Good Bad Dreams

Last night I dreamt that Elannah Rose was still alive, she had just run away from home. She wouldn't talk to me and kept dancing away.

Facts are fluid in dreams and so as this one wore on, she became younger. Toward the end, Elannah Rose was a little girl and she was being cared for by a woman who had been led to believe that she was protecting ER from me. The dream became chaotic, a crazy combination of events all geared toward ending any chance of reunion. Every time I thought I had conquered one thing, a new trial began.

When I finally woke up, I felt desperate and defeated. I must have hit snooze 42 times because as horrible as the dream had been, the chance to see ER's face and hear her voice was impossible to give up. The part where she was alive was amazing.

The problem, of course, with dreaming that she's alive is that waking up is devastating. For a few brief moments there is confusion and a renewed sense of loss.

I was reminded of my early and irrational hope that it wasn't Elannah Rose that they found. That she had run away and would return once she had made peace with her demons. Of course, I knew this wasn't the case, but I'm sure I'm not the only person who has tried to reason her way out of her loss.

I would give anything to have not lost my oldest child. Part of my heart went with her. I think often about what I did to allow that to happen, and I punish myself for what I didn't do to stop it.

I wonder why my subconscious chose last night to punish me a bit extra. Is it, perhaps, because my other two children are stretching more and more toward their own versions of independence?

I let my son walk home from his friends house yesterday after school. It's two blocks and I followed him in my car, moving forward half a block at a time so that I could make sure he was safe. His walk may have been short, but it was a big step for him. As significant to him as his sisters cross-country journey just a few days before. My inner untrained psychologist imagines that these giant leaps are the reason that my brain is suddenly focused on loss and danger.

Danger. I'm obsessed with it. With trying to ascertain what is real and what is overblown fear.  I strive to let my kids grow up normal and free. I refuse to let my loss turn me into a helicopter mom, although "free-range parenting" is probably eternally out of my reach. I tell myself daily not to punish my living children for the mistakes we made, for the mistakes ER made.

I can even reason away the fire that erupted at the end of my dream. It makes sense, this final devastation, considering that the California wildfires seem to have raged non-stop for the past several years.

Reason doesn't matter, though, when my heart feels like I lost my daughter yesterday. When I will jump into the nightmares that I've spent my life trying not to have, just to see her again. When my imagination tries to show me that I could have avoided all of this.