I need to apologize to my mother. For the last 30 years I have been so assured of my own immortality that I’ve probably terrified her within an inch of her own. Over Skype, “Surprise, Mom! I’m in the middle east! Hear that? It’s the call to prayer!” Late one night while home from college, “I really want to move to Uganda.” As a 16-year-old backing down the driveway with a breakfast taco in one hand and less than all my attention on the rearview mirror. As a 9 year old, squeezing myself into the washing machine.
But she handled it all with great faith, trusting God for my survival (and the survival of all major appliances).
So now it’s my turn. And as I sit here wanting my little peanut to develop into a strong, healthy extra-uterine being…I realize that I’m never going to reach the point where we’re “in the clear” on her safety. She’s just going to keep terrifying us and making us trust God.
In the meantime, this newfound concern has mixed with my hormones to give me some pretty fantastic nightmares. Not unlike Bilbo and Frodo suffer from as the Precious eats their brains. Some of my favorites:
- I look down while nursing the baby to see that she is a cyclops.
- While bathing the baby, she begins to shrink until she is the size of a Barbie (still proportioned like a baby).
- The baby is born looking like the little old man Jesus from medieval paintings of the Virgin and child.
- I am so giantly pregnant that I cannot get up to shut the door when the scary wraithlike figure is approaching. (That one was genuinely horrific)
- My mother and her friends had taken over Lewis’s all-male Bible study. She then announced she was pregnant. (This dream was stressful, but it wasn’t scary.)
So I started praying for better sleep, and no nightmares, especially concerning the baby. Lewis and I are in a season where we are really experiencing the reality of answered prayers, and this time it was my turn to witness the miracle.
In place of my nightmares, two nights ago I had the following dream:
I dreamed that I sat on an observation bench in the city council chambers and watched a 3 hour meeting to allocate bond money. I watched the entire thing peacefully as several million dollars were divvied up between playgrounds, sports fields, and a few ill-advised parking lots. I voiced my opinion on the parking lots in the citizens-to-be-heard portion of the meeting, and the council members changed their minds and gave the money to a library. I felt a deep sense of joy at my accomplishment.
I don’t know what it says about me that my “peaceful place” is watching city government at its most tedious.
