Bad and Good Dreams.

I'm so used to not getting what I want that almost every morning I automatically wake up about 30 minutes before anyone else, including my dogs.  I lie there, as still as I can, cherishing the alone time, wondering if my new life is really just a dream. 

I look at my unconscious husband, equal parts impossibly hairy and handsome, and our two dogs hogging much bed.  And I wait and assess what hurts and what's slid even further down the maypole of encroaching middle age.  I run down a mental checklist of what must happen on this day, and convince myself it can all get done.  Then I wait and worry.  And wait to see if my dream is real. 

Soon enough, a tiny little voice pipes up over the baby monitor, calling for me.  And I exhale happily.  Yes, someone did give me a child. This actually happened. Then the voice on the monitor changes.  I can interpret the baby speak. 'Mama, get down here and change the soggiest diaper you've ever seen, next to Siberian orphans at the end of a long holiday weekend.'

Even as I type this sentence about my life it feels like I'm making it all up.  Even my fantasy life as a compulsive liar wouldn't dare dream of me ending up as a mother of a sweet and fierce toddler.  

Due to the complications of advanced age coupled with serious Momnesia, I'm astonished by what I forget and even more astonished by what I'm able to remember.  The Bad Dream will last the rest of my life, no matter what becomes of my over 50 year old brain.

And yes. I do have internal conflicts about being an old mom. I feel guilty almost constantly when I realize what my daughter will be grappling with when she's 20. Parents who are 70 years old. To combat that reality and mitigate my guilt at the prospect of her pushing my wheelchair to her own college graduation, I do yoga daily, brain exercises (when I remember to) and drink more Kombucha and chia seeds than anyone really should ever have to.  I want to earn my daughter's devotion by truly and fully being there for her, as opposed to her being weighed down by obligation to me. I don't want her life to be a sacrifice to my accomplishment of becoming a mother despite the odds and my age.

And yet, the guilt persists. Do other adopted moms feel the guilt of rearing the child of someone who couldn't provide for the baby they gave birth to?  At times I feel myself numbing out or lingering at the grocery store, staring down the aisles of a CVS, deepening my time away from her- not because I need a break but because I can't stand the guilt of actually having this stunning little person who I desperately love and who loves me so much.  Why did my happiness have to come at the expense of someone else? A question for which there is no answer is a question I just keep asking. Over and over. And I remember that dream. It was a really bad dream.

To call my bad dream a nightmare is to insult what a nightmare my bad dream actually was.  About three weeks after we brought Baby Girl home, our in-laws came to visit. They took her out for lunch and a long walk so I could get my first real alone-time nap.  

To call that nap sleep is like calling heroin a recreational drug.  I have never been so deeply asleep in my entire life- probably due to being a bedwetter... yes. I wet the bed until I was 8 or 9- and still never truly sleep deeply, most likely due to the fear of  a deep, hard sleep leading to a soaked husband.  

And during this one nap, in the almost death-like depths of sleep I will probably never enjoy again, I had a dream. 

The baby was with my mother-in-law, being sat and cared for and doted on. And someone took her.  The grief, the loss and the sadness all tumbled around us, for a long, long time. We never got our baby back- the crime became a wound, which became a scar and we somehow moved on while continuing to grieve- and my grief was Anna Magnani-like in it's fierce wildness. I grieved HARD, in the way that dreams drop you into the deepest well of an emotion and leave you there- weeping and keening and wailing and crying, heart torn asunder amid vivid unimaginable pain- yet all of this happening in a tiny but rough neighborhood in my brain, while the rest of me just lay there, unable to defend myself.  It amazes me that I didn't thrash myself awake from the horrors of losing my newborn in my dream, but I stayed asleep. 

And in that cinematic way that dreams do, decades passed.  And I was someplace fancy, like a beautiful old department store, or restaurant or University with marbled floors. It was an event and everyone was dressed up and on their best behavior. And my long lost daughter was there.  

She was 25, had a different name than the one we gave her, was eye wateringly beautiful, lovely and spoke French fluently. I don't know why I knew who she was, but I did. She didn't know me. She had been taken from me at 3 weeks old, and had clearly been raised with love and care and respect.  

I never told her who I was and when we spoke I was deeply saddened by how polite if distant she was, treating me the way any well raised young woman would treat a stranger. As I watched her walk away and go back to her very full life, I was devastated but proud. The well of my grief was the deepest I'd ever felt- and I dream-cried endlessly.  When I tried to put words to my sadness, all I could say was, "All I wanted was to be a participant in her life and to watch her grow up."  

Then I woke up.  The in-laws returned with my baby girl and I was so happy to still be her mother.  And I was stunningly well rested.  But the dream kept wafting back into my memory for days and weeks after. Even now I think about it, like a scar from an old accident.  It's taken me over a year to write it down and in doing so, I hope to exorcise it.

It finally occurred to me that I dreamed what my birth mother must have experienced in giving up her baby.  In one nap I felt the full force of her grief and loss and helplessness.  And it was awe-ful and awful.  Of course I have zero idea of what it truly felt like to grow a baby inside me and give her up for adoption, but now that I've been lucky enough to be this child's mother for 18 months, I have a tiny idea of just how much it must ache to have given that opportunity up.  

So my guilt is the price I willingly pay for the happiness I feel as a mother.  And my ongoing if tender relationship with my birth mother is something I will nurture and support as long as my birth mother wishes it to. It's the least I can do.