Another Dream

In my dream Emily is only a few weeks old and is sleeping upstairs. Maddie is asleep in her room. I start having some uncomfortable stomach pains, so I head to the bathroom, thinking that is the problem. I barely get the door shut when a very intense pain drives me to my knees. I reach down and feel a baby crowning. I gently push and slowly guide the head out of my body with my hand. I can feel the damp softness of the baby's hair, and I can feel the baby both inside and outside of me. I give another small push and bring the baby up to my chest. She is a girl, and she doesn't utter a sound, but I can see she is breathing. I sit quickly, and feel her weight in my arms. Chris comes in the room and, like me, is shocked to see we have another baby. But I am too caught up in the exquisite perfectness of this birth to think about anything else.

The dream ended there. I had this dream a few weeks after Emily was born. I had nearly forgotten about it until about a week ago, when it resurfaced in my mind. What amazed me then, as now, was how vivid the dream was. I could feel the pain of the contractions, the stretching of my perineum. I could feel the downy softness of her head, and her legs as she left my body. I could smell the birth fluids. The tile floor felt cold under me. At the time, it helped me feel like I regained some of what I had lost when Emily was born in the hospital.

But the dream has come back. My mind cannot seem to let go of it. Even when my conscious mind is elsewhere, I can feel it playing on the edges of my subconscious. I have not yet caught what this dream is trying to teach me, but I felt compelled to share it.