To ask you to tell me about when you’ve experienced ‘mother’s intuition’?

[Tryagainplease]

Sort of inspired by the fascinating matrix thread.

What stories do you have of your intuition telling you something about your child(ren)?

I don’t have any majorly weird ones but I still find it so weird that I just know when DS is going to be ill before he even shows any symptoms. Quite a few times I’ve brought calpol and a bowl up to bed knowing full well he is going to get a fever and be sick even though there are absolutely no reasons for me to think this. DH even finds it a bit weird still as he doesn’t get this even though he is very close to DS also.

I can tell the second my son opens his eyes he is five now. No matter what time of night it is I can feel that he is awake.

@loahsjrtkajwosihdyr

Nothing serious but I can smell when mine are going to be unwell.

I do this too. Nobody believes me!

Does anyone think dad's have the same thing?. I'm thinking very unlikely as maybe it's to do with nature and the babies growing inside us makes the bond different. It's amazing how some mums here have saved their childrens lives

I was 34 weeks pregnant with DD3 and had gone to an appointment at the hospital due to suspected gestational diabetes.

For some reason, as I was leaving, I just knew that I would be back the next day and that DD would need to be delivered soon. I just knew that she would not be going to full term.

That night in bed at home I thought my waters had begun to leak. By the morning they were definitely leaking so DH drove me back to the hospital. Initially I don't think they believed me as the leaks were sporadic, but they put me on the ward for observation and that night the waters went in a huge flood which went on for hours.

A couple of days later, and after steroid injections to mature her lungs, DD had to be delivered by emergency C-section. She was born at 35 weeks of pregnancy.

I've never been sure how I could have known at that hospital antenatal appointment that all was not as it seemed and she was about to be born pre-term. There were no obvious physical signs then that it was about to happen.

I did know though.

@FortySeven

Your account sent shivers down my spine. I have seen that empty look in someone.

Unfortunately no. My DM was very out of sync with me. If anything she had the opposite of mother's intuition, always reacting in the wrong way, and sadly that seems to have continued on with me and my DC's.

Several years ago DS aged 20 was sent home from work sick. He’s asthmatic and said he felt terrible so I got him a GPS appointment straight away assuming it was asthma related. He was told he had flu, was to rest, plenty of fluids, etc. DH and DD subsequently went down with it too. I was fine (I’d had my yearly flu jab and one off swine flu jab.)
All three of them were poorly in bed but after four days I knew DS wasn’t right. I got him an out of hours GP’s appointment and I went with DS and made him admit my son, back in the day when they could do that but I could hear him on the phone with the bed manager arguing my son’s case who didn’t want a flu case admitting.

I expected him to be admitted onto a ward but we were made to wait hours in A&E. We were treated appallingly that night. They took bloods but made it clear as soon as the results came back we’d be on our way home, that we were wasting there time (my son was embarrassed. They wouldn’t even let him lie down after his initial assessment. He was directed to a chair because there was patients who actually needed a bed. They were so dismissive I started to doubt my insistence to the GP.
All hell broke loose when the bloods came back. I’ve never seen them move so quickly. His heart was failing, his white blood cell count was completely wiped and he’d have died if I hadn’t been such an arsehole. He spent a long time in coronary care but survived. It turned out they all had swine flu.

I have one that isn’t mother’s intuition at all. I had taken my older two DC to the doctor and he’d sent us to the hospital for x-rays and suspected pneumonia (we’d all had flu). As we were waiting, a nurse looked at my baby, nearly 1 at the time. I thought he’d just started with flu like everyone else. She said, that baby needs to see a doctor. Turned out he had sepsis (immediately on IV antibiotics and made a full recovery) and the two older DC and I all had pneumonia. I was so ill I didn’t get the nurse’s name but she saved his life. We’ve had the flu shot every year since.

More recently, DD was having a hard time with mental health but she’d gone to school oddly without fuss. Around 10:30 I just got this niggling feeling I needed to check. I rang the school to check she was in her class. She wasn’t. She’s a law-abiding student and they caught my worry so they started searching. She was hiding in an out of the way spot and had tried to kill herself.

@Workin8til6

I knew from when my eldest DD was born that there was something not right with her. No specific reasons, nothing obvious medically. I just knew though, from the day she was born I knew I needed to look after her in ways that most other children wouldn’t need looking after. I was dismissed by everyone including my own family as overly anxious. When she started to miss milestones I said look, I told you, something is not right but it took me ages and ages to get anyone to take me seriously. Finally got referred to a paediatrician when she was 14 months and not crawling or standing or babbling. She has a genetic neurological condition that is a random genetic mutation so it’s not even like other family members have it and I was already on the look out.

