The Dream
This is the story of an unexpected visit.
I always wanted to be a mom. This is something in my life that was certain. And then I got pregnant. We can wish and hope for things we want in life, but if we get them? Well, that’s a whole new undertaking. A commitment. A death for a life.
I was seven weeks pregnant when this realization hit my body. I couldn’t tell anyone. How would they understand? I don’t even get it. No one could possibly share these fucked up feelings I had.
Everything in my life supported the space for me to become a mother. I was settled into a cozy duplex in Silver Lake on the east side of Los Angeles. My husband and I moved in not long after we got married and I had curated a highly descriptive list of all of our desired amenities and fixtures for a space to live in. Our home matched my dream list almost perfectly. I imagined it in great detail, wrote everything from my mind down, and it appeared, magically. We found it through a Craigslist ad and it seemed too good to be true. The location was superb, private, and totally unique— kind of like us. We met the owner at night after he had met with more than twenty others earlier that day. He told us that he liked us a lot and, “to put it bluntly” we were finalists. He said it was between us and another couple… a doctor and an architect. My competitive nature arose and I couldn’t accept this place as anyone else’s but ours. It was ours. I am the one who imagined it, after all. But how could we compete with a doctor and an architect? Jesus, that seemed out of depth. They sounded cool, and rich, even if they weren’t real people. Comparison began doing its work.
“Whoever gets the application to me first,” he said. This place had a yard— front and back— (and I only manifested for one or the other), a great big window in front of the kitchen sink, an open kitchen to cook in, lots of natural light, and a splash of character throughout. It had it all. I couldn’t get a pen faster. We applied right on the spot and left feeling so lit. Something we wanted so badly was right in front of us, and there was a chance we might not get it.
To this day, I will never know if there was a cool, rich doctor and architect up against us, but we got the apartment. We moved in during the middle of California winter and it was absolutely dreamy. This was our third one-bedroom apartment over five years together and it felt like a third-times-the-charm type place.
In this home, I became a plant person. And also a dog mom to two amazing doggos. I call them doggos because they are cutie-pie, squishy doggos. In this space my plants began living longer than they previously had died and I began to believe in myself. I started to wonder… could I possibly keep a human alive, too?
Pretty ambitious, huh.
It seemed like the right time though. I was thirty-two years old, had a solid income, and a life partner who wanted a family as much as I did. I was keeping living things alive. I seemed to be pretty good at it. I mean… why not have a baby now? During the month of February [2020] I discussed the things with my guy and decided that next month would be our time to give it a shot.
That next month started out with so much promise. I was cast in a short film and we shot it during that first week of March. It was a horror flick, and I learned a lot. I learned things like how to film someone getting their throat slit and their heart ripped out. A lot of it is implied death and not something you actually see straight-on— much like how my storytelling idol Tarantino works in his films. Lots of blood splatters and the audiences’ imagination putting the rest together. Pretty crafty. Our imaginations are a wild place. The following week was my husband’s birthday and we celebrated with our favorite people. I was feeling hyped about our secret plan.
If you have been on Earth since then, you know what happened next. COVID-19 rushed in to the states and put everyone and everything on hold. Two weeks to stay home. Right? Secret plan, halt.
I’m someone who believes in the timing of life even when it doesn’t match with our personal game plan. So halt, we did. The thought of becoming a mom right now just no longer made sense. Fear was everywhere — in my home and my body included. People were scared to go to the hospital let alone leave their homes. This became a year of transformation in the ways I had not expected. I held myself close to my inner circle and watched the days go by. We all did. I lost a great job and watched many people I love experience tragedies alongside unthinkable news hitting our television screens. I wondered if I would ever become a mom. I didn’t know what was next.
Months and months and months of not knowing what was next. Just stay home, they said. Don’t leave. Make a new life indoors.
So, eventually, I did. I became pregnant in November and it came with a lot of feelings. Mostly joy. Then curiosity. Then just plain old fucking fear. I was scared. Maybe I wasn’t always meant to be a mom. Maybe I actually could not do this.
Early in my pregnancy, I began having some pretty vivid dreams. Recurring dreams of roaming through forests, being pregnant in various situations, and giving birth to aliens. On the last night of my pregnancy’s week six, I had a dream where I was visited by my grandma and grandpa Forte. They both passed in 2014 after being married for sixty-something years. They were life’s most beautiful example of true love and they died twelve days apart. They were adorable and always bickering.
In my dream, I was in my apartment in Silver Lake and had just walked out of the bathroom and into my bedroom. At the foot of my bed I saw my husband, aloof to his surroundings playing video games. Nintendo sixty-four, I noted. Behind him at the head of my bed sat my grandparents. They were clear as day, lit by golden light and looked healthy and as beautiful as I can remember them ever being. My grandpa on the left, and my grandma on the right, and they were holding hands in the middle. I was shocked to see them and asked what they were doing here. It felt so much like real life. They spoke to me telepathically in the dream which I’m not sure I have ever experienced before but I could understand them just as if we were speaking verbally. My grandpa said they got here a lot quicker than grandma thought they would, as if they had just beat traffic in a long car ride. My grandma gave him ol’, “Oh, Angelo!” like stop poking fun at me. Angelo and Loretta were their names.
To answer my question, my grandma looked up at me and smiled, and said simply, “well, we are here because we are getting to know your son.”
