Teaching Myself to Dream (Again)

I think I’ve forgotten how to live. How to feel. How to be happy. After two years of the pandemic, two years of barely holding it together, two years of pushing past the point of complete and total failure, it feels like a small bud of hope is trying to push through the ashes.

The feeling began as I gave birth to my newest child. I lay on the table, believing my death was imminent. The epidural had failed and the pain was excruciating enough for me to start praying — please Lord, don’t let me die here. I have another son, I don’t want him to grow up without me.

But then, all of a sudden, my son popped out and the pain just ended as quickly as it began. The pain was over — the memory was still there, but the pain ended and there was a new life taking his first breaths on my chest.

The moment was a turning point and one that felt like a summation of the last two years. There was so much death — starting with the miscarriage, then continuing with Mike, Tiffany, Rudy, and then ending with my father. I could barely recover from any of those feelings much less process the death of democracy, the attack on the Capitol, and the ongoing slog of trying to make a start up work in a pandemic with small children at home. Everything kept failing and failing and there felt like no light at the end of the tunnel.

But honestly, it feels like I’ve been dead for a while now. The haze of pain has lifted, that kind of persistent fog of dread and sorrow that I’ve been living with for so long. But now, it’s almost as if I’m trying to learn to live again. I’ve always tried to avoid being my mother — just lying in the bed for years on end and not taking the reins of my own life. But the bed is a safe place when the world outside is cruel and reality is a little too much. I stayed in the bed so much that I ruined the foam mattress, a permanent indentation on my side of the bed, symbolizing how often I chose not to face the day. Instead, I ran my life from the safety of my bed, escaping back into sleep. I suppose it’s called death’s second self for a reason.

Now I’m panicking a bit — I have to remember how to live again in the world. How to do things quickly. How to return to the speed of work after the immense amount of trauma. I need to be able to find joy in the day to day again and to reclaim my voice. I know what I need to do. It just feels so daunting most days.