30 days :: put the phone down

Posted by in letters to the boys

I am going to write every day for the next 30 days for at least 20 minutes. I am not sure whether to do this on this blog or on waking lumina but I think I’ll do it here. I am going to be honest. It’s something that’s kept me from writing on here lately. Not sure who is reading, not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings or make anyone feel worried, feel offended, etc. So here’s your warning, for the next 30 days I am going to write a little bit every day, and I am going to be honest about how I am feeling. Okay? 🙂

Okay, setting the timer for 20 minutes starting now!

I had a dream last night about Ayrie. It was about him, but I was never able to be with him in this dream.  I think there have only been about three dreams since he died where I was actually able to hold him, touch him, talk to him.

In my dream last night I woke up from a nap and found a message on my phone. It was a call from the preschool saying that Ayrie had not been picked up yet. I looked at the clock and saw in a panic that it was 6:30 PM. Oh no! He had been at the school for over an hour since it closed and no one had picked him up.

But wait. He is dead, right? Or maybe that was a dream? Maybe he is alive? I’m confused. And I a bad mom if I don’t even know if my kid is dead or alive? (This is recurring for me. Dreams where I am not sure if he is actually dead and I have realize all over again that he has in fact died.) But he must be alive if the school called.  So I call the school and there is no answer. I rush over there and not all of the sudden it’s not the afternoon, it’s the morning, and I see Shiya walking into his classroom with his class. I ask them at the front desk where Ayrie is and they tell me that he was too sick so they called a nurse and he was transferred to a hospital.  This makes me feel so confused again. He’s sick? He was never so sick that he couldn’t stay at school. And how do they know the people at the hospital?

I shake my head as if to clear it and realize that these aren’t the right questions to be asking. Instead, I realize that if I go find Ayrie I will be late picking Shiya up. Oh, no! Do I have to choose between the two of them? Or is this not a big deal? Again, I feel so confused. But I look at Shiya through a window in his classroom and see how happy, strong and confident he is so I decide to go to Ayrie. When I get to the hospital I can’t find anyone. The rooms look like they are under construction and they are all empty.  There is no nurse’s station.  Where is Ayrie? Again, more confusion.

white phoneFinally a nurse comes and finds me and sits me down. She warns me about something, I don’t know what, but I feel a great deal of concern. And then she tells me that Ayrie wanted to give me one message before I entered his room.  She told me not to put the phone on the bed when I am visiting with him. He wanted me to know that the words we were going the share, the time we had together, the messages he wanted to impart on me, were much more important than anything we could learn from that phone. Focus on me and him, not the outside world. I understood what she meant and remembered a visit I had with him where he was all in white, the room was all in white, I might have also been all in white, and I had pulled an old rotary phone off of the bedside table (also white) and put it on his lap just in case we needed to call someone.

And then I woke up. I never did get to see him in this dream. But I woke with the distinct feeling that I am doing too much looking outward and not enough looking inward. I have received this message from him before at different times and in different ways. This time I felt like he was telling me that he’s ready to take me to the next level, ready to work even more closely with me, but I need to work on keeping myself more open than ever. So this month, small chunks of writing, meditating and running each day to see what happens! If you are reading this, thanks for taking this journey with me!!  xoxo nora