Teen Dreams

There is a restaurant on the south side of Key West called Louie’s Backyard. It’s a white Victorian house with elegant double porches, and the namesake backyard is in fact the sea. The sea is less like a view than an embrace, wrapping you in its blue pocket, filling your ears with its call and your mouth with its salt.

Terry, one of my best friends on the island, has tended bar at Louie’s for over ten years. The Afterdeck bar is aptly named, an open space momentarily forgotten by the white linens and long-necked lilies of the formal dining room. One can be equally at home sipping a martini or knocking back a shot of tequila, the crowd a mix of neighborhood regulars and providential tourists.

Louie’s often comes to me in my dreams, a world away in little village in Switzerland. Winding through upside-down worlds, peopled by a strange cast and unlikely circumstances, I ultimately find myself standing on a strip of stand, facing the familiar house at the end of a residential street. I float towards it – I am not sure if I am on foot or on a bicycle (or perhaps flying), but I pass the bike rack, move over the beach, and I see the sign – “BAR”—posted on the wooden gate post leading to the back porch. I hear the sound of familiar laughter – an amalgam of friends and family – the tinkle of ice in a martini shaker, Terry’s voice, the waves lapping against the shore. It is dusky, the pale moon sharing the sky with the sinking sun.

I make my way over the wooden walkway, I reach for the gate, I wake up.

I don’t know how long Louie’s has been the Elysian Fields of my dreams, but it predates Switzerland and was less frequent when I actually lived in Key West, so I imagine it got stuck in my brain somewhere around 2010 in my apartment in Harlem. The yearning this dream brings when I wake up is for so much more than the place, but for this ineffable feeling – of nostalgia, of belonging, the call of the sea, and of my youth. The dream has become more frequent since I’ve become a mother.

My dreams have generally become more vivid since my daughter has been born, which is saying a lot, as I’ve always been a hyper-active dreamer, consumed nearly as much by my imagined worlds as by the real world in which I live. Lucid dreams have preoccupied me since adolescent, when a friend’s kind father, a child psychologist, encouraged me to write them down. My most frequent dreams nowadays are stolen from my youth – I encounter buddies from high school, ex-boyfriends from college, my 20-something New York crew, who come to me at night to speak to me with conviction about my imagined version of their lives. A friend from high school confides how dissatisfied he is with his marriage; my ex-boyfriend apologies for not listening to me; an estranged girlfriend tells me she has been unable to have children. We cry; we embrace. I awake feeling guilty, as though this is emotional infidelity – not to my partner, but to my current life. I feel like an escape artist, slipping out the window and materializing again at dawn, to leave the world of sharing cigarettes on a Chelsea fire escape, to change my baby and feed her breakfast.

I am often young again in these dreams – the age I was at the time I knew the characters in them. But not always. Sometimes I am forty, meeting my friends as they were, frozen in time, impressing upon them the wisdom that has come with age – telling the university friend that developed an eating disorder how beautiful she is; telling the ex-boyfriend to stop taking the pills that would one day help kill him.

Their doggedness prompted me to talk to my therapist about the teen dreams. The dreams of escape, of confession, of the intimacy that we forge in youth when we stay up all night to watch the sun rise, drinking cheap warm beer and divulging our fears to someone who may have just been an acquaintance 24 hours earlier. I wonder at my seeming regression, here at the starting gate of motherhood. I am happy as a mother, with my partner, in my domestic life. Why are my nights filled with such adolescent yearning?

Do you believe that these dreams are literal, or do you desire the emotional experience they offer you? And what is the emotional experience of the dreams?

Freedom, intimacy, the urge to help someone in crisis, to matter. The friend from New York may be voicing my own fears about being an older mother; perhaps the apology from my ex-boyfriend is a form of something I seek from my partner. Sometimes I want to help them avoid the fates they are careening towards; sometimes I want to visit the other paths I might have taken. Some are altruistic, some escapist. My dreams are doing repair work. My dreams are scratching a phantom limb.

I turned forty in May. Sometimes I think am having the opposite of a midlife crisis – I am starting a family, ten or fifteen years after many of my peers. Most of my adulthood has been relatively carefree – living alone in New York or Key West, having no dependents, enjoying the freedom to drink a margarita at 10 am or go to the gym at midnight, both of which I did more than once. I loved the thrill of no one knowing where I was, the feeling of getting on my bike and riding down the West Side Highway to a concert in Brooklyn or the Overseas Highway to jump off a bridge into the Gulf. Being alone in the world can be exhilarating.

It can also be lonely. My dreams back then were populated by the husband I hadn’t met, the baby whose existence was only theoretical, the home that I could only imagine via late night Zillow fantasies. I longed for a family like the one I have now. This was the object of my yearning in earlier adulthood, the melancholy that colored the joy of my independence.

These imaginings didn’t make me a spinster then, and just as they don’t make me a latent juvenile now. But they do offer a reminder of the road not taken, a tug of the “what might have been” had a different path been forged, a job or relationship pursued or left. And to be fair, there are some very juvenile things that I miss. I miss singing along to rap music in my granny’s 2007 Toyota Solara convertible. I miss eating takeout in bed, watching 90s action movies on my laptop. I miss smoking weed in the backyard, an iced coffee in hand, and the day ahead void of commitments and full of possibility.