In my dream brain, I looked over at my husband at the foot of the bed and thought, “how strange that she would call him my son. That’s my husband.” I didn’t understand. I then noticed something else strange. My grandpa who had been completely bald since about the age of thirty, had this stick straight haircut. He had a full head of hair— spiky, straight hair. It flowed as if he was underwater when they were talking to me and I made an absolute note of it. Then I woke up.
The following day, I sort of forgot about the dream. The pandemic was reality and the dream although clear, just left my current brain waves. This day was when I really started to question if I was cut out for this. I spent the entire morning mulling over my feelings and asking myself difficult questions. No one knew I was pregnant yet except for my husband. What if we didn’t make it through the first trimester? Maybe I would be OK. Maybe a later time would be better when the world made more sense.
Around noon, I went to the bathroom before I was about to drive to Orange County to drop off some Christmas cookies, and when I wiped I saw red. Bright red blood that looked the same as getting a period. This was now week-seven of my pregnancy and my body reacted with a sinking heart. This can’t be happening, no no no. I prayed. And prayed some more. I came out of the bathroom and was terrified to tell Ian who wanted to be a dad so badly that I discovered I was bleeding. A lot. He immediately hugged me, held me tight, and then drove me to the emergency room. The whole time he kept calm and continued to remind me that we didn’t know anything for sure and there wasn’t reason to panic just yet. This kept me grounded as we both clung to positive thinking. Something I know to be true is that thoughts are powerful. I leaned on this knowing and kept my head strong.
Ian couldn’t come inside the hospital with me because of Covid restrictions, so he dropped me off and I checked myself in to Kaiser on Sunset Blvd. where I had unfortunately grown quite familiar with from other recent ER visits. A broken finger, a work injury, and a dizzy spell earlier that year that resulted in a diagnosis of vertigo. I knew I was in good hands here.
A nurse took me in right away to take my vitals and weight. Blood pressure was good, oxygen levels good, and the nurse made me feel at ease. I wasn’t experiencing any pain which she reassured me was a very good sign.
“Everything looks good from the outside” she told me, “Have a seat in our waiting room and we’ll call you in shortly to figure out what’s going on in the inside.”
I waited in that room for over three hours. Three long, terrifying hours. Masked up and watching patient after patient come in and wait for their turn, too. During the wait, a million thoughts flood my mind— miscarriage… twins…? I’m going to be OK. I’m going to be OK. I’m going to be OK. Ian was at home googling God knows what, staying connected with me via text, and both of us reassuring the other with support and goddamn positive thinking. Then I remembered my dream.
I felt a rush of energy feeling my grandparents with me. How could I have that dream the night before this? And that thought alone is what truly pulled me through. My due date was my grandma’s birthday. There’s no way I could be losing this baby. It was in this moment that I realized how badly I actually wanted this child. More than anything in the world. I wanted to survive this thing together. I knew in this moment that I was ready to be a mom.
I knew in this moment that I was ready to be a mom.
About 3:45pm, they called my name. THANK YOU, GOD. The nurse took me to a room where they set me up with one of their in-house GYNs. Before I settled into my robe, they asked me to pee in a cup and I was so freaking scared as to what I would see when I went to the bathroom again. But there I went, and to my absolute relief and surprise I looked down and saw almost no blood. Just some brown spots and everything was normal when I wiped. Angels with me. I cried to myself in the bathroom before returning my cup.
They took four vials of my blood to run tests and asked me to tell them when my bladder felt eighty percent full. How convenient considering they just had me empty my bladder into a cup. Ugh, hospitals. But, a wave of gratitude washed over me and I could hear my grandma’s voice inside telling me to be patient. Patience was her superpower and something she always tried to instill in me when she was alive. So patient, I was.
The nurse gave me sixty-four ounces of water to take down to help move things along which I was thankful for because I was insanely thirsty by this time. Starving too.
At around 5:30pm, they were ready to give me an ultrasound. By this hour, nurses had ruled out an ectopic pregnancy, and everything else appeared healthy, normal, and good. I had two doctors now — a male and female Gynecologist come in to perform the ultrasound. Moment of truth.
With the screen turned towards them, they both looked at each other, then looked up at me, and smiled. Holy Balls. It hit me then and there like a bus to the face. My dream. Grandpa on the left, male doctor on the left. Grandma on the right, female doctor on the right. The male doctor had straight, spiky hair. The exact same unexplainable hair-do that my grandpa had in the dream. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. Shock hit on all levels.
They looked at me smiling and the female doctor said, “there it is” — she turned the screen around and for the first time in my life, I could see a beating heart happening inside of me that wasn’t mine. There was this little bean; a growing life happening before my very eyes. So much woah. It was a surreal moment. The baby is OK. I am OK. We are going to be OK. I began to breathe again.
Following this visit, the female GYN did some physical inspections to insure that I wasn’t bleeding from my cervix or anything else potentially dangerous. Again— more relief came. More breathing. She explained to me that with pregnancy, especially a first pregnancy, bleeding can be normal and spotting is actually to be expected. This was good information to have because I had more light spotting show up in the following weeks. No more red blood though. Thankfully.
One month later, I decided to do genetic testing with my doctor. I found out I was going to be having a boy. I guess my grandparents really were getting to know my son. Wherever they were. Wherever they are.
Pay attention to your dreams— the ones you carry in your heart and the ones that reach you while you sleep. The stranger they may seem, the more important they may be.
