fo(u)r you

who would you be now? for a long time i’ve wondered, no sure notion in my head. but now i think i know. i think you would be (are?) the same little boy i saw in a dream a few weeks ago.

after nearly four years of never meeting you in that other place, the one where anything is possible, i wondered what was wrong with me. why is it that i never even dreamt of my own child? or there was the even worse thought that maybe you didn’t want to see me…even in my dreams.

but you came! you finally came. and at first the dream was terrifying. i was rushing around frantically trying to find you (i’ve lost him! where is he? how can i get back to him? i have to get back to him!). and then i walked in to a room, and you were there…your little-boy body lying crosswise on a bed, blond head tipped forward to look down at the pages you’d pulled out of one of my sketchbooks. i could see your small hands touching the torn up, colorful pieces of my art. there was no malice or mischief in you, just curiosity. and then you looked up and smiled at me, as if to say, “i’m right here, mama,” and there was such a sweet gentleness that surrounded and suffused you, and i felt my whole being flooded with the most intense love and relief i’ve ever experienced. i woke up and cried tears of joy to have seen you again. not the baby i was expecting…not the newborn trapped in the only images we have you, but a little boy. my little boy.

about a week after that dream, a new friend of ours told Froggy and me that she’d dreamt about you. i hadn’t told her about my dream or even spoken much to her about you. but she described a little blond boy filled with gentleness and love and surrounded by light. she said he’d put his arms around her and comforted her, this luminous little boy. when i read her dream (something she almost didn’t share for fear of possibly hurting us), i knew it was you, too. she says that i’ll meet you again, even in my waking life. i don’t know…i don’t know what to believe, and sometimes i’m not sure if i believe in anything anymore.

except…now i do believe in something. i believe in the goodness, the lightness, the love of that four-year-old little blondheaded boy. and i still feel you. and i still miss you…desperately.

happy birthday, my little son.

 

 

where donuts are made

one of the things that helps to illuminate those dark places in my head is travel. since little sun died, there hasn’t been enough of it in my life. i could (and should) write more about the eight different countries i’ve lived in or the many others i’ve had the immense fortune to  visit. but there is a plane to catch in about 12 hours and a 12 hour car ride ahead of us the day after tomorrow, so for now i will share some images of our very brief (but nevertheless uplifting) sojourn in the land of Helios and Athena.

with my heart in a choke hold

 

solid air

je ne vais pas bien.

je ne vais pas bien.

how is it that i am still here?

      (written for Nick Drake)

i wake and i find you asleep in the deep of my heart

(read part 1, dreaming, i was only dreaming…)

the next round  of the special dreams arrived a few years later when i was temporarily back in the States. in the first dream, i saw my friend Tanja with a large, obviously-pregnant belly. she and i had been very close when i was an exchange student at her German gymnasium nearly a decade earlier, but we hadn’t seen each other or been in touch in at least five years. the dream caught me a bit by surprise…i hadn’t thought of Tanja in ages. it’s almost always an unexpected pleasure to run into old friends while wandering Morpheus’ realm, though, and i just enjoyed the little swell of happiness the dream brought with it instead of thinking too much about whether it meant anything

two months later, i had another dream about Tanja. in this one, she was smiling and bouncing a baby on her knee. this was enough for me to put pen to paper. “did you just have a baby by any chance?” i wrote in the letter that i sent to her. she never did respond, but ten months later when i was visiting friends in Europe before heading off to the Peace Corps, i did get to see Tanja. yes, she’d gotten my letter, but she’d been too busy to respond. her ten-month-old daughter was smiling and babbling at me from her high chair as Tanja acknowledge that it was a pretty strange coincidence.

dreaming, i was only dreaming…

the first dream was a good one. i don’t actually remember the details of dream itself, but i awoke knowing something, feeling certain that it was true. at the time, i was living in the suburbs of Seoul with a Korean family, a recently married couple from whom i rented a room. what i awoke knowing was that my “host mother” was pregnant. when i told her at breakfast what i’d dreamt, a look of wonder passed over her face, and then she broke out into a huge smile. her husband had apparently had a dream that night, too, the kind of dream that is known as tae-mong.

there’s no one word in English that can convey all of the meaning contained in the word tae-mong. “tae” is related to birth and “mong” means dream, so in a general sense it is a dream about birth and/or pregnancy. a dream that a member of the family or someone close to the expectant couple has. i learned that these kinds of dreams are supposed to tell about the unborn baby’s personality and fortune, and i don’t think i ever met someone there who didn’t believe in them.

my host father and i both turned out to be right: my host mother was pregnant.

l’instinct de vivre

so why did i come back after all this time? why did i return to this strange little cyberworld that i’d completely abandoned nearly two years ago? i suppose you could say that a book brought me back. to be more precise, L’instinct de vivre a book by Laetitia Lycke, another woman who belongs to the club that no one wants to join. if you can read French, i can’t recommend this book highly enough.

but the story of my return to the babyloss blogosphere (and of how i even came to read the book in the first place) is a bit more complicated than that. it actually started with Skype.

here

i’m still here…somewhere.

i’m trying to find my words, or perhaps to liberate them, but it’s not an easy thing. silence has been my stony refuge these last two years, and i’m not sure how to chisel through these walls that i’ve constructed out of desperation and self-protection. but i will try…i must try.

a lot has happened, since i stopped posting on this blog. there have been new jobs.  there have been too many trips to other countries….for embryo transfers and tests and surgical procedures. there have been more than a few negative pregnancy tests followed by excruciating (but required) blood draws to confirm what was already painfully clear.

a quick update

for everyone who is wondering about Sadie and her little Girl Wonder, i had an update today.  Girl Wonder is doing better and at home with her parents.  i don’t want to tell Sadie’s story (since she does such a brilliant job of it herself), but i did want to reassure everyone who may be out there worrying and wondering.  so many people have been generous and donated to help them, and i just wanted to thank you all again.  

helping Sadie and Girl Wonder (update 2)

i’m back with another quick update on the fundraiser for Sadie over at Invincible Spring.