Dreaming in Babies
On April 15, 2015 | 2 Comments | Bill, Emma Grace, Everett, Madagascar, parenting, Will |

Lately I dream in babies.

Almost always they are my own, earlier incarnations of these same beings who, even now–at eighteen, and sixteen, and fourteen–do much to order my day.

A week ago it was Emma, suddenly arriving while I visited with a friend who was in the midst of moving house. Boxes and displaced furnishings and noise surrounded us. Teenage children, our children– those of my friend and also my own–came and went. And then, without warning or, bizarrely, any awareness on my own part, I gave birth to Emma, who reasonably presented with the demands of a newborn, which were strange and also familiar, as was true the first time she came.

Two nights ago it was Everett, age two. At some point during the dream, he went missing, and while other disremembered plots of the dream were resolved, the terrifying aspect of his disappearance persisted until I awoke–just barely–to realize with sweet relief that it was just a dream.

And other dreams over the course of recent weeks, each freighted with habit and sensation as acute as yesterday: the down of William’s newborn hair, the tender fold of his newborn body, the skin so soft it was otherworldly. When she was days old, Bill and I remarked of Emma that the grooves of our fingerprints were too wide to apprehend that softness.

***

I wonder if this is simply a cumulative effect: these days I have a lovely handful of friends who are considerably younger than I am, and recently they are reproducing with remarkable celerity. In the short time we have been friends, two of them have given birth and one of these is expecting again, while last month the other gave birth to twins. And now a third is expecting her first baby.

All of this is wonderful and exciting and also evocative. What mother–observing a pregnancy, hearing of a birth–doesn’t also tacitly or otherwise revisit her own pregnancies and births, doesn’t marvel again with mute recollection at the miraculous growth of an infant, the widening eyes, the head swiveling toward sound? We experience it differently when, this time, we are not the ones doing the mothering, and are instead able to observe, notice, wonder at the insistent force of miracle.

***

And these days, too, the world outdoors is doing its predictable April thing. The newborn leaves of our backyard maple were chartreuse strands last week. Today they have widened into their own recognizable hands with which, for months to come, they will register breeze and pending storm. They will hail us in the breakfast room with silver backs and shield us from the neighbors. And beneath them now hang their pink and golden seed pods, which will soon enough let go and spin like helicopter blades (or is it helicopter blades that spin like seed pods?) down to the lawn.

Meanwhile the pine tree pollen is relentlessly turning the white car yellow, the gray car a sickly green. The dog and I went for an overdue run yesterday afternoon in what was decidedly heat, and I came home again drenched in sweat and coated with a pollen-grit that demanded immediate bathing.

Spring is decidedly here, making–if not all things–so many things new.

***

In the past two weeks, Everett earned his driver’s license and got a job. He drove himself to school today for the first time because today I don’t need the car, and because he can.

***

And in less than two weeks, Will comes home from Madagascar. Emma has counted the months, and then the weeks, and now she counts the days. And I, too, am aware, of course, that he will be home again. Occasionally I allow myself to imagine him here, the singularness of him. Are there words for this? The cumulative effect of loving him for these few, potent years. How vividly I remember his newborn moments, how Bill leaned in toward us as William cried into my bare shoulder. And I, exhausted, spoke quietly to him, and he quit crying and lifted his head.

The insistent force of miracle.

It is likely miracle, too, that I watch the narrowing margin of days with some sorrow–not for myself, but for him. For while he is eager and excited to come home, to see friends and family again, to do the new things that lie ahead, his coming means also the irrevocable end of these five months away and all–uncountable, invaluable–that they have meant to him, that they mean.

So here I register yet more new things: the expansion of our family to five again, the practical shift into having a child in adulthood, the richness and complexity of parenting him now. And the expansion of my heart to welcome this, to accept it as necessary and sweet and good. I, who have often lived backwards, with a persistently over-the-shoulder gaze. But that were a blindness, close-fisted and close-hearted both.

I am grateful to find I can open my hands to this, to await with expectation and joy the New.

Comments 2
Sarah Jane Posted April 15, 2015 at8:21 pm   Reply

I always end your posts with wet eyes.

Sarah Ruff Posted April 29, 2015 at3:44 am   Reply

I, too, have tears running down my face. Beautifully written. So glad your Will is home!

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