A Good Night’s Dream

Two nights ago, I dreamt I was sorting through piles of dolls and stuffed animals with Emery in the dining room of the house she grew up in. Dreams love to plop you down in random places doing things that seem pretty irrelevant, but after you wake up, hopefully with a rough sketch of who, what, and where, I find that the puzzle pieces usually fit together quite nicely.  There was no doubt in my mind when I woke up as to why I needed to sort through dolls slowly and stuffed animals with my daughter.  It was exactly what I needed.

We were sitting in dining room chairs, in a room void of all else except the large piles of stuffed animals and dolls.  Emery would thoughtfully pick up every doll or stuffed animal and turn it over slowly while looking at it with such love that it seemed she might have actually birthed it.  I was coming from a place of more efficiency and less emotion, and wanted to speed up the process and start building piles.  The save pile was the only pile that was even a pile at all, as the other two, the trash pile and the give-it-away pile, were still just empty spots on the wooden floor.  My daughter is a softy with a huge heart.

There was one doll that was about 18 inches tall, with hair that had been cut and washed by Emery, neither with much success. It had a broken eye, a missing arm, and no clothes.  None of the dolls or animals were familiar to me, and I was aware of that in the dream, giving me pause as to why we were sorting strange toys in the first place.  I quietly slid naked punk-haired baby to the spot on the floor for throw away, or give away, giving her the honor of starting whichever pile would be acceptable.
“We can’t give her away, Mommy. No one will love her like we do because we know her,” said the sweet, tiny voice next to me.

When I turned around to justify my decision, it was 4-year-old Emery who was sitting next to me, wearing the dress with cowboys and horses on it I had made for her, red cowboy boots, and striped leggings that didn’t match anything.  My sweet little 4-year-old Emery, right next to me.
I wanted more than anything to pull her up onto my lap and hug her and hold her and hug her some more,  but I didn’t because I was afraid if I tried to touch her, my hand would go right through her like a ghost and she might even disappear.

For the remainder of the dream,  I got to sit with my little girl next to me and sort out piles of dollies and animals that, although I had no attachment to,  I began to find a fondness for simply by seeing them through Emery’s young eyes.  I knew that the task at hand would be a simple one and that the give-away and throw-away piles would remain empty spots on the floor because my assistant’s heart was bigger than the room, and there would be no creature left behind.

One of the very strange and memorable elements of the dream was that I had control of the pace and can distinctly remember slowing it down to a crawl at one point simply for the luxury of getting to linger in memories that were so real I could touch them, feel them and even help lovingly stack them into piles with stuffed animals on one side and the dolls on the other.  I had dipped into the realm of lucid dreaming, something I had accidentally stumbled upon during an evening class several years ago.  Yes, accidentally.  This was a much easier accident than when I enrolled in an Astronomy class my first semester at K-State and quickly figured out that I wasn’t going to learn anything about Virgos and what sign they would have the most luck dating.  I was a very young freshman, barely 18, if that helps my cause.

Anyway, back to dream classes…I thought I had enrolled in a one-evening dream analysis class,  but instead I got a three-hour rundown on lucid dreaming, which ended up being better than what I had planned on.  I didn’t learn how to do it, per se, but now can easily recognize it when it happens, which is cool.

The last text I had gotten from Emery before I fell into dreamland that night was a photo of a cute little yellow house in Ft Collins, Colorado, the house that she and her new husband, Miles, had just signed a rental contract on during their quick weekend visit to house search. She’s married.  She’s moving to Colorado.  She’s growing up.

I woke up feeling sentimental, sad, confused, yet with a very full heart. There was a part of me that needed to sit with 4-year-old Emery and be reminded that no matter how old she is, or how grown-up the decisions she is making with Miles are, she will always have that loving little girl inside of her with a heart that’s as big and open as the Kansas sky.

While growing up and finding their wings is what I assume most parents hope and plan for their children, the process is clumsy and awkward with shoes that are too big and pants too long, and then one day it all fits and they’re adults doing adult things and managing just fine, because that’s what we taught them.  It still sometimes surprises me, though.

Life gave me the gift of a tiptoe back to a place that I needed to be reminded of while helping me, once again, through the process of letting go —a process I hadn’t realized was already taking place.  Somehow, that pile of orphaned toys and the little girl sorting through them gave me the message that everything was going to be OK. And that, in my maternal pain of letting go, is what I’m holding onto.