Widowed: The Blog

Dreams


Sunday night I dreamed I was pregnant. I used to have pregnancy dreams all the time while we were trying to conceive and while I was actually pregnant but honestly, since the birth of my daughter, I haven’t dreamed of being pregnant at all. So I was a little confused, in the dream and as I was watching the dream.

You see, I know I am dreaming about 90% of the time. It is surreal to be a character and a viewer at the same time, but I have always dreamed this way it seems.

I was pregnant and far along. Everyone was happy for me. Happy about the baby. My family. My friends. And I wasn’t married. There was no man around. At some point in the dream I am at home with all my family, extended plus my own child and I am suddenly aware that someone is trying to break into the house.

I rush around securing doors and windows and then suddenly realize the basement door isn’t locked and I have this feeling that “he” is down there and heading up the stairs. I run to lock the door and am struck by the fact that it is not my actual basement door (which has no lock) but the door that leads to my parents’ basement. The basement of my childhood.

As I reach to lock the door, it starts to open and I push on it to close it, but not very hard because I know I can’t keep the man from coming up the stairs. He steps out. He is tall. Dressed well. He says, “You know you can’t stop me.” And I am afraid but not enough to run or scream and at this point I wake up.

I am aware that I was dreaming but irrationally want to get up to check the doors downstairs. I don’t and fall back to sleep quickly.

Monday night I actually have a sequel dream. I don’t know what happened with the man from the basement. I am fine. I’ve had my baby and I am carrying him around. I never actually see the baby. He is swaddled in blankets with his face hidden but I can feel him. And I know it is a boy.

It’s winter. We are all going to church. I think it is the baby’s baptism. The way to the church leads us through the neighborhood where my husband and I first lived together. Before he got sick. The snow is crisp and very white. It feels as though we are trying to get to the church before something can stop us. I don’t feel afraid though.

The church is set up like an outdoor theater. There are no walls, only and altar with pews all around. The aisles are snow-covered. I hand the baby to my mother and at that moment I see a wolf off to the left. I race towards it. I am unclear why. I think I am trying to ward it away from my family, especially the baby.

It attacks me. Takes bloody chunks out of my left forearm and my hand near the thumb. It really hurts and I wake up and never really go back to sleep though I am not at all afraid.

I am not an interpreter of dreams. I know that pregnancy sometimes symbolizes new beginnings as do babies. Houses represent a person’s physical self and basements the sub/unconscious mind. Intruders represent danger and a fear of being violated.

I wouldn’t bother to write this down because I am a vivid dreamer and usually when I am trying to tell myself something in a dream, I am not so vague because frankly, I don’t do subtle well on either end – sending or receiving. But the fact that I dreamed a two-parter, two nights in a row, must mean something.

Feel free to offer opinions, those few of you who read here.

The Rule of 10-10-10


In the September issue of Oprah I found an interesting article by Suzy Welch on decision making. Everyone makes decisions, big, small, life-changing and life-threatening everyday. The author contends that her formula for working through the problem-solving process on the way to coming to a definite decision is one that could change a person’s life or at the very least help those of us who have over-analyzed our dilemmas to the point of inertia.

She calls her solution 10-10-10. And its implementation is simple. When faced with a difficult, or not, decision, ask yourself three questions: What are the consequences of my decision in 10 minutes? In 10 months? And in 10 years? The answers to these questions will usually give you enough information to proceed to a decision. Read Full Article

High End Pens


On page 194 of the September issue of Oprah, there is a small article on fountain pens. I saved it because it reminded me of my husband.

Will loved pens. He hated shopping unless it was for a new pen (or Pittsburgh Steelers paraphernalia). He didn’t write much in his line of work. Mainly he took orders and filled in inventory files, but he insisted on having a good pen to do these things with. Before his illness took hold of him, he had printer perfect block letter penmanship and his cursive was small and impossibly neat. He would leave yellow post-it notes for me with little messages and I Love You’s that were basically the extent of the writing he was willing to do.

He had a pen-pal though. A foreign exchange student he met in high school and their correspondence spanned about seven or eight years. He stopped writing to her after we were married. Not because I asked him to but because she reappeared in his life about two months before our wedding expecting him to be free to pick up their on/off more romantic on his side than hers relationship. I think something about seeing she and I together made him finally realize that he had been used.

Periodically he would initiate a shopping trip strictly for the purpose of acquiring new pens. He would normally purchase several at a time because as a route salesman he knew that they would eventually be left at a stop or lost in the seat of the truck or dropped from his pocket as he loaded and unloaded.

I still have his favorite one. And though it doesn’t work very well anymore, I can’t throw it away. Our daughter seems to have inherited his love of writing utensils though she loves mechanical pencils as much as she loves pens. We are forever collecting them, and she has her favorites that tend to the girly with sparkles and feathers.

It never ceases to amaze me how much she is like him when she never really knew the man that I fell in love with. He was long gone by the time she was born. She only ever knew her father as a sick man. Confused. Frail. And then wheelchair and bed-bound. Unable to talk, see, feed himself.

“Daddy never talks to me,” she would say when I asked her if she would like to visit him in the nursing home where he spent over a year of the last fifteen months of his life.

The pen I save is one she uses sometimes though often she will decline to use it because “that’s Daddy’s.”

It’s funny the little things that pull up memories you forgot you even remembered. Articles in Oprah, god would he have laughed about that, and fountain pens.