The last three nights I’ve been having these wacky dreams where undesirable things happen to me that feel slightly out of control. I keep thinking I should record these dreams and then re-thinking and telling myself these are the kinds of dreams I might want to let go. As in, let’s just choose not to remember these dreams. And then the next night I have a similar yet different dream and I just have to face it, my soul is trying to tell me something. Or so it would appear. I can’t tell this stuff apart from sheer anxiety or hormones most of the time.
In the first dream, I was pregnant with a fourth child, and really did not want to be. I was pretty upset about it. What was strange was that I realized I was pregnant about seven months into the whole thing, as though one day I wasn’t, and then boom, I was, and rather far along, and kind of realizing how big a deal this was. It all happened in one moment in the dream, a sense of realization and then a sense of overwhelm. The main problem for me was remembering the toddler years. In the dream I stood and looked at myself in a full-length mirror and thought, darn it, how could I have missed this pregnancy for so long? What was I thinking? I’m not ready for a fourth baby. And how am I going to deal with those crazy-challenging toddler years? My house isn’t toddler-proof.
When I woke up I was so relieved. But also scared. I have this constant fear of going back to the years when things were so, so, so very intense. I am not knocking pregnancy or child-rearing in any way. Actually I’m honoring it. For me, it was and still is so challenging. The most challenging thing, ever. Setting aside so much of my own …everything… to make room for another—others I should say—it really takes a lot of patience and forbearance. With every year that passes I am increasingly aware of how much sacrifice has been involved in my parenting, because while it gets harder in some ways, it gets easier in others, and as the pressure lessens I realize that there was pressure there to begin with. Thinking of having another baby—at this stage in my life—makes me want to run, screaming, saying, noooooooo! I’m doing other stuff now, the outreach I haven’t been able to do for so long. If I have another baby, what will happen to me? I’m irrationally fearful of it.
But I’ve had weird pregnancy dreams before. I’ve dreamt a doctor was trying to coax me into delivering a baby when I was about four months along. Others were trying to peer-pressure me into it as well. “It’s so much easier when you do it at four months, rather than waiting all the way until nine,” they were saying to me. I managed even in the dream to roll my eyes at the doctor and walk away, but still I was a little frantic and worried and surprised at being pregnant in the first place.
Also in the last couple of nights I dreamt that I left my oldest child somewhere far away on a trip. We were there together as a family and I got ready to go when we were done visiting, and I just left her there, I didn’t even bother to find out if she was ready to leave with me. I hate those kind of child-abandonment dreams. I’ve had those plenty as well. I wake up feeling like such a bad mom. The worst thing was that this dream was also combined with a weird, slimy hotel-affair storyline, where I abandoned my daughter in order to go meet some guy at a Motel 6 or something, and I brought my four-year-old with me. Slimy affairs are a recurring theme in my dreams, a fear that I don’t have what it takes to be married. With children in the mix it’s particularly messy and nasty. I woke up to that dream not only feeling like a bad mom, but also a bad wife. And nothing even happened. I remember meeting the guy at a hotel—he looked like the lead singer of Ah-Ha, the ’80s Norwegian band—and the two of us just going, well, whatever, we probably don’t need to meet here, see you later. Afterwards I sat in the hotel room watching news on the TV and wondering where the heck my daughter was.
Then last night I dreamt that I had breast cancer. The doctors I saw in the dream told me I’d have to have surgery so I unthinkingly and unquestioningly went along. I emerged from surgery later with no breasts. I knew the cancer had been in my left breast so I couldn’t figure out what had happened—why did they remove both breasts? Then I examined more closely and saw that they had only removed a portion of the left breast and otherwise I was intact. That was freaky. For a moment I felt completely out of control, like my body was not mine to determine what should happen to it.
In a way I feel that what is happening is some gradual understanding, internally but not cognitively, that I am just some kind of channel for other things to carry out. Like my body is being used so that other things can move forward, and I might need to get used to it.
Still, it’s terribly disturbing when I feel so out of touch with it. And there’s this ever-present feeling that my kids are somehow victims in the process—that perhaps by giving so much in areas not directly related to their care or education, I am “bad mommy” and must be brought down and humbled, whether by another pregnancy that keeps me home-bound or a cancer that takes away a physical part of me, or some kind of debasing affair that reminds me of how animalistic and unloving I am. As though I haven’t yet done a good enough job, and I deserve punishing.
Maybe I need to go easier on myself, and just reconnect, find myself again.