letter #3
we're all making our own sense of things
(just to let you know this does talk a bit about infertility so if you don't feel up for reading about that subject right now you can hit delete)
one thing
I had a dream that haunted my morning. For hours I felt hollow and shadowed, but I couldn't pinpoint why. I drank an extra coffee then a cup of chamomile tea. I had a panadol, a shower. Nothing worked. And then a flash of something. I glimpsed it out of the corner of my eye and in that second the dream was remembered. I've never understood how dreams do that, stay present but unremembered.
Anyway, in that dream I had three children. The two I have and the one I don't. He was real even if he only existed in my dreams. He had an awkward-sounding name but I don't remember what it was. All through the dream people kept saying to me, 'I didn't know you had three children, you've never mentioned him before.' My dream-boy rarely spoke and even when he did I rarely heard him. Rarely listened.
I can't quite comprehend that I never will have a third child, and my mind seems to have this lingering idea that there will be three where there are actually two. Like he was there all along if only I'd looked properly. I haven't been able to completely dispel the image I had of myself as a mother of three. I mean I don't take my temperature anymore, I don't plot my cycle on a graph. In fact, I seem to be making the transition from perimenopause to menopause much more quickly than I expected to. But I think some part of me still expects this third child to appear.
There's nothing surprising in the timing of this being stirred up again. The boys stayed at home by themselves for a week while I was away in Japan. A week. By themselves. With no parent even in the country. And one of them has just put in his university applications for next year while the other is off to get his Ls this week. So there's lots of repositioning and rethinking. Personal rebranding. And in terms of how I see myself I seem to always be a decade or so behind. I've only recently stopped seeing myself as the mother of preschoolers. At the moment, I don't see myself as the mother of young children, but I don't see myself as the mother of young adults either. And it does seem a pity that they're moving on just when I feel like I've worked out how parenting works.
Another not entirely unrelated thing
When I was young--when I was a child I mean, not when I was twenty or thirty both of these being ages that now look young to me--it was eat what's on your plate and no arguments. Except beetroot. I didn't have to eat beetroot. I found beetroot actually unbearable. Not only inedible, but unbearable. We are talking tinned beetroot here, so I know I'm not Robinson Crusoe in not liking it, but many other people loved it especially in my family. And I didn't just not like it. I hated it. I think it's the only food that has ever made me understand the phrase 'it turns my stomach.' My dad said I didn't have to eat it until I was twelve. Like it was this really big thing, 'You'll have to eat it when you're twelve.' I was terrified of turning twelve. Every birthday I would think, 'Another three years, another two, only one more year ... '. Every time Dad had it I would look at it on his plate and think, 'I'll have to eat that when I'm twelve.' And I assumed, I had this picture in my mind that on my twelfth birthday he would present me with a tin of beetroot and say, 'Eat this.' I had a picture of it in my mind, and I used to dream about it, then wake up wishing that no time had passed.
I turned twelve. And nothing. There was no tin of beetroot, not even a card with a silly poem something like 'toot toot beetroot'. Nothing. I didn't dare mention it in case he'd only forgotten and once remembered I would be forced to eat the beetroot after all.
This is one of those memories that sits deeply inside, so deeply inside that it always went unquestioned. It was just there, my whole life. The fear and the dread and then the strange release. It was as much a part of me as my fingers or toes, my blood, my bones.
I don't understand it. I don't know what it means. How did it start? Whose idea was it? Sitting here now I think, 'Well, maybe it was my idea. Maybe I said, I promise I'll eat it when I'm twelve.' I never thought to ask Dad about it. So now it sits inside like a dream I can't quite grasp. All I've got is the feeling without understanding its true meaning. I feel like if I understood this then I would understand a lot more about myself.
I'm trying not to leave my children with too many questions. I'm trying to explain things as I go. But they can only hear what their experience lets them hear and anyway it isn't up to me to tell them how they should interpret their parents, how they should interpret me.
what this made me think
There is a relationship between memories and dreams. Not all dreams and not all memories, but some dreams and some memories are indistinct one from the other.
Thank you for reading my tiny letter and for your notes written back. It's lovely talking with you this way.