Bad Dream

Probably because there is so much going on. Last night my first dream was horrible.

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My husband and I were visiting his mother, who lived - oddly enough - in a dreamland version of my maternal grandmother's house. There were other members of his mother's family there, visiting I seem to recall, for some family event. Maybe it was a birthday, but I'm not sure.

Somewhere in the depths of the dream, I deposited my husband and our daughter in a room on the second or maybe even the third story; a room where my mother-in-law was holding some family version of court, I think. Shortly after they went into the room - I'm not sure I was allowed to enter - I went downstairs... All the way downstairs.

It was in the basement/cellar that I was doing our laundry... But I could hear what was happening - in scattered bits and pieces - in all the other rooms of the house, courtesy of a ratty ventilation/heating system. This is eerily accurate to my Grandma's house by the way. After not too long I realised that my husband was in the basement with me - under the pretense of helping me. I was torn between being relieved for having company in the musty, dim room and being infuriated that he had left our daughter ANYWHERE in this house without one of us close at hand.

Before I got a chance to tell him this, however, I heard the instantly heart-breaking, every mother's worst moment, shrill, I'm-in-pain scream of my daughter echoing through the ducts, like a pinball making its way through the ventilation maze down to us.

I brushed past my ashen mother-in-law who was shouting to my husband "It's NOT my fault" as I made my way up the stairs to my daughter. My body and instincts, perhaps, had taken over and in this state of auto-mom, lungs and lips and teeth and tongue were independently screaming out the phrase "Where's my baby? Where's my baby?!?!?!"

She was in the kitchen, at the table, sitting on the lap of a girl - no more than 15 - who I didn't know, but who bore enough family resemblance for me to know that she belonged here. The girl held a once white, now blood-stained washcloth to my daughter's face, between her right temple and her right eye. The cloth covered her eye and I felt the bottom fall out of my stomach. Even now my daughter's dream-wailing rings in my ears. In the dream, of course, I was moving in slow motion and by the time I made it to her side, the girl removed the cloth to reveal a semi-circular gash running in the curve from the end of her eyebrow to the very corner of her eye. In the seconds that the cloth was removed, the wound welled up with blood and overflowed onto her pale cheek, her white shirt... The floor.

I got to her and held her in my arms, pressing the cloth to her face and desperately attempting to force my lungs and lips and teeth and tongue to call for my husband, before I woke up... But only just before.

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When I woke up, I was a wreck. Heart thumping, sweaty, scrambling to hold my peacefully sleeping little girl close to me and never let her go.
I think this might be an allegory for what it is to be a mom. For as much as I put up the brave face, and remind my anxious family members that "babies fall over," there IS, in me, the ferocious tiger of a mother who worries, constantly and with a wild imagination, over her safety... and my own feeble attempts to ensure it.