Daughters and the Last Dream
Eight years after Paul and I had married, "I found my growing self-acceptance, relaxing my views of family, and so when friends introduced us to their recently adopted five-year-old daughter, I knew their smiles as they called adoption 'second-best' meant the opposite. Affected by their joy, within a year we had a six-year old daughter. I would come to understand that she was teaching me I could be a mother, as twenty-one months later our second daughter was born."*
When our older daughter was in second grade, we bought a two-story house with a faded-white exterior and dark green trim—a carpenter special we could afford—across from Edgemont Park in Montclair, and moved in on the Fourth of July—watching the parade as we worked.
Our older daughter went to a magnet school where she stayed after school for gymnastics; and I brought the baby to watch, nursing her from the side—happy to have both ages. With a tall, lithe body, our daughter could do "walk-overs" and one-handed cartwheels across the mats, smiling, as I did, at her accomplishments.
At this age, thirty-one, I still had occasional fearful dreams that woke me at night. Going quickly to each girl’s room I’d wet my forefinger and hold it under her nose until sighing with relief, I knew neither had drowned.
This one night, I woke with a new and deeper understanding from my subconscious that ended this one particular dream. In it, I am the one at the bottom of the swimming pool—and I am looking up to be rescued, which I am.
My realization is, "Raising children, we may be brought face-to-face with our own childhood-memory-fears in dreams that bring us new meaning and salvation."
*A Flower for God