I dream of Charlotte

Mommy guilt is always lurking around somewhere. The night after Nicholas was born, while still at the hospital, I had a horrible nightmare about Charlotte. I dreamt that I had taken her to a toddler class at Wurster Hall (a building on my college campus) and afterwards, we walked outside toward Cafe Strada, but she didn't cross the street with me. She walked to the bus stop and stood there.

I asked her what she was doing and she replied that she had to wait for the bus to go home. I asked her why she was taking the bus home and she said that she had to take the bus home by herself, her eyes welling up with tears. Her actual words in my dream were a mix of Chinese and English "yeh yeh zhi Ji take the bus to go home." Lately, in real life, she has been asking to do a lot of things on her own.

At this point in my dream, I realized that she wasn't mine and I started crying and kept asking her why she wasn't mine. Images of her parents in my dream started to form and I imagined her getting off of the bus to meet them at home. I remember sobbing in my dream pleading with her to answer why she wasn't mine and she just stood there looking for the bus to turn on Bancroft way from College Avenue. The grief and confusion I was feeling was retry unbearable. I could not grasp the fact that she wasn't mine and I kept searching for a reason that could have caused this to happen. I think it was the wrist feeling I had ever felt in a dream or in reality.

I hope this dream was a result of raging postpartum hormones and not any sort of premonition of my future with my darling Charlotte.