Dreams of my mother
Michael A. Lindenberger says 20 years is not enough time to have a mom, especially one gifted to you as a replacement.
There was a dream I used to have when I was 4 years old or maybe 5. It was of my mother, Kathy, sitting at the plain kitchen table we had in the house where I lived with her, my dad and my next-oldest brother from when I was 4 till I was 16, and where most of my important memories were made. I was just getting to know my mother at that time, and I remember how big her smile was and how large her eyes and her teeth were, at least to me, small as I was back then.
In the dream, she would be drinking coffee, something both my mother and my dad, who was never in this dream, drank a lot of, and she would offer me a cup.
She’d be wearing a nightgown and slippers, or maybe a robe, and would look at me with big, wide eyes as I took the coffee. It was in the china we had at that time, white with a simple green flower and a clinking saucer, and I would take it in my small hands. I don’t remember what it tasted like, but it was warm as I raised it to my lips and began to drink, watching my mother, watching me.
Before I met her, I hadn’t had a mother for a long time — not one I knew, anyway.
At a few weeks old, I was placed in the care of a kindly couple, Mr. and Mrs. Wolff, foster parents who made room in their modest home for a rotating crew of temporary children amid an already full house of older kids of their own. Mr.
Wolff worked at Mother’s Cookies in Louisville and would bring home bags full on Saturdays. Mrs. Wolff stayed at home and took care of us. They were full of love and great examples of the selfless folks being honored during this National Foster Care Month, for helping heal torn lives.
Despite the loving care — it was nothing like the Dickensian scenes we hear about in the Texas foster care system, still rife with abuse
and lax oversight after years of litigation — when I think back on those early years, I have a vague sense of wariness about the teenagers in the house, an uneasy feeling that I can’t put my finger on. But the member of the family closest to me in age was a little girl named Cindy. She was black, the only non-white face I’d know for several years. She was maybe a year younger and I adored her. Once, many months after I was adopted away, my mother and I were shopping at a department store, moseying down the wide center aisle when I suddenly spotted a couple walking across the way with a familiar-looking pony-tailed girl.
My world stopped. My heart pumped so fast I can still feel the pulsing blood as I write 45 years later. I ran like the dickens, past the toys, the men’s shoes and the packs of underwear.
“Cindy!” I shouted, ready to pull her ponytails like I used to or hug her or kiss her or maybe do all three at once.
The couple turned around. I didn’t recognize them. “Cindy must have been adopted, too,” I thought. But the confused look on their faces stopped my tiny peds in their tracks. When the girl turned around, I saw that she was someone else, not the sister I so desperately missed. I crumpled in sadness.
It was the same kind of sadness I’d feel in that same store on another outing that year. I had been casually trailing my mother down the aisles when I looked up for a moment to find I could no longer see her. That’s a frightening experience for any kid.
For me, it was shattering.
The dark aloneness I felt in the seconds or minutes before a security guard reunited us was terrifying. I felt how a monk might describe that moment when he stops hearing God in his meditations. My mother had merely turned the corner to check prices or something and before I even fully processed she was missing, I was bawling.
It was about a year after these two department store episodes that I began having the coffee dream.
Each time I had it, maybe three times, I was in my bedroom by myself. Each time, I sipped the warm coffee, and something inside me would eventually turn cold.
My mother’s big, warm eyes would suddenly turn new, strange. Her face would become warped, twisted with anticipation.
I would drop the coffee mug and hear it crash on the linoleum. My mother — or whoever, whatever that was behind my mother’s big smile and huge eyes — was laughing now. My little dreaming mind would see in my mom’s face the wicked, hooded stepmother cackling in morbid delight as she watched Snow White eat the red apple.
I’d start to choke, then I’d start falling. Just before I hit my knees, I’d wake in my bed, sweaty and tear-stained, hoarse from horror, the image of my mother’s distorted smile terrifyingly present.
