Dreams and other Emotional Messes

I dream about my mom almost every night. Most of the time, I've forgotten the dream by the time I wake up to the alarm even if I remembered it after the first or even second pee break that night. There are only two that I remembered long enough to tell anyone. They both involved food.

In the first dream, my mom had written a long letter to me on leaves of lettuce and spinach and clipped the whole salady missive together with a binder clip. She had mailed it to me in a brown cardboard box. The letter was about how she had met President Obama after the local news station did a story about her and my dad, and the house that they built, and how she had to sell it after he died. Apparently, Obama was so impressed with her story that he invited her to the White House for lunch. She noted that she never thought she would vote democrat, but she was glad she had voted for him. All of this, on lettuce. In my dream, I pictured my mom telling me in person while I read the letter.

In the second dream, my mom and I went grocery shopping together and she convinced me that it was OK for vegetarians to eat salami when pregnant. She assured me that the protein and salt were good for the baby, and that I should eat anything I wanted. She bought a big loaf of Wonder bread and some hard salami, and we went back to her house and she made me sandwiches and I ate them and we watched TV. I told her that I didn't think salami even counted as meat, so I didn't feel that bad about eating it. I woke up feeling guilty for DREAMING about eating meat. And wishing that there were some way that I could hang out with my mom and eat sandwiches one more time. Or a thousand more times.

It is still unfathomable to me that I am going to be a mom without my mom. I cannot grasp that she will never meet this baby, never hold her, never sing to her. I've started to become extra prickly whenever anyone complains about her mom about anything. I just want to scream "YOUR MOM IS ALIVE! STFU!". But I don't scream. I just choke back tears and daydream about her coming to the hospital with my dad with a blanket she crocheted, and holding our little baby in her lap and singing to her. I don't know why I torture myself this way. I just do. I can't stop.

I'm starting a new part time job in a couple of weeks. I didn't go looking for it - I was recruited by a non-profit where I had had an informational interview when we first moved to town. They have a part time opening right now that would be a great fit. I was leery about starting something new, but I told them I was expecting and couldn't 100% promise that I'd come back after baby. They were cool with that, and wanted me anyway. I finally decided to take the job so that I could afford a birth doula and a post-partum doula. Because I will NEED help, and I don't have a mom to come and stay for a week while I try to get my wits about me. Or to come over once in a while and just help. Heaven knows my in-laws are not the first people I would call. Hiring a mom-like helper seems like the next best thing.

Sometimes I feel like I absolutely cannot do this without my mom. In fact, after my mom died, my resolve to not have kids was the strongest it had ever been. I did not want to have children that wouldn't have my parents in their lives, their world. It seemed stupid. My family was now incomplete. Homeless, rootless, and clouded with loss. That heaviness was one of the first things God had to break through on this path to motherhood. I still feel it, but it doesn't feel like I'm drowning in it anymore.

I started reading the book "Parentless Parents" and it is SO good. I stopped reading it so that Les and I can read it together over his winter break. It's one of those books where you are inwardly, and sometimes audibly, shouting "YES! That's exactly what it is like!" as you read. I think it should be called something more like "So You're Having a Kid with Someone Whose Parents are Dead", because while it has been reassuring to me that my experience is a shared one, it will be even more valuable to Les as he has to navigate our new family life with me, the bereaved. Particularly because he never met my parents.

One of the hardest things about my parentlessness at this stage of my life is that our extended family life is totally one-sided. We don't have to negotiate whose family to visit at the holidays, or which grandparents will do/have/buy/visit and when. It's all his family, all the time. Their traditions, their timelines, their everything. With the exception of Thanksgiving Lunch and Christmas Eve with my mom's side of the family, we are with his family 100% of the time. I have proposed that we at least carve out some holiday time that will be OUR family time, OUR traditions. Maybe we won't even go to his family's stuff every time, every year. Maybe some years, our little family unit will stay home and do our own thing. These are the things I worry about. Not the only things, but they are pretty high on the list.