The whisper of a dream

(Wrote this a couple of days ago, been procrastinating posting it, cause ugh, editing...)

Well, that was a hopeless sleep of barely 4 hours with a strange dream. But I had to get up so that I could write it down, and not like I could sleep anyway. It was an elusive dream that I kept drifting in and out of sleep from, but it felt important. It was sad, yet in my role I was empty, despondent, conflicted but also loving.

The dream was set in an alternate reality in which my thoughts of having a kid never quite went away, but they faded a bit. I lived somewhere else, in a messy apartment somewhere on the mainland, but I looked pretty much the same, just a little heavier, didn't have bottom surgery. I suspect I was a few years older than I am now, but took a different route in life to get there. I was sleeping around with strangers but not for money, and one of them accidentally knocked me up and on a whim I decided to keep it. Whether I stopped taking testosterone during the pregnancy or not was not clear, and I can't figure it out in retrospect. A lot wasn't clear. It was but a whisper of a dream.

But anyhow, I didn't go to any hospitals or had any ultrasounds, basically just stayed at home and seemed to barely even care about that I was pregnant, like I forgot about it on and off. Didn't prepare my home much at all for a family. Gave birth to the kid in my own home, completely alone. It went way too unrealistically well on a physical aspect, but it did give me a postpartum depression with a vague hint at psychosis. My senses weren't entirely there and it was probably cause of it being a huge shock. But I got a little girl and she was very cute, rather quiet and not very responsive but definitely alive. I made a crib for her out of an old drawer, pillows and cut off pieces of blankets, and put her in a pink romper with a matching hat. I did love and care about her, but I wasn't a very good parent at all. I kept dropping her cause I couldn't hold her weight or focus enough on what my arms where supposed to be doing. Then dropped her once too many times and too far a distance. She survived the initial fall, and I gently put her in the home-made crib but barely even had the time to tuck her in before she was dead. Just a few days old.

I felt immense sadness and lied down next to where she was in the crib, and just lied there and held her and spoke gently for probably several days. Then I just let her lie there as I tried to get on with my miserable life somehow, and slowly came back to my senses again but couldn't really deal with the loss or figure out what to do about her rotting corpse in my home. Since she wasn't registered at any hospital in any way, and no one knew about my pregnancy, I was the only one who knew she ever existed, which meant I had to keep her secret to not be charged for murder/manslaughter, and I wanted to keep her remains too, so I guess why not. I don't even know if I ever fed the kid (not like I could have breast fed), or if she was born healthy or with issues that also caused her death. As I said, a lot wasn't clear.

Then years went by, about two of them, I think, before my mother suddenly visited me. She found the corpse of my child which was just a sleleton at that point, still lying in that crib, shoved in under my bed. So I explained everything to her and that was a strange conversation to have in my head. I told my mother in the dream that her granddaughter had my nose, but otherwise wasn't so similar to me. She really did have my nose though, blue eyes and reddish blonde hair. It was weird and creepy when I re-visited her skeleton and looked at it, for the first time since she had died. I wanted to keep the skull, cause I didn't have any pictures of what she looked like alive and I had serious problems letting go. My mother wanted to throw it away, I could tell she was very disturbed by that I wanted to hold on to that kind of thing, but she also didn't try very hard to convince me otherwise.

Then we just sat there on a couch in my home, sad and horrified over the ordeal without really knowing what to say about it.

It was like the dream was a piece of a vague thought that had been lingering on and off in the back of my mind for many years but never quite surfaced, and now it just floated up like driftwood. It felt like a vague "could have been" that I feared would happen. Not necessarily the means to the end, but the results of it. I definitely feared that if I ever had a kid I would accidentally kill it just by negligence and clumsiness. And I also feared I wouldn't really be mentally there or connect quite like I'd suppose to. And raising a kid by yourself when you're a mentally disabled cluts... definitely comes with some risks. Risks that I ultimately was not willing or prepared to take.

That's callous. Cause no matter how much "motherly love" (and I say "motherly" only cause of my biology being female and giving birth like one, cause the parental bond to a kid is generally stronger for females than males) I could have had for a kid, having a kid for selfish reasons when you know you're inept at caring for a kid, especially if it's so to the point you think you have a legitimate fear the kid could come to harm, even severe harm... then having that kid in the first place would have been callous. It would have been comparable to getting a pet you know you can't care for and then it dies in your "care", when you wanted it just because you thought it was cute and you couldn't stop obsessing about it. Except that comparing a human baby to a random pet of any species doesn't sit quite right with me. Not really cause of whichever of those have more or less value, but rather because a human baby of my own making would be a little bit closer to heart, than just a random fucking pet. Even though some people treat their pets as though they were their babies, and some people treat their babies as though they were pets. But I think you should probably make some amount of emotional distinction.

So I guess that's the moral I take from this dream. It was never meant and I know I'm making the right choice to get sterilised. Cause getting randomly knocked up by a complete stranger I've fucked... not an entirely unrealistic scenario. Just because the last one wore a condom doesn't mean the next one will. Or the one after that. And so on, but having a hysto will definitely calm me the fuck down in worrying about shit happening in that department, at least. Cause having one thing less to worry about in life is always something I consider to be good. And if I can lessen the amount of worries that I have, that's good too.