Monday, May 30, 2011

The Re-occurring Dream

The night before we found out that LBZ is a boy, I had a dream that he was.  This was the first dream that he was a boy as in the others before the baby was a girl.  The boy part stood out, but the interesting part was that the baby was born and I had no recollection of the hardest part of the birth.  I sort of "woke up" and my mom was there and handed me the baby, all wrapped up.
I brushed the dream off and relished in the news that our sweet baby boy is in fact, a boy!

A few weeks later, I had another similar dream.  I started to post about it but didn't, for some reason.

The basic premise was the same, although the dream itself was very different.  Again I somehow missed the labor part of having the baby and he was just here.  I was home already and was very, very confused about how I could have missed the birth and the first hours of his life.

In the dream I didn't even know his name!  It was either N or my mom who told me that they named him what I wanted to name him.  I also asked if he was circumcised, which is odd that I wondered this in the dream except that I care very much about whether or not that happens with our youngest boy.

So as if that wasn't weird enough, last night the dream came again and took a different, yet similar storyline.  I woke again, this time in the hospital room where I delivered, but the whole birth process was a blank.  It's like I just showed up there.

Our boy had the same name, but the nurse wouldn't let me see him for some reason.  I asked repeatedly to see him, but the nurse kept telling me I couldn't.  Then I threw a big fit and said that at the hospital where I had BBZ, he never left my side, and I expected the same thing from this hospital.  The nurse left with the intention of bringing me my baby.

She came back into the room where N and I were and she brought us our boy, who was in the little plastic box bed that the hospitals have.  He was bundled up and as cute as can be.  He was so small and had jet black hair.  It was a great dream.

But I can't shake the fact that these dreams all carry the same message that I am completely absent during LBZ's birth.  I keep questioning why this is.

I desperately want to have a different experience than the one I had with BBZ.  Maybe it means that the birth isn't the important part as the end result is what matters.  But the birth really does matter to me.  I really do want to experience his birth and perhaps even heal the wounds left by my first experience.

What I am afraid of is that I am more afraid than I realize I am.  I honestly think that my experience was about as bad as a delivery can get.  I felt disconnected from BBZ, it took months to heal, and I am pretty sure that the fact that he was born at 5pm was directly correlated with the end of my doctor's work day.  I truly know that the simple act of foregoing the epidural will give me the experience I want.

So why do all of my dreams leave out what I hope will be the healing part of my experience?  Maybe it is because the truth is, that part really doesn't matter.  It matters, but not as much as the end result of having my sweet healthy baby boy in my arms.  Something I am getting so excited about!

One more dream I want to be sure to remember is the one I had this past Friday night.  I missed the birth again, but that wasn't really the basis of the dream as it was with the others.  In this dream, we actually had a little girl.  She was premature and the tiniest thing I ever saw.  But, I was still pregnant with LBZ.  It was as though we had twins but the little girl was born early and LBZ was still cooking.

I was trying to nurse her but she was so small and while she was doing fine with it, it seemed odd since she was so tiny.  That's about all I remember.

Pregnant dreams are so weird.  I remember reading about a woman's dream once that the baby turned into green sludge.  So the fact that these dreams may not make sense to me is probably ok.  They don't really need to, I suppose.

Have a great week, everyone!