We had DD2 and my DH asked me soon after she was born if I was worried that she’d have the same condition (we wouldn’t know in medical terms straight away). I said no, she doesn’t have it. He asked how do I know and I said I just do. I was right; she doesn’t, she’s fine.

I had exactly the same experience as you. The day DS was born I knew there was something medically not right, but not one person believed me. It wasn't until he was three and a health visitor noticed his birthmarks that a doctor finally listened. He was diagnosed with a genetics neurological condition a few months later. I also knew he had ADHD from around a year old. We saw the community paediatrician at three years who dismissed us entirely. Once at school his teacher raised concerns about his concentration and he was officially diagnosed at the age of seven. When his consultant confirmed it I told him that I knew and had known for years. He told me that it's very common for mums to know these things first.

I have a habit of calling my boys whenever anything major has happened in their lives. It's just a "must call Spawn 1" feeling. Nothing specific, I just know that I need to touch base.

Before DS was born I had a big bleed. I was admitted to hospital but despite investigations they couldn't find a cause.

I had reduced movement and felt a feeling of impending doom. Hospital kept saying heart trace etc etc was all perfect no cause for alarm.

I made such a massive fuss in the end they delivered via c section early. Confirmed placental rupture and DS was born fighting to breathe and blood sugar so low he was rushed to NICU.

Narrowly avoided a still born situation. Every single part of me knew that baby was not ok and that I had to do anything to get him out. Turns out I was right. I lost so much blood in surgery I almost needed a transfusion and my life would have been in danger from the bleeding eventually.

I recall those conversations with consultants in horror but I'm so thankful my little boy hung in there long enough. They honestly thought I was mental but I just knew.

Fortunate that my DH absolutely respected my intuition and advocated strongly for me.

I'm not sure this counts as intuition, but when my first child was born (a long time ago) he was taken into the nursery at night, as were all the other babies on the ward - about 10 babies in there at that time - so that the mum's could sleep. I couldn't sleep at first as I was just too excited about my new son. So throughout the night different babies would cry, but I knew everytime when it was my dear little one, and would get into the nursery to breastfeed him before they had a chance to give him a bottle. I was in there for 8 days, and it worked every time.

When said baby was about 8 the Dr said that DS had to have his tonsils out, which I initially agreed to as he used to get awful tonsillitis, with a very high temperature. However, as the time got nearer to the operation date I started to get a horrible feeling of foreboding about the operation, until in the end I let the surgeon know that I had changed my mind, and why. He wrote back to me saying quite politely that I was being silly, and that he had never 'lost' a patient, but I couldn't change my mind. So my DS didn't have his operation, so I can't prove that something would have gone wrong with the anaesthetic (my fear was that the anaesthetic would go wrong in some way and he wouldn't have survived the operation), but from that day to this he has never had another bout of tonsillitis. The same son had his appendix out when he was 12 with no problems whatsoever.

This is going to no doubt have people accusing me of being a troll but I assure you this is true. I want to preface it but saying NOPE! He does not see our child any longer and yes, I absolutely called the police and our relationship was over immediately

Baby was 5 weeks old. I had post birth haemorrhaging and had to go to hospital at 2am. Was already arguing with other half so he showed zero concern for my well-being - nice. Obviously I couldn't take baby so he had to stay at home with her & miss work (something he'd done a lot of). However my Mum lived round the corner... though personally if my other half was in hospital haemorrhaging blood 5 weeks after birth, I wouldn't want to go into work...but I digress.

8:30am I leave hospital absolutely fine, besides tired and a bit weak. I'm driving down our street and notice his car has gone....? Now in this moment I'm thinking he must've dropped her off at my Mums but something told me not to turn round to go to my Mums, but to go inside (possibly the desperate need for a shower but I wanted to see my baby first). Well thank the good lord above that I did go inside because there she was! Sat in her car seat on the fucking sofa....... 🤬🤬🤬 5 weeks old. Left alone. She could've died.

He later told Police that he was certain I'd be home not long after he left for work! Absolute monster. Yes he was prosecuted for neglect. No he's never seen her since.

When my DS was around 9mo and I put him to bed in his cot as normal. I tiptoed out as usual, as if he was aware I was leaving he'd scream blue murder and have to be resettled.

I gently closed the door, no sound from him, so I was pleased that he was down for the night. But at that point I had this sense of impending doom, hard to describe, but my brain just told me to go back in and check on him (which I never did). I went back in and he was lying on his back, choking on his own vomit. I immediately grabbed him, slapped him on the back and the vomit all came flying out, and after a few seconds he started screaming. My legs almost went out from under me, I was so full of adrenalin.

