Dreams

Last night I had a terrible dream.  In the dream I woke up to find my daughter re-hooked up to oxygen, monitors and a feeding tube.  She was tiny-all skin and bones, like her 2-month-old self, but the wires were tangled around her crib and I was completely stunned.  How did this happen? What went wrong? This isn’t how I put her to sleep last night, in her warm sleep stretchy and adorable chubbiness.  She was amazing yesterday-her first real trip to the supermarket sitting in the front of the cart (she was in heaven looking around at all the groceries, smiling at everyone who walked by, laughing at my mother), she played with her bath toys for the first time last night, and she didn’t even want to get out of her bath she was having so much fun playing.  I asked dream hubby and he said that At Home Medical (the medical supply company that provided us with all the oxygen and monitors when we came home from the hospital-more about them, later) came over at 4am and hooked her up-dream husband let them in the door.  Somehow, because it’s a dream and that’s how things work, we were in a hospital and I was screaming at a doctor who happened to be Penn (from Penn and Teller) that there was no way that Lily needed all of these devices, that she hadn’t desaturated in months, that she’d been off oxygen since November 12.  I even got my neonatologist on the phone-she called Dr. Penn an idiot.  They were running tests on Lily, taking her blood and I screamed at them that she didn’t need the unnecessary pain.  Leave her alone!  It wasn’t full out Shirley MacLaine, but it was impressive.

I don’t remember more than that because I woke up, startled.  The thing is, dreams like this aren’t uncommon.  While Lily was still in the NICU I had dreams about her dying or about the doctors taking her away from me, forever.  Once she came home, the dreams were about her choking or not breathing or being taken away from me.  The bigger and stronger she gets the less often I have them, but the being taken away from me part stays pretty consistent, and that’s because, well…that’s how it felt.  It felt like the doctors had taken her away from me (she was, after all, literally ripped out of my body-a couple of times I quoted Macbeth “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped,” but my hubby thought it was weird so I stopped), and for a long, long time, I didn’t know when I was going to get her back-I knew that, eventually, she would be mine and I would get to be her mother, but I did not know when.  No one seemed to know when.  I would lie in bed, hysterically crying on my husband’s chest, moaning that “they took her” and “I want her back,” and there was nothing he could do but hold me and rock me and try to tell me that it was going to be okay.

I had a similar reaction after the C-section: nightmares and misdirected anger.  I later explained the hurt to the hubby as the following: “I think of you as my knight, as my great protector from all the hurt and pain in the world.  And I know you relish the role because you truly believe that it is your job to protect me (he nodded in agreement). But there I was, completely helpless, literally going through my own personal version of hell, and there you were right next to me, and you couldn't make it stop, you couldn't make them stop, and you couldn't protect me.”  He finally understood.

He understood the whole time about feeling like Lily had been taken from me, had been “untimely ripped.”  He still understands about the dreams, even though he always seems to be an idiot in them (he’s really not an idiot in real life, I swear).  Dream hubby is just an ignorant, misguided man who thinks he’s doing the right thing, whereas real life hubby is an amazing, loving father who wishes he had more time with his daughter-he only gets to see her for about an hour on weekdays, and most of that time she’s in the screaming phase because it’s time to go to bed and she doesn’t want to (even at 6 months she’s capable of have a 2-year-old’s tantrum).

I’m sure that the dreams will go away or become so infrequent that they feel like they’re gone, but I don’t think that the feelings they represent will ever go away.  I’m never going to be able to forget that my child was taken away from me, but as she grows and experiences new things, I get to add to the feelings-new, happy experiences help to dull the pain of the past.

This is Lily sitting in a shopping cart for the first time-cart cover courtesy of the Factors (love you guys).  My mother said we should shove things all around her to keep her upright, so that's Lily's blanket on the left and my mother's purse on the right.  Lily's laser-like focus narrowed in on every product we passed by-here, she is staring at soda bottles (good sale on Pepsi products right now at A&P).  Despite the lack of smile at this moment, Lily had a blast.  My husband said it looks like I went shopping and picked up a Lily. I took this photo.