Last night I dreamt that my mother was giving birth to a baby and came to say that it was time. I was there with my father (he a younger version) and we were getting ready for the long birthing process. Then, this woman giving birth was both my mother and not and I could see she was already crowning and my mother was on the toilet with a loose stool in the next room and I was calling into her saying she’s crowning, you’d better hurry up and then almost as soon as the words had left my mouth the baby was out and I was calling to the woman in the bathroom to make sure she washed her hands—baby is now here.
The baby was a very strong girl and she was left face down, off to the side, while the man attended to the woman, still connected to umbilical cord and squirming, cold and crying. I went to pick her up trying to be careful with her newborn, floppy body and was surprised by both her heft and her strength. I got her turned around and then she settled into my chest, pulled her arms and legs in and rested contentedly.
Umbilical is to biblical? The words (symbols) sure look alike. I saw the baby still connected to mother by a pulsing cord, a child who like Christ is a child of God. I took the baby in my arms, first in a car and then on a train, traveling away from the birth scene into the future.
The dream tells me she is mine to take and I wake thinking she is me as a baby and wonder is it possible I am dreaming of my own birth? The details don’t match. My father and mother were both absent at my birth—Dad in Vietnam and my mother knocked out on twilight sleep. She tells me it took her two days to wake up and that the nurses were carrying me around the hospital and feeding me bottles of sugar-water.
Though Mom is not sure if I was a forceps delivery, my brother a chiropractor suspects I was because my neck vertebrae are so twisted and hardened into place. I always had ear troubles—two surgeries in the past year in fact, and my hearing is bad.
Mom did become a midwife and some of my siblings were born at home, but not until the system had robbed her a few times of the power bestowed in the birthing.
What I am attempting to get at in writing all of this is my morning revelation related to birth and our spirits and biblical teachings. If Christ was God’s child born to Mary and Joseph (immaculate conception) then we too in that flawless pattern are God’s child born of human hosts (who are also God’s creation). For me, seeing it in this way, not a Bible story removed, but a map for living and just a slight shift in perception, makes it easy to forgive my parents of their shortcomings and also to realize I myself, must pick up that baby-spirit that was/is me because I am God’s child.
And though I do take care of myself and have for a very long time, I am realizing there are fragments of me in different time zones and places. I am being asked to gather myself—just as I believe we all are.
As far as fragments in different places, my mother recently sold our childhood home and built a smaller, though I didn't feel that attached to the place and encouraged her downsizing, I started to have lot's of dreams of the house. I wasn't quite sure why until I found myself explaining to a friend whom I hadn't spoken to in awhile that my mother had moved and when his next question was about my dreaming life and I told him of dreaming of the home, it suddenly dawned on me that I had been busy at night gathering my psychic and spiritual energy from the house strangers were now living in.
Like always, the revelation written seems flat when taken down, words as symbols not enough to carry all meaning no matter how I arrange them. And, perhaps publishing it here will assist someone else in some way, if not, it’s helped me, a way of mirroring to myself my own thoughts.
Dreamt: Is it a word, or must we write, last night I dreamed? It’s how my brother’s and I said it always: DREAMT.
Photo: My babies in the Rhododendron some years ago
