more dreams

It was inevitable. Every pregnant blogger I follow (and believe me, there's lots) at some point has written about their whacko dreams. So far my nighttime meanderings have been extremely complex and also very memorable. I've had some very sweet and wonderful dreams, and also some strange ones that play off my most extreme fears and insecurities.But the past few nights I got into the just plain weird.

I won't bore you with the details of my bizarre dreams, other than to say that two nights ago my baby was the size of a small hampster and last night's dream involved a deformed newborn who talked and disappeared bit by bit with each wipe of her breastmilk poop-covered tooshie. It was the type of dream where midway through, my conscious mind said to my unconscious mind, "I know this is just a freaky pregnancy dream. Real babies might be born with physical deformities, but they don't talk or disappear when you wipe their booties."

The rest of the dream my conscious and unconscious minds played tennis, volleying back and forth between somewhat real and completely surreal. The poop was definitely "real"--yellow, seedy and all over the place. Finally finishing cleaning up the poop and putting a diaper the size of a band-aid on my now itsy-bitsy baby: not real. Actually, after I put the band-aid on, my baby turned into one of those old school, paper punch-out, dress-up dolls, the kind where the clothes wrapped around the flat, skinny lady with little white tabs. Freaky.

But there were real elements of the dream as well. At one point I distinctly said to my talking newborn, who had just asked about me the extent of her deformities, "I love you just the way you are." And I really meant it.

That part of the dream is probably the most significant. If you look at what most first-time moms worry about, it's that something will be wrong with their child. Will I make it through the first trimester? Is the nuchal fold okay? What will the blood tests say? 20-week ultrasound normal? Growing at the same rate as other babies? 10 fingers and 10 toes? The fears and worries are nearly constant, and I know from my friends who are moms that the worrying never stops. But what it always comes down to is that no matter what, I do and I will love this baby more than ever possibly imagined. You cannot put a limit on a mother's love, no matter what the outcome. Very rarely do we have "perfect" children. As a matter of fact, I have yet to meet a perfect child.

So I say, bring it on dreams. Let my conscious mind put the unconscious in its place. This baby was loved well before she anything more than a clump of cells growing and dividing.