Daughter Dreams & Decimating Devotion

I'm sat on the couch of a psychic medium, trading for babysitting services…

"I'm going to first just see what's waiting for you," she offers before closing her eyes and immediately opening them.

"Whoa, okay. There's a little girl right there waiting."

I know what's coming.

She describes the face I've seen a hundred times; dark hair, bright hazel eyes, skin paler than mine. A lithe little spirit with the density & the light of a thousand stars shows herself as a four year old girl of the highest beauty. She tells me how the little one introduced herself excitedly, readily, by name.

"Mm, that's my daughter," I tell her.

I'm nineteen. I've never been pregnant.

 I was thirteen when she first came in a dream, and she became my guiding force. I have shared before that I always knew myself to be a mother, but more specifically, most of my years were spent knowing myself to be her mother.

Our relationship blossomed over years of intimate revealing, as she awaited me in every journey into the spirit realm, every dream, every meditation, every space where the divine bled openly into the physical.

And then, when I was 19, I met a man.

A man who told me of his dreams and his daughter that met him there: dark hair, bright hazel eyes, skin paler like his - a four year old girl of the highest beauty. I tied myself to him in honor of my anchor to her.

She came a year later, the first to fill my womb with the blessed touch of a child, and she left mere weeks after she came. The days my form spent in communion with hers became the formative structure within which I lived the next decade of my life.

 When my womb became her grave as it had been her haven, I was cast out from the experience of myself that had felt most true: the days of myself as hers. I became lost to the ether while caught in a body - no desire to live where she was not.

In the following months, I oscillated between desperately seeking to pull her back into the physical with me and devotedly wishing to simply follow her out of it. Having neither, I was left with him.

It was the promise of her that kept me tied. Because you see, I never chose him. I chose her, through him.

And when the day came that I finally let myself feel resolve that she would never return, a son was there. And then another, and another, and another still.

The fourth boy came to fortify and protect as I set myself free.

The threads that I had woven with this man for a decade were knotted and frayed, twisted and torn. They cut into my wrists and chained my chest into submission. My fingers have splintered and my heart has broken as I plucked them away one by one.

Beneath it all, this girl has remained - a sacred balm of a daughter remembered and beloved, her touch serves too as a phantom of myself: the woman I spent a lifetime trying to become, waiting patiently to be released.

This image cannot be carried beyond this moment. This dream died when my daughter did, and while my grip has softened, my hold on it has remained. Locked in devoted dissonance between what calls my spirit and what my spirit once called for.

Until now.

As my daughter poured in again this solstice, on the tenth anniversary of her birth and death, my womb became heavy. Full and stagnant and sticky, I have waited for the release while indulging what I knew to be my final days with these old, cherished threads.

I let myself hold them with reverence and respect over resistance and resentment. I let my grief overwash my gratitude. I broke under the waters of my womb, drowning in them as my baby had, meeting her in a place I had been too scared and small and alone to go.

Until they flowed out. With the waters of the cancer full moon, the floodgates of my womb opened once more. Dying dreams and darling daughters sit neatly beside me, as I sit in a puddle of blood and tears.

It has been the most delicious grief of my life.

Finally free enough to feel, where her death once gave me mine, I am now again finding her life giving me life.

The work in spirit is already showing itself in the physical. The mug I had purchased with a budding womb for what would be her postpartum has shattered, just as I knew it would. What comes next will surely be the reorganization of my body to match the reorientation of my being.

The gift of a daughter, complete ten years later.