Lizards and Cake

dreams and metaphors

(the best role model, with little me and little Tim)

Last night, there is a young mom on the train with a cranky baby. He looks to be ten, maybe eleven months, not old enough to talk, but able to say “mamamamamama,” what looks like a clear bid for attention. Many of them. His mom gives him a toy, and a bottle of water. But what strikes me is that she doesn’t comfort him, not really. She doesn't engage him or distract him in the way you’d expect. She doesn’t talk to him…at all. Maybe she’s never seen a mom say, “We’re on the train, buddy! Look at all those cars on the bridge! See the lights? Oh look, the sun is going down and the clouds are pink!”

I don’t say anything of course. I don’t know the full story, and no doubt she’s doing the best she can. Most of us are.

I knew how to talk to babies, comfort babies, because I had a really good mom and a great act to follow. The kind who pointed out pink clouds and loud trains, and made sure to tell me to always turn pot handles in so a toddler wouldn’t flip them when you aren’t looking and get burned. I knew that the running commentary you make to preverbal children teaches them about the world, and with the wisdom of experience I also know that one day you are in the car saying things like, “Look! There’s a dorito truck! It’s taking the doritos to the store!” and the next you are telling your girls that Gwen Stefani is singing “This ship is bananas” (“Like ship of fools!”) and your teenage girls are laughing at you because this shit is bananas. Not that I know anyone that happened to, or anything.

A week and a half ago, I wake up from an interesting dream. Mike and I are at a store with the kids, a store that sells lizards and cake. We are buying both these things. We pick out a monitor lizard and a white one with yellow and light turquoise spots. The white one is Marianne, I say. The other one doesn’t get a name yet. The woman at the lizard counter tells me the lizards won’t get along if I don’t put a big, yellow frog in there with them. For some reason, I have to be the one to put it in there, and when I pick it up, I feel disgust and revulsion. I don’t want to touch it or put it in the cage with my lizards. Why does it have to be me?

They do have cake here too, and we are all getting cake! But it isn’t displayed like you usually would see at a bakery, on a cake stand with a glass dome. The cake is on styrofoam plates. Every piece is exactly the same size, but the frosting and cake are different colors. Yellow cake, blue frosting. Chocolate cake, chocolate frosting. White cake, pink frosting. They are all tightly covered in plastic wrap. Sariah and I wander over to find something else for the lizards.

“Mom!” Scarlett is calling me. She tells me they have gingerbread cake with gingerbread ice cream. I can get that. “Okay,” I say. And then I wake up.

It takes a week and a half and three other people to help me understand this dream.* The lizard part is an in person kind of story, the part I understand before the cake. But when I see, I see.

The cake is being like everyone else. Doing what is expected. I don’t want that cake, and I never wanted that cake. It’s not appetizing, even if you can choke it down with gingerbread ice cream (which come to think of it, does sound good, but do I have to eat the cake too?).

One reason I write is to tell Mike’s story, tell it through the lens of great love, which is the only way I believe it should be told. But the other reason is that sometimes, we don’t know a way is possible until we see someone living and modeling the way. You don’t have to live and grieve my way…of course. But is is an option. And you don’t have to eat cake at all if you don’t want to. Even if you do have to touch the damn frog.

*thanks to Lesley, Krystynna, and my therapist