Climbing in bed at 2 am with a head full of Minwax fumes, as we are staining our new kitchen cabinets, I just awoke from one most bizarre dream.
I’m in a hospital. Immediately on the heels of a c-section, for our 4th child. We have no 4th child. It’s just the dream. My mother is there, and as I’m being wheeled down the hall after my due time in recovery, we’re just chatting away. And she doesn’t know that A. I’ve been pregnant at all, and B. that while she is talking with me, I’ve just had major surgery and given birth. And C. That I’m hiding our new baby in a plastic grocery sack, on ice and wrapped in a baggy. So she won’t know. Nor does she wonder why, at all, we’re visiting in a hospital in the first place. Now some people may could actually hide these bits of pertinent information from a mother, but they don’t have my mother. There are no secrets from my mother. She’s sees all.
Flash to our room. Which really proves this bizarre nature of this dream. I have a suite mate. If I have just had major surgery and given birth, I have. a. private. room. So anyway, once in there, the baby morphs several times into different looking creatures. One is about the size of a beenie baby. And then suddenly, in some odd turn of events, my baby is gone. But my parents, particularly my mother, is still unaware that the baby that was now clearly at my breast, was mine at all. So she calmly says, I’m sure they’ll find that baby, and I have to say, well, that was my baby. Is she surprised? Shocked? Nope. In a eerily accurate move for a dream, she heads to the nearest phone, calls the other grandparents, and starts cooking. Meanwhile, the hunt for our infant is on.
At a really weird flash of a scene in here, I go ballistic all over the doctor who says he’s ignored our orders to not circumsize the baby. As I’m railing on him, I suddenly realize our baby is a girl, and it doesn’t apply to her at all. Even though the doctor had just told me he did indeed, circumsize her. Here, I’m still confused.
Turns out, there is a baby stealing ring in the hospital, which is accentuated by the HIGHLY IMPOSSIBLE fact that some nurses are forgetting to match wrist tags for mom and baby. Besides, don’t they have some sort of baby Lo-Jack deal now? And of course, as at some point when I am walking through the hall with now a baby that I don’t realize is mine, it is taken from me to check for matching to me. My suite mates turn out to be 2 men, one of whom is only masquerading as a just-given-birth woman, for the sole purpose of snatching babies. And when I discover this, much kung-fu like battling ensues, with no thought to my newly sliced and stitched belly. I even topple a large armoire from a second story balcony onto one of them, just after they land a punch to my head, and when failing to injure me there, go for my swollen, newly lactating breast.
Somewhere in here, a group of women appear, not unlike that roller skating chick competition show on some cable channel. And they are all in cahoots with my faux suite mates. I begin to scream where is my baby, and one of them finally caves and points to an upstairs shop in the hospital, which is sort of like an indoor mall. The shop is a Papa John’s pizza joint with an apartment in back. I race upstairs, again with no thought to the pain. A woman must save her baby. Burst through the doors, and see another woman, who’d been in maternity with me, and had truly lost her baby due to an unfortunate death. The entire ring of baby stealers was coordinated by her mother, a bitter Italian woman that was cooking marinara in the background. She replaced her daughter’s dead baby with mine. Anna, Anna, I yelled. Why I knew her name, I do not know. You cannot have my baby!
I grab my darling baby from the traitorous breast, to finally hold and nurse my own, beautiful, tabby kitten. And as I gazed into those green eyes, and stroked the soft whiskers, I knew my baby would never be parted from me again. And just as I started to give what for to that Bitter Italian Woman, our 5 year old burst into our bedroom, and tore me from my justice. Oh well. At least our kitten baby was restored to our family, and we could get on with our bonding.
We may need to crack a window today as we proceed with the staining.