These scenes are played out to the hip hop of my youth, the early-aughts Outkast and Ludacris and Goodie Mob albums that lived as scratched CDs in a binder on the floor of my Jetta, amid empty Diet Coke bottles and lighters. Back when viral internet videos were just becoming a “thing,” I remember one that circulated of a six-year-old boy in Florida who stole his grandmother’s car for a joyride. When questioned, he said, “I wanted to do it cause it’s fun; it’s fun to do bad things.”

The interviewer responds: “Did you know that you could perhaps kill somebody?”

“Yes, but I just wanted to do hoodrat stuff with my friends.”

And while I realize the absurdity of the leap between me, a middle-aged white woman living in Switzerland, and little Latarian Milton of 2010, at times, when I am editing an Excel spreadsheet, or piling the baby and dog in the car to run some tedious errand, in fact, the cartoon thought bubble that appears above my head reads a version that. “I just want to do fun stuff with my friends.”

You know, the etymology of nostalgia is time (nost), plus pain (algia), my therapist says. The word is literally rooted in pain.

It rings true, and when I look it up, the Greek roots from which it has grown are indeed nost and algia, but it is “home” plus “pain.” They both feel true, nostalgia, and what would be “chronalgia,” longing for lost home and lost time.

Naming things can remove their sting, but my longing is not sharp-edged. It is wistful and diffuse. This is probably because the new home I am building in Switzerland is immediate and demands my attention. Yet nudge of the dreams runs counter to living in a conservative country, with a loving partner who sometimes appears to want to spool me in bubble wrap and place me gently on a shelf until I give birth to our next child.

I strain against the metaphorical bubble wrap. I enjoy the nightly escape to a life untethered – even untethered to the ones I love most. In this way, release and guilt go hand in hand, just as they did in real life, in my teen years and young adultood, when I snuck out of my parents’ house at night or neglected to stay in touch in college. Back then, these things of my own doing separated me from my loved ones, but they conversely left me yearning in the other direction – for home, for closeness, to be re-wrapped up.

Have you considered that it might be grief? We often associate bereavement only with death, but that was a stage of life that you are no longer living, and with children, won’t live again.

I hadn’t really admitted to myself that I won’t live these days again, but my therapist is right, and when I think about this, I don’t feel terribly sad about it. I feel a stoic sense of: this was, and will be no more, and this more demanding - and more rewarding - chapter is my present.

The course of ageing always forces us to reckon with that which was and will be no more. Looking at the veins that have appeared on my legs in this second pregnancy, the wrinkles that now run the expanse of my forehead, the streak of silver hair above my right eye, exactly where my mom’s hair first began to turn, I see this writ on my body. There is no turning back; time does not run in reverse. This doesn’t fill me with anxiety or dread, but rather wonder at how our lives and bodies and circumstances change, often drastically over the course of a lifetime, but invisibly and incrementally in the hours and days of our lives.

Of course, I am only forty and dreaming of my teens. Someday, as my life unspools toward old age, I may be eighty and alone, dreaming of Andrew taming our tomato plants in the back garden in Switzerland, the laughing baby and the black dog, strolling through the vineyards that surround our house. I will have a few more wrinkles and veins, and maybe a bit more acceptance of time careening forward as I ride on her tail, knowing that at some point, very soon for me, time will stop, while she speeds forward for everyone else.

My mother says she doesn’t fear death, she just has FOMO. I wonder if my existential dread will evolve into something lighter, like my mom appears to have. But while with old age comes wisdom, it also inevitably is accompanied by deterioration, our organic vehicles getting skin cancers and osteoporosis and phantom, unexplained pains that simply creep in as we begin to break down.

I see this with my granny, one of the most brilliant women I know, a titan on the tennis court and in life, whose failing senses - almost no hearing and eyesight following fast – is being lost in the ether of old age. At 97, she mostly cannot participate in conversations, films, or long-adored athletics because of her diminished hearing, sight and balance. This leaves her largely alone in a world of people connecting with each other, around her.

My aunt writes in an email: As I watch mom's daily struggle, I am furious at the Grand Design. Why, when we have a lifetime of wisdom to help others and make the world a better place, are we instead reduced to a fraction of our former selves? Why couldn't the Grand Design have been for people to gain function and ultimately morph into a state that is pure, omnipresent energy? Why couldn't aging have been something to look forward to, and ultimately end with omniscience and omnipotence? That such an intelligent, giving, optimistic, grateful person is reduced to this state is a travesty.

Andrew reminds me that without the loss of the Granny Janes, there would not be room for the Skyes to be born. We are animals; we age; we die. We must make space.

You talk a lot about Andrew’s feelings coping with being an older father. How are you coping with being an older mother? 

I am grateful that motherhood has come naturally to me – not easily, not by a mile, but naturally. In my waking hours, though I may examine my encroaching grey hairs or surf real estate in Key West, I don’t mourn the younger woman that I was. Skye has gone from physically being a part of me to being a mental and emotional extension in a way that feels enriching rather than limiting. She is always there in my mind and heart. I do not strain against this. Being a mother, normally, feels more like a homecoming than a lasso for me.

But it is more difficult for some of us. A friend of mine who is a wonderful mother also confided her despair after having her daughter. She fell into a postpartum abyss, mourning the self that she once was and looking bleakly down the road of motherhood, something in which she did not recognize herself. She is a beautiful woman, and perhaps an identity burnished in beauty is one more difficult to fuse with motherhood, which is grounded in acts of service, messiness, physical sacrifice, blood and shit and dark circles. There is no glamour to motherhood (though they can coexist). Your elemental being is brought back to primacy. You are not the idealized feminine form; you are the earthen clay from