked her neighbors how they were doing whenever she saw them. If she knew they were having a tough day, she would do little things to bring them comfort, like put a basket of homemade
bread or muffins on their porch or fresh cut flowers or berries from her garden. She was always aware but would never interfere. She seemed to intuitively know what to do.

My mother would often say to us as children, “Never allow the spirit of contention to enter your thoughts. If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” I’ve shortened that for my own children. I just say, “Zip it.” Times have changed!

She once told me, when I asked her why she would never talk about anyone in a negative way, ever: “I could have destroyed families with the things that people would tell me privately. Why would I ever do that? They trusted me.”

Even though I spent much of my childhood thinking that my mother was perfect, I know she wasn’t. None of us is. If she acted in a way that seemed perfect, it was because she used wisdom through her constant search for a better understanding of everything from horticulture to teaching the hearing impaired, from genealogy to child psychology, and applied what she had learned.

One of the quotes she would pin up on the wall is attributed to a famous British preacher from the mid-1800s, Charles Spurgeon: “Wisdom is the proper application of knowledge.” Today, there is an abundance of knowledge available, but the question is: Are we learning the wisdom necessary to apply it correctly?

My mother was passionate about one thing that, due to the circumstances of our “on-the-go” lives, she could rarely achieve: organization, or as her own mother would call it “everything in apple pie order.” She was always happiest when she
could set up new files or ways to store information, recipes, and ideas. In the 1970s, she wrote a book called
Let’s Get Organized
, which thousands of fans purchased.

She liked the idea of always knowing where everything was, but that became impossible with our touring and moving numerous times over the years.

One thing that she would consistently do, no matter where we traveled, toured, visited, or lived, was to write out a list of what she wanted to do that day. At the top of that list, without fail, was one word: “Prayer.” Before anyone else got up in the morning, she would sit at a table in the quiet for about thirty minutes and read her Scriptures; she would pray for direction to any problems and give thanks for her blessings. That usually meant that she slept only three or four hours every night, rarely getting to catch an extra few winks to make it through her long days. She always felt like prayer would sustain her far more than the sleep she lost.

I know that prayer, meditation, and study were how my mother “refilled the well.” It set the tone for her day and reminded her that she didn’t have to struggle alone, that she could trust in guidance from God, if she would take the time each day to listen to His direction.

When I was about nine years old, I asked my mother why she believed in God. Without hesitation, she told me, “Because He answers my prayers.”

Then she told me a story of how, very early in her life, she had had an experience of what it meant to listen and pay attention to the messages God sends.

As a little girl, she lived with her parents in a tiny home near a canal in Idaho. After a huge snowfall, my mother took her sled outside and climbed a hill behind their house. The snow seemed to pile high on the edge of the hill, so my mother eagerly moved to the very top to get the most mileage on the slide down. As she got near, she heard a voice say, “Go back, Olive! Turn around and walk back down the hill!” My mother said she looked around, startled, because she knew no one else could have been up there with her and she had never heard a voice like that. She decided to listen to the advice and walked down the side of the hill instead of using her sled. Out of curiosity, once she was safely down, she looked back up to what she thought was the slope of the hill. It was only a false snow ledge, about a foot thick, that had been created by the blowing winds. It hung out over a big hollowed-out space above a twelve-foot drop to the snow-covered ground below. She knew then that if she had walked to the edge with her sled, she would have fallen through and been injured or buried alive until spring. She felt that she had been guarded by angels and was grateful she had listened.

From that time on, the verse from Psalms “Be still and know that I am God” had more meaning to my mother. It was one of the first Scripture verses she taught my brothers and me.

I had a number of incidents in my own life when, by following my mother’s advice about “listening” to my own intuition, I was able to get instructions that saved me from danger.

When Stephen was a baby, we were staying in a condo in Los Angeles. My husband, Steve, was working, so my girlfriend
Tina was with me to help care for our son while I was dealing with a long day of various TV and press appearances I had to do for work. We returned to the condo after dark that evening, tired and hungry.

Starting as a child, I had developed a couple of customary habits from living in so many different places and staying in hundreds of different hotel rooms my entire life. One habit is I always open every closet door in every room and leave them open. The other is: Before I enter any place I’m staying that night, I have an automatic internal dialogue with God, asking that all will be safe and secure. Returning to the LA condo that evening, Tina helped me bring in a couple bags of groceries, while I carried Stephen in his car seat into the house. Usually, the first thing I would do after getting home is take the baby from his car seat and carry him upstairs with me to get him changed and into pajamas. For some reason, I left him in his car seat and asked Tina if she would warm his bottle up while I went upstairs for his pajamas. As I walked up the stairs, I had a strong feeling of alarm come over me. I didn’t know why at first, until I turned the corner to go into the bedroom and noticed the closet doors; they were both closed. I knew there wasn’t a chance that Steve had been back home. I felt a cold apprehension, and my heart started to race. It was obvious to me that I needed to get out quick, but I also sensed a prompting by the spirit that it would be very dangerous to let the intruder know that I was aware of his presence. Doing the best I could to keep my voice sounding casual, I said out loud, as if talking to myself, “Oh, I forgot my purse.”

