Dreams

tw: abuse

Last week, I dreamed again that my father tried to kill me. It occurs every few months. I’m young and in trouble and he’s lunging for my throat. I struggle to defend myself, drawing on the muscle memory I’ve built over the years: how to use my arms to block in Krav Maga, how to kick as if I’m swimming. I wake up jerkily, still kicking, gasping at the air like I’ve forgotten how to breathe.

When I was eighteen years old, my father found me talking on the phone with my boyfriend at night. He dragged me from my bed and attempted to wrest the phone from my hands, shaking me and punching me as I tried to run. He heaved me down the stairs, but I caught myself before the fall. I ran to a different bedroom. Behind me, his hands, reaching for my neck.

I curled up in the fetal position on the bed as blows rained down my back until my mother, heavily pregnant and screaming, threw her body over mine. Then he finally stopped.

“You’re lucky your mother’s pregnant,” he snarled before leaving the room.

The phone had fallen out of my hands and lay next to the bed. On the other end, my boyfriend listened to the whole thing in horrified silence, shaking on the other side of the world.

“I’ll call you back,” I said before ending the call.

A few weeks ago, I asked my husband to get me some water. He sighed before standing up for the third time in ten minutes.

“You’re lucky you’re pregnant,” he said with affection. I smiled at him while an unfamiliar feeling snaked through my stomach to my chest. I ignored it.

So the dream came back.

In the dream, I felt despair that I could not protect myself or my unborn child, that I had spent so long trying to escape only to find myself back here again. At sixteen weeks pregnant, where I am now, a baby might start to hear the outside world, might learn the sounds of its parents’ voices or hear a symphony or the laughter of friends.

My mother was long past that time; already her belly protruded from her body and her ankles swelled. She avoided climbing stairs, sleeping in the first-floor bedroom instead. It must have taken her much longer to make her way upstairs that night.

It made me sad to know that my little sister, thirteen years old now, could hear the screaming. I thought about what kind of world she must have heard outside, whether she was confused or scared.

I thought about a question my other sister asked me once, about a hazy memory she had of our father striking me repeatedly with a belt. “Did I make that up?” she asked.

I had forgotten. My mind constructed a memory of the silver tip against ruptured skin. Perhaps it came to me too readily, offered up by my body in an echo it still remembered. Perhaps I had an overactive imagination. I thought about how I would never find the right words to answer that question.

I thought about each step I had taken since then to create a world where my son will never know that feeling. The last place that fear will find me is in my dreams. Perhaps I’ll never outrun it, but I know that like my mother, I would throw my body over him in exactly the same way.