Mom?

It will come as no surprise that I have been extremely tired.  Tired doesn't even feel like the right word for it.  I have just been more-than tired.  Each day around 12:30, I am ready for a good, deep, 2-hour+ nap.  And I still go to bed at a pretty good time.  More-than tired.

Yesterday, because we were returning the ties, I didn't get to start my nap as early as I would have liked, so I only had about an hour, maybe an hour-and-a-half tops.  But I needed it.  Desperately.  The dream I had was so deep and so real, it felt like I had been asleep for an entire night.

The first remembrance was that a mother had died and that I had been named the "new mother" of four kids that I didn't even know.  In fact, I never even saw these four unknown kids' faces, I just knew I was supposed to be their new mom soon.  As I was trying to figure out how to make any of this work, confused at why I was the one chosen, I came to the understanding that I was even expected to move to Texas to mother these kids, leaving my own behind for portions of time.  "How am I supposed to be a mother to these kids?"  "How am I supposed to be a good mom to kids that I don't even know, have never even seen?"  "What am I going to do with them, to make them like me? To love me?!"  I didn't get the sense in the dream that Caden had died, only that I had always had four kids, so I didn't really feel that my own kids had had something very traumatic already happen to them, so my next thought was, "What are my kids going to do without their own mother in the times that I'm taking care of someone else in another state that I don't even know?!" 

In all of this confusion that took minutes and even hours in my dream, I became an emotional wreck and started crying harder and harder with each thought.  By the time I came to the last question in my dream-self's mind, I was hysterically bawling, completely weighed down with it all, gasping for breath at the feeling of drowning.  I woke in that moment, actually gasping, heart pounding, sweating, and literally crying.  It had felt so real.  And then I realized, it really is real for me right now.  How am I going to be the mother that does stuff for my kids to make them like me, to make them love me, when I am "babysitting" grief unlike anything I have ever met before?  In some ways, I'm afraid that I'm going to be in another "state" while dealing with it, and I'm afraid for my kids while I'm "gone."  Even though I had already been crying and feeling all of those dream emotions, I started with very real ones in reality.  I cried harder than I have since moments after Caden passed away.  Hard, soul-wracking sobs of confusion and despair and honestly, fear.  How can I be a good mother when grief is enveloping me a little bit at a time?  What are we all going to do?

It was only a dream.  But the memory and the enveloping, suffocating feelings have not left me since.  It may have started out as a subconscious thought, but it is a very real nightmare for me right now.  I am worried about mothering my sweet kids in the way I want, the way I am used to, the way I LOVE, because I have other "stuff" to do and work out.  Stuff that I have never seen, never thought I would be chosen to work through, stuff that I really don't understand, stuff that is going to change my life once again, I can feel it.  In some ways, it feels like I need to have more faith to endure this than anything else I have endured in my life.  Including losing my first-born child.