I was in a swimming pool with [name redacted] and we were [activity redacted]. (Excuse the redactivity but telling the truth would be highly awkward.) When we finished, he made some sort of overture that something was going on down there, and I’m sure I don’t have to explain the exact geography of down there. I reach down and sure enough I can feel a heavy, round presence there, and it’s getting bigger. It’s a head! It’s coming out! I’m having the baby! And holy crap he is moving down that tunnel with a quickness!

I feel no pain as he makes his exit — he just slips right out into my hands, and I struggle a bit to get a grip under his shoulders as he’s underwater and slippery, not to mention heavier than I thought he would be.

I bring him up out of the water and to my chest, and he is lovely and warm against my skin, and such a nice rosy color. I can’t quite see if he is breathing but he is quiet and I feel his warmth next to me and the slight tensing pull of the cord against my skin.

He’s out and it was easy and unexpected and I’ve finally met him. All smiles.

I had this dream nearly three months before Holden was born, but what’s nuts is that this is pretty much exactly what happened, without elaborating too much. Except, of course, there was a period of many hours between the first activity and the birth. And it was anything but painless in the literal sense, but was indeed painless in a more philosophical sense. But good grief, that dream is spot on, down to the not being able to see if he was breathing and the cord tension (we had a short cord so I couldn’t hold the baby up and get a good look at him until it was cut.) Isn’t that weird? That is weird. Pretty amazing, actually.

I feel no pain as he makes his exit — he just slips right out into my hands, and I struggle a bit to get a grip under his shoulders as he’s underwater and slippery, not to mention heavier than I thought he would be.

I bring him up out of the water and to my chest, and he is lovely and warm against my skin, and such a nice rosy color. I can’t quite see if he is breathing but he is quiet and I feel his warmth next to me and the slight tensing pull of the cord against my skin.

He’s out and it was easy and unexpected and I’ve finally met him. All smiles.

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

So I took him into my lap and watched as he latched on, his face all scrunched up — a total trip considering I’ve never breastfed anyone and can only imagine how the real thing is going to go down — then felt my heart sink as I realized that I had no milk to give.

He looked at me point blank and said, “Are you retarded?”

I confided in my mom that I wondered if something bad had happened to cause the person who’d lived there before to leave all her stuff behind. “I mean, I don’t get a bad vibe from this place,” I explained. But it sure was weird inheriting all this stuff from a complete stranger. I was inspecting a business section cover (for a paper I have never seen before in real life but that looked a bit like the old CAmid-’90s layout style) and it dawned on me that the woman who had owned the house before me had been a newspaper designer. I saw tell-tale press-test signs on the page and felt proud of myself for sleuthing it out.

Then she came in the door. And it was like meeting a lost family member. I started crying, she started crying. We hugged. My parents took pictures. It was a full-blown reunion. She started telling us about her life, about how she didn’t work for the paper anymore. She was dressed unflatteringly, with a too-small, coral-colored button-down shirt and unflattering blue jeans. It was the outfit of someone who cannot be bothered to care about something so fleeting as fashion. Her face was kind and she had shoulder-length, sandy blonde hair. She was sweet and warm. And seemed sort of sad to have passed on her house and her things to someone else, but she had certainly meant to do so.

And then I woke up. So she’ll never get those things back.

I blame this song‘s existence.

Like, for example, causing a dream in which there is a band field show featuring two kids who look just like the Olson twins (circa late Full House), dressed up as The White Stripes, singing “When I Hear My Name.”