Amniotic dreams

Definition of brave: sharing some of my poetry from graduate school. This is from one of my creative writing classes during my first year of grad school, obviously before I was pregnant with my daughter. The Master's gown still hasn't happened... kids and moving managed to side-track me. However, I'm in a writing slump at the moment and thought that just putting my older words out in the world might inspire me to write again.

Amniotic Dreams

I

When I was twenty-two, my mother and I went to the San Diego Zoo. I am just like my mother, always right, always my way. We fought in the car, more like lionesses than cats and dogs, and she went into the zoo without me. It took several hours, several calls to my father, and several unheard intercom pages of “Would Linda (______) please meet her daughter at the zoo entrance” before I found her. She was staring at the sea otters with the same look of contentment I see on my husband’s face when I turn to him as morning light tiptoes across our rumpled sheets. When she saw me, she smiled and said that if Hindus are right and we Catholics are wrong, then she wants to come back as a sea otter. She said she wants to swim and flip and play in the satin-cool water all day long.

II

My mother works in a tall, shiny building, an edifice more suited to skydiving than skin diving. Not long after I was married, my husband visited my mother at her office.  He came home laughing, saying that she told him her dream of walking through the cubicle walls, and of jumping down whole flights of stairs in one leap, and of soaring through the air, right out of her office windows. I think he thinks my mother is a bit crazy. He says he knows where I get it, as if dreams are something passed through the umbilical cord like nutrients from mother to child. He laughed again at her stories and then looked at me for a response.  I was silent.

III

I am my mother’s only child, her first and last born. I think about my mother and how everyone remarks about how alike we are, how they know whose daughter I am, nudge-nudge, looking at my mother. I’m secretly jealous of her. Not in an Electra I-want-my-father sense, but in a why-are-her-dreams-so-much-better-than-mine kind of way. She dreams of open skies and lapping waves of salty water, while my dreams are full of land. My shoes hold fast to the soil, despite all my desperate efforts to leave the ground. The ocean calls to me at night by way of a sound machine, but I can only pick up the smoothly polished stones by the sea and long to enter the roar. 

IV

My mother is a middle child, a comic book shelved haphazardly between a scholarly college text and a glitzy fashion magazine. Her mother had her when she was twenty-nine, and my mother had me when she was twenty-nine. I will be twenty-nine myself in just seventeen months, Masters diploma in sight. My stomach may be rounded then with child, a living basketball stored beneath a cap and slimming black gown. Will my practical, earth-centered dreams be transferred through the womb, or will the child be like my mother, dreaming of things my own sleep-soaked brain cannot? I read a psychology journal that said embryos can dream at thirty-two weeks. If this is true, perhaps my dream-child will teach me how to leave the ground, and fly just above the glittering ocean, dipping the tips of my toes in its wetness.