He had been perfectly fine, calm and sleepy when I had put him in the cot only a minute or two earlier. I don't know what it was that made me go back in, but if I hadn't I really dread to think what might have happened to him.

@FortySeven

At a wedding, the mum of my cousin’s DP offered to take DD (then age 4) for a walk around the grounds. She was a very respectable-looking 60-something softly spoken lady but every fibre of my being was screaming not to let her near DD so I made an excuse and avoided her for the rest of the day. It became apparent through her actions years later that she was an utterly evil human being. It sounds silly but she had an emptiness in her eyes and I couldn’t get my DD away from her fast enough that day.

I may regret asking this but what had she done?

TW!

We were pregnant again following a natural miscarriage at 5 weeks. We got to 7/8 weeks with the second pregnancy, no symptoms of a miscarriage, no bleeding etc. but I just "knew" there was something wrong. Booked for a private scan and was confirmed we'd had a MMC 😭 My DH couldn't get his head around how I knew.

I had a difficult three day labour that ended in an emergency C Section. (Not the UK)

In the recovery room I came to with a start when I felt a massive stabbing pain in my right heel. I thought 'what the hell are they doing to me now'? I looked down to see my legs/feet neatly tucked in under a hospital sheet. Just then the doctor came in so I asked him why my right heel was hurting so bad and he gave me a very odd look and told me they were taking blood from my baby's heel in the next room at that very moment. Btw; I didn't ask about my baby before that because I really thought my baby hadn't made it as the birth was so bad. Terrible experience.

Other weird things happened for a few weeks after he was born. In the mornings I'd wake up pushing the back of my fist to my mouth to suck - just look over to see my baby doing the same thing. I'd very often wake up in the night and lie still waiting for him to stir, which he always did a few minuets later, wanting to be breastfed. It's not like he even had a schedule, I just knew when he was hungry.

@OneTitWonder

When my DS was around 9mo and I put him to bed in his cot as normal. I tiptoed out as usual, as if he was aware I was leaving he'd scream blue murder and have to be resettled.

I gently closed the door, no sound from him, so I was pleased that he was down for the night. But at that point I had this sense of impending doom, hard to describe, but my brain just told me to go back in and check on him (which I never did). I went back in and he was lying on his back, choking on his own vomit. I immediately grabbed him, slapped him on the back and the vomit all came flying out, and after a few seconds he started screaming. My legs almost went out from under me, I was so full of adrenalin.

He had been perfectly fine, calm and sleepy when I had put him in the cot only a minute or two earlier. I don't know what it was that made me go back in, but if I hadn't I really dread to think what might have happened to him.

Wow, you knew! I remember how I used to do the happy dance in the hallway after I closed the door and the baby didn't cry. I never had the urge to open it again to check him, so I know it was your intuition that made you do it. You felt his distress.

@Ellowyn I am the least woo person I know, but it's impossible to logically explain why I went back in, other than instinct.

I've just had one - woke up half an hour ago, checked the time on my phone. Felt confused because I've had such a long day, then 2 mins later I hear dd stirring then start crying for me. Like I knew she needed me before she even did!

My brother died in his sleep at my dads house. The same night my mum had been up all night at her own house as her dog was having puppies and she was helping her deliver them, she said around 4.46 in the morning she felt a massive icy rush through the room she was in and a feeling someone was there. She didn’t know the significance when it happened but at 5.30am she got a call from my dad to tell her to come, he’d got up to go to the loo and for some reason felt compelled to check on my brother and found him, he was gone, but still felt warm to touch. I think both of them had that parental intuition that morning.

I can smell when my daughter is about to be ill. Oddly I've started getting it for my partner as well.

I'm thinking very unlikely as maybe it's to do with nature and the babies growing inside us makes the bond different.

My DC are adopted and we’re older when we adopted them. I have the same capacity for smelling when they are poorly, I know when somethings happened to my DD and can often predict what my DS is going to say. I think as a mum you spend so much time attending to their needs you just come to know them intricately regardless of whether you grew them.

Not mothers intuition as such...

I have a Teams meeting this morning at 10am for work. My laptop is a bit old and slow, but functional.
However I thought I would switch it on before the school run just in case. Good job I did because it was 80% through a major update when I got back. I would have been waiting forever if I woukd have done my usual and switch on 5 mins before the meeting.

Something made me suddenly want to inspect my DD’s scalp, then aged five, even though she hadn’t been scratching her head. Black with nits’ eggs.

Cried when I got a positive pregnancy test. Lost the pregnancy several weeks later; even before the loss, I cried to my DH and said that I was scared that something was wrong. Didn’t cry at all for subsequent pg tests - all went well.