Is there Negative Energy? El Ojo? Superstition or fact? You decide!

It's scary being a new mother. I remember when I first had my daughter April. You wait and wait all those months for your baby to get here, you read the books, you listen to advice of other mothers, but when it comes right down to it all of a sudden all those things are gone and it's just you and that little baby...for hours and hours and hours without end!!!

Parts of it are great. I remember feeding times when I would just stare into her big black eyes. I could do that for days! And her scent! That beautiful baby smell of her! This feeling of love would come over me and I just wanted to eat her! I've heard that some animals eat their young and I wanted to eat my baby she was just so perfect and wonderful. Weird I know, but I think perfectly normal.

But then there were those days when she would not sleep or nurse and she just cried and cried, for hours! I would try everything; changing her, bathing her, singing to her, taking her for a ride in the car, dancing with her. Anything and everything to get her to just stop crying.

One day was especially bad and I remember calling my mom. I was in tears myself and she could barely understand me, but being a mother, she knew her own baby needed help and she could hear her granddaughter in the background crying and wailing. So she popped on over. She lived 30 minutes away but she dropped everything she was doing and popped on over!

When she got there she tried everything that I had tried and nothing worked for her either. April would not stop crying! So my mom said "le hicieron ojo", translated to mean someone gave April the evil eye or negative energy. And I remembered several times that I would see my mom greeting a friend that had a baby and she would say, "let me touch your baby because she's so beautiful I don't want to give her the evil eye!" A Superstition definitely! But it made sense to me because my April was the most beautiful baby that had ever been born so I'm sure someone had given her the evil eye.

So mom had me gather up a candle and an egg and a bowl. We gave April a good bath and got her nice and cozy on a blanket on my bed and my mom began a ritual that I don't really remember, but she took the egg and while she prayed she brought the egg around to several places on April's body, from the top of her head to the soles of her feet.

Once she was done with that ritual, my mom broke the egg into the bowl that she had placed near April's head and she lit the candle, and placed the flame over the bowl for a while and then turned the candle off in the egg mixture. This was presumably to burn the evilness so it wouldn't remain in the house or go back into the baby.

April had watched all this intently and it seemed to calm her and all of a sudden she started closing her little eyes and she fell asleep and slept for hours and so did I and my mom just stayed with us both until we woke up and then April was just perfectly happy after that and never again did she have an episode like that where she would not stop crying!

Witchcraft? Brujeria? Superstition? I don't know. I just know it worked. Was there a bad energy in my child that someone else had placed in her by coveting her? I still don't know all these years later. Was it the bath that calmed her? Was it my mom's voice while she prayed over her? Was it God? Was it the egg? Heck if I know, but it did work. I saw it with my own eyes.

Have you every experienced anything like this? Have you heard of "ojo"? What superstitions did your own parents have? There is so much on this earth that can not be explained.