Magic and Children By Cate Cavanagh

Magic and Children
By Cate Cavanagh

Take a deep breath and try to remember when you were a child eager to wake up the next day to see what the tooth fairy left you. Try to remember how you used to feel wishing on a star. Remember how it felt to believe anything was possible?

Far forward to now. Perhaps you have lost beloveds along your path or faced illness or injury or lost a job. Now, as adults, facing the harsh realities life can throw our way, it is not easy to believe the way we used to when we were children.

This is a precious gift so many of us lose along the way and with it comes doubt, a challenge to hoping and holding onto the belief that life can hold blessings, miracles and magic.

I have written numerous articles that help adults recapture hope and belief through loss and grief and truly difficult times and it all boils down to finding a way to believe in the magic of a wish and the ability to feel like we used to as children when we made a wish.

But this article will discuss the importance for children to not lose that wishing-on-a-star feeling in the first place. Children are growing up too quickly as their families face problems that affect them deeply. Sometimes adult underestimate the impact adult and family problems have on the children in the family and how it begins to steal the magic of believing.

The magic of believing is essential to living life with hope. Without it life becomes a connecting the dots string of events that conceal what can be beautiful from us. Children deserve to not experience this. Childhood is supposed to be filled with dreams, fun, hope and believing! When children are able to hold onto these magical feelings, they are actually creating a better adult hood as the energies of their hopes and dreams becomes seeds in the cosmos. We as adults who have achieved heightened awareness have learned how to manifest through believing. It would have been so much easier for us if we had not lost that magic along the road from childhood to adulthood to begin with.

My book, Her Godmother, although about a child and a story written to help children begin to heal from the trauma of an addiction in the family, is also a book adults will enjoy as well. You see, the main character, Allie, is a little girl whose family broke up because of her father's drinking and Allie's already tenuous childhood dreams of her father becoming the father he was are dashed.

How many children undergo this? How many adults grew up under this specter or that of drug addiction? I am the adult child of an alcoholic and know what it is to wish for a normal family only to feel that somehow something must have been wrong with my wish that it never happened.

Experiences like this steal hope. They steal the magic and suddenly you are experiencing adult issues with the coping skills of a child. Such is where Allie is when we first meet her.

While her mother plans for relocation to rural upstate New York, Allie goes to stay with her colorful godmother, Brigid. Where Allie begins her journey to healing a sad and guilt ridden young girl, she begins to evolve into being a child again with the wisdom to understand and know what is not within her power but more importantly, what is.

In Her Godmother, Allie learns to connect with the magic all around her and within herself and in discovering this, she begins to heal; she begins to release the problems that are not hers and learns what it is to experience magic all around and the hope it brings with it.

Believing and magic is always all around us and regardless of our age, it can be tapped into but we may be jaded. Just the same we need to strive to keep alive the magic in our children's lives by allowing them to hope and believe and to wish upon a star with the knowledge that sometimes wishes may take time to happen but they really can…