A Dream Of My Mother's From My Youth

In her dream, we're at the beach and my mother looks out and sees that me and my sister and my dad are all drowning. And she has to decide who to save. And then she wakes up.

I think I was around six when she told us the dream, because my little brother didn't factor into the equation (it could have been that he was too little to be out swimming, so maybe I was about seven or eight). From memory she had (and related) the dream repeatedly, and would often tell us about it while we were at the beach.

She would always immediately follow it's telling with "of course, it's so silly. I would just rescue Dad and then we would each rescue one of you".

This was undoubtedly meant to be reassuring, but I promise you, it was not. Even at that young age, I was aware that I would likely be a goner by the time they got to me. And besides, if Dad was able to come rescue me, why would he need Mom's rescuing in the first place? No, I knew she could only rescue one, and I was dang sure that wasn't a lottery I was gonna win.

What's interesting to me about it (besides maybe serving as an explanation why I never wanted to see "Sophie's Choice") is that she would make such an apparently misguided decision to burden her six-year old son with her nightmare. Maybe it's possible she was trying to keep me from going out too far. In my most cynical teen years, I entertained the idea it was to make me behave, in a general sense, so as to improve my chances of surviving. But now I think it simply weighed too heavy on her to not speak it.

She obviously knew it was not a particularly great thing to tell her children, and the unrealistic rescue scenario she attached speaks to that. But I think the dream was going to be on her mind literally every moment until she spoke it. Basically, if she wanted to keep it to herself (which she probably did), she had no chance.

I feel like I see that more and more in life. Definitely still in my mother, but also in myself, and in most anyone who I know well at all. Some things people can keep secret. But some things just have to come out. Doesn't matter if they're hurtful, or harmful, or meant to be kept quiet. Or just boring, not funny, really of interest to absolutely no one. There's just no stopping it. If the six year-old gets scared shitless in the process, well, nobody's happy about that. But it couldn't be helped.