A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes

A dream is a wish your heart makes
When you're fast asleep
In dreams you will lose your heartaches
Whatever you wish for, you keep

Have faith in your dreams and someday
Your rainbow will come smiling through
No matter how your heart is grieving
If you keep on believing
The dream that you wish will come true

--" A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” Walt Disney Music Company

Dear Thi,

We have taken half a trip around the sun apart from each other. Half a year has gone by. I put some distance between myself and the tragedy that turned my world upside-down. I found my smile again. I discovered courage that I know you’d expect from me, and strength to start at a different job to see what challenges another place has to offer. I found new curiosity to prove my worth not as a 12-year veteran at a company, but as someone coming in fresh and inquisitive.

And yet sometimes I am taken back to the day I delivered you in that hospital room, when I cuddled you so small and soft and still. A friend has just suffered a midterm loss; her little girl was only a few weeks further along than you. The announcement text I read is like a slap in the face. I am sitting in a new company where I hardly know anyone, at a chair and table that is not mine, staring into a foreign space, a sea of strangers. Suddenly, I miss you so keenly; I wonder where you are, what you could have been doing, and how you fare, having been without a mother to guide you for half a year through. Suddenly, I find myself in a restroom stall, locked in to let my tears pour out, a small and temporary space to mourn you and that newly departed baby before putting myself together and putting my game face back on, ready to once again face a place where no one knows my past.

It is June, a summer when you should have been with me, alive and whole. I realize I still have flannel sheets on the crib that Luc never uses but for the occasional nap. We were going to transition him to his Big Brother, Big Boy room when you came along, but after you passed, neither Daddy nor I felt right about having our one living child far away from us during nights after we have left him to work for most of the day. I pull off the flannel to launder and stretch on cool, summer cotton sheets with little farm animal prints. There was a time when I was pregnant with Luc when a strange and utterly morbid thought fleeted across my mind—I imagined having to pack up all the baby things I had bought and been gifted for him, diapers and all, and having to give them away if my baby didn’t make it to term. “Would anyone like these things?” I could hear myself saying, “They were for my baby who isn’t here anymore.” 

You couldn’t imagine the fear and shame I felt over such a nightmarish daydream, how our minds could take us to such dark places. We retreat afterward to our nest of safety, our normal lives, until they are so violently arrested by nightmare becoming reality. The irony is not lost on me, how I had these pre-partum anxiety attacks for the one that made it, but felt a false sense of experience and assurance for the one that did not; how I was changing linens on a crib that neither of my babies ever really used. “Oh, my girl, my girl—why did you leave me, my girl?” I thought as I crumbled to the floor of the nursery and had a good cry. Recovering from grief is like learning to walk again. Up to a point, you feel confident on your regained skills over something you spent most of your remembered life doing. But sometimes you stumble, fall, find yourself on your knees, your confidence shaken when you bruise up.

A few nights later, I had a dream. I was peering into a bassinet, where a beautiful, lively baby giggled up at me. That sad refrain that ran through my head transformed into a new one: “My girl, my girl, oh there you are, my little girl!” I cooed to her. I woke in the early dawn hours, tears eking from my eyes and onto my pillow, my heart feeling hollow for want of an ephemeral vision. And yet, like Pandora’s Box, there is a soft sense of hope tugging the sadness gently away. After all, a dream is a wish your heart makes.