In Which I Recount a Dream*

Sometimes I’m better at things when I go away for awhile and then come back again. So there, away I went. Not purposely. Well, maybe purposely. But purposefully, too.

It’s a strange thing about finding your voice. Part of it, for me, is the struggle of allowing the search. And part of it is the battle to convince yourself that it matters, one way or the other, that you do find it.

I had the most wonderful dream last night. It was a yard sale (so many of my dreams center around yard sales, the wonderful white-elephant world, those everyday portals to the subconscious). I was admiring a rustic, folk art, hewn together set of drawers. The kind of object that draws me in, that could only have been made by its maker, the kind of thing that shouts of history and story and love. It was reasonably priced ($60 dollars) but I couldn’t figure out how to ship it home, (I was on an island…less romantic than it sounds).

Who should appear but my mother. And she appears and I know that not only will she get it for me, but she will figure out how to get it to my home. And then my brother Tim is there, and I know he’s going to help. It was the feeling of being taken care of. It was the feeling of being spared regret, longing, and remorse. It was the deep feeling of comfort.

Strange and wonderful and glorious. I can count on one hand the number of good dreams I’ve had about my mother since she died. In fact, I could count them on the toes of a sloth, if you know what I mean. Good signs, people, good signs.


*Recounting dreams rates second only, on the scale of that-which-bores, to retelling (preferably in an office setting) any skit from Monty Python's Flying Circus. But this is my blog. And I get to write what I want. (See. Look at her go!)

I avoid writing about losing my mother. Even as I sit here my mind battles me (“No one wants to hear about this. It’s such a downer.”) My fingers rebel -- reaching for the backspace button every time I get a sentence down. My eyes well up. I keep my neck tight. When I allow it, the grief is close to overwhelming. And now, here I sit, in my cube at work, dabbing my eyes with a tissue, my mind racing to locate a private place to cry place in this huge, over-populated building. (See. This is a downer. And can I say that it is inhumane to have a work place with no safe place to cry!)

But today is her birthday. And year after year I let days like these sail by. Her birthday, the day she died… Anniversaries that mark an absence. Anniversaries that measure time-away.

When my mother died I inherited her sewing machine. And it’s a beauty. A top of the line, for the times, Bernina that lived, most of my childhood, on the floor of the guest room closet, only coming out for a quick mend here and there. In the last twenty years I’ve hauled it from town to town, taught myself to sew on it, manhandled it, misused it, broken countless needles. But, such an excellent machine, it refuses to quit. And now I use it to bust out puppets, dolls, tiny pillows for teddy bear heads. The stuff of childhood. The creations of mothers.

The sewing machine has a little storage area and, ever since I’ve owned it, my mother’s “storks” have been tucked in the top drawer. I dug them out the other night and put them down on the table next to my “storks”. (My storks were snatched up, new and shiny, back in my estate sale shopping days in Michigan. I thought of my mother immediately, grabbed the scissors, and in the next moment felt grateful that I was raised to recognize a quality pair of indispensable scissors when I saw them)

When I saw the two pairs of scissors on the table, side by side I was floored. And, as it always seems to be with death, I was sad in a new way. Her scissors are old. They are fragile, no longer useful. They are rusting away. And, doing the math, I realized my mother would be turning eighty this year.

Most of my life I haven’t really understood the appeal of fairy tales. Or, honestly, the function. They’ve always seemed old fashioned. They seemed indulgent and hokey. If you listen to a professor I worked for at the University of Michigan, they are all Freudian and perverted. But something about my mom's storks seems so fairy-tale-ish to me. I feel like a little girl, frozen in time, desperately clinging to a pair of magical, disappearing scissors.

I've been wrangling with this last paragraph. I had something philosophical (mildly) and distant and melancholy. It was about death and myths and what the living are left with. But the truth here is a simple one. I miss my mom. Despite that fact that I have no idea what it is that I'm missing anymore. I just miss my mom.