I spun around and headed back down the stairs. I signaled to Tina in the kitchen not to say anything, to turn off the stove and follow me. I lifted the baby’s car seat from off the floor, and we stepped as quietly as possible back out the front door. Once outside on the porch, I put in the house key and locked the door behind me. I remember thinking how unusual it was for me to feel prompted to lock the apartment since all I wanted to do was get away quickly. Tina, even though she had no idea what I was doing, could see the urgency in my face and had started to buckle Stephen’s car seat back into the car. We jumped into the car and locked the doors, and I drove away from the house as fast as I safely could. Not knowing what to do, I stopped at a public phone where I called my in-laws, who lived about fifteen minutes away. They called the police, who said they would go to the condo to check out the situation. My in-laws told me they’d be there as soon as possible and to meet them back at my condo but not until after the police had been there first.

The police said when they arrived they found the front door ajar, but no one was inside and nothing seemed to be disturbed. When I asked them if the closet doors were open or closed upstairs, they said open. I told them the doors were closed when I was in the apartment. The police concluded that this intruder was hiding in the closet and obviously meant to do me physical harm. As frightening as the idea was, I also felt gratitude that I had listened to my intuition and paid attention.

The experiences that have caused me the most concern or heartache as a mother have always occurred when I ignored
the voice of my intuition. In May 2008, I was touring internationally with my brothers for their fiftieth-anniversary tour. I was a single mother at that time, so I had my four younger children, then ages five to eleven, with me. Jimmy and his wife also had their four children with them, and Donny’s wife, Debbie, and their two younger sons were also along. During the day, we would often take all of the kids sightseeing because it was a great educational opportunity.

Traveling with our family was a longtime friend and personal assistant who still works with me and is an incredible help on many levels. She’s a trusted friend who keeps us all organized and running efficiently. She knew my mother well for about twenty years, and the two of them were like organizational clones!

Near the end of our tour, we had a scheduled show at the famous Genting Highlands in Malaysia. My children were stir-crazy from being confined in the hotel room for most of the previous day and begged to go to the amusement park attached to the hotel, which they could see from the window. I was fighting off a sore throat and was concerned about losing my voice for the show that night, so I asked my friend if she would take the children for the day. The kids were ecstatic to be able to go play, but before they left, I reminded them that they all had to stay together and come back before it was time to leave for the show.

Once they had left, I tried to lie down to rest my voice, but after about twenty minutes, I felt anxious. The kids had been gone less than an hour, but my intuition was telling me to call
my assistant and have her bring them back. I pushed it out of my mind, knowing how disappointed they would all be to have to return to the room so soon. I returned some business e-mails and checked in with my older children on an international call. After about an hour, I still felt unsettled but couldn’t understand why. Though it was still a few hours before the show, I decided to start putting on my stage makeup and fix my hair. About forty minutes later, I tried to call my assistant but couldn’t get through. So I went downstairs to get something to eat and saw my sisters-in-law Michelle and Debbie with their children. I asked them if they had seen my kids. They said they hadn’t. I let the feeling go for a second time and went upstairs to finish putting on my makeup; I felt it would be good to be completely ready for the show, though I had no idea why. Still, the feeling persisted that something was not right.

About thirty minutes later, my cell phone rang, displaying the assistant’s number. I could feel my heart contract in my chest. I knew something was wrong before I even answered it.

She was panicked and talking very quickly. She had bought a family pass for them to go on the rides. As I found out later, they had agreed as a group that they would all take turns choosing the next ride. The day went along pretty well, but the size of the crowd in the park made the lines grow very long. It was also difficult because the rides the older kids could go on were ones that my youngest wasn’t tall enough to go on. Toward the end of the day, the boys chose a roller coaster, which didn’t interest the girls. My assistant stood with the two little girls as the boys waited in line and took their ride. When they
were done, it was time for the girls to choose and Abi was anxious to ride the merry-go-round before they all had to return to the hotel. They were headed over to that ride when the boys announced that they wanted to purchase the photo that was taken of them on the roller coaster right at the scariest moment. The assistant told the girls they would have to wait a moment and herded the group back to the kiosk selling the photos. She got out her wallet to pay for them, and when she turned around to hand them to the boys, the girls were gone!