Writing has not been something I've made time for lately. My world spins quickly, and it seems that in taking the moments to be there, presently, with all that happens leaves little time for reflection. As the days darken, however, I am seeking to carve that time. I do appreciate being able to document this life as I live it.


A few nights ago, I dreamt of Samantha. She was a woman as if from a dream, who came to me after the birth of Charlotte, probably not more than a week after Charlotte came and went. Our hospital had, then, a wonderful program where one was provided with twenty hours of post-partum home doula care after discharge. I had elected this option before the birth, and was gently informed by my nurse that while I was sadly not going to have a baby to bring home, I was still entitled to my doula. She told me there was one they had in mind, a gentle, quiet woman who was a massage therapist and had once before worked with a family in Oregon whose baby had died. I signed the paper. A few days later, Sam called.
When she first came, all I wanted to hear about was Benjamin. He was the baby before, the other one who had died. I wanted to know about this other mother who had walked in my shoes. I needed some connection, even if it was a second-hand, trans-continental connection through a kind, sweet-faced doula named Sam. She held my hand. She hugged me for a long, long time. She told me the story of Benjamin, and then she listened to me. For five, four hour sessions, she rubbed the pain in my body, kneading the sad, bitter energy through my being, and heard me pour out my soul, my very life. She started on the other couch, her feet tucked up beneath her, her face earnest. She was thirty, four years older than I was. She cried a little. By the end, she was on the couch with me, holding me on her shoulder, stroking my hair. She held me like we had always known each other.
Sam told me that she thought Charlotte had chosen me as a mother, because she knew that I would be able to keep her, even when she couldn't stay. Those words were my life raft for some time.
Sam knew me at a time when I don't remember myself. But I do remember her, and how she held me when my body was about to break into a thousand pieces on the floor, held me with warm, strong arms, and spoke to me softly with a voice like hushed wind.
She told me that her favorite tree was a hazel tree. I had never seen one. She described it to me. Ten days ago, I was making a ropes course with Liam and came across a gangly tree, blooming yellow in early November. A hazel tree, right there in my own front yard. I wanted to call her, to run into her warm arms. To cry again.
And so she came to me in a dream. I saw her, across a lawn, and did run into her arms, and felt her strength as she hugged me close. I was so full of intense joy for having found her, yet when I felt her envelop me with her warmth I was returned to the saddest place I've ever been and I began to cry. Not just weep, or tear up with joy, but cry the mother's cry, the cry of the mother who has lost what she loves most. But I was safe.
I miss that Samantha, and this dream is my call to find her. Off I go.