I’d lie there in my pajamas, desperately wanting to throw off the sheets and run the 20 feet down the hall to my mom and dad’s door. I wanted that more than anything in my young life. But I didn’t dare move.
You might assume it was because I was afraid of my mother. Or maybe that I dared not tempt the monsters who surely lurked beneath my bed.
But neither of those were why I lay still as stone. It was much worse than that. I stayed because I knew the very next question my new parents would ask me after I told them I had a nightmare: what was it about?
How could I tell them? How could I look at my dad and mom who had rescued me from a vagabond existence of foster parents and group homes only to shower me with love and a real home with a babbling creek, my own Big Wheel trike, three brothers, a sister, a cat and a dog named Poochie — how could I look her, especially, in the eye and tell her I had dreamed she was a phony? That she scared me. That in my dreams she poisoned me and loved it.
I couldn’t. At least in no way a 5-year-old could devise. So, each time, I lay there frozen in terror until the fear subsided and the sleep came again.
Eventually, I stopped having the dream, but it haunts me still. I never could tell my mother about it. I thought I would some day, but we ran out of time.
Twenty years after the dreams stopped, I was sitting alone in the stands at my high school alma mater on a brilliant fall afternoon — the kind Kentucky does so well — watching two squads of teenagers playing a game. I was full of dread that day. It was Sept. 30, 1996, and it was the day I realized my mother, only 52, was going to die, and probably pretty damn soon. I had gone out to clear my head and the beautiful weather had helped.
When I drove back to the house — the larger place in the suburbs where we had moved when I was 16 — my Uncle Tim was standing at my mother’s bedside in the family room. My dad, small and grief-wasted, was there, too. My mom was sleeping, her breathing jagged.
Her breath would stop for a minute and my dad would touch her arm, softly call out to her, Kath, and shake her gently as if rousing her from a snore. And she’d inhale deeply, probably because the falling oxygen levels in her blood had signaled her unconscious brain for help, not anything my dad was doing. But it had seemed at the time that my dad, down 30 pounds, tear-stained, was shaking off the cold pall of death for just a bit longer.
He had been doing that off and on since before she came home from the hospital and all through her treatments and surgeries, her manic periods of optimism and death-like coma, all the days and minutes of the five months since he first called me at 3 a.m. to tell me she had cancer. On that September day, about half an hour after I returned from my lonely vigil in the stands, she finally stopped responding and died.
Twenty years.
It’s not enough time to have a mother. Especially not one gifted to you as a replacement for others who weren’t able or willing to shoulder the job.
I wish it had been enough time to tell her about the dreams, that back when I was 5 my tangled mind had thought she might kill me. That she couldn’t possibly be real.
This fall will mark 24 years since she died, and maybe the truth is I wasn’t ready to tell her back then. Maybe at 25, I didn’t understand that the dream had nothing to do with my mother. She was as genuine as the dripping sweetness of watermelon in the summertime, all sliced up at the swim club we used to belong to as kids, pink juices and sticky seeds framing our irrepressible smiles.
She was the stuff of dreams, not nightmares.
The dream, if it had any meaning at all in the waking world, had everything to do with me. Truth is, for more years than I’ll admit here, I was that kid in the department store suddenly finding my mother missing. That kid tearing ass down the aisle to hug my longlost Cindy. That kid seeing poisoned clouds in the coffee.
You don’t go from the delivery floor in St. Anthony’s hospital to a crowded foster home. Then, I’m told, back to my birth mother for a time. Then back to the Wolffs. Then, once birth parent rights were terminated, back on the block for whomever is next in line for a trial period. Then to a new family and a new name and a new life they tell you, this time, is really real — you don’t go through all that without consequences.
Even a tiny package wellcared for as I was, delivered into a land of frankincense and myrrh, into the arms of a bigeyed, smiling angel, has some demons to reconcile.
“I wish it had been enough time to tell her about the dreams, that back when I was 5 my tangled mind had thought she might kill me. That she couldn’t possibly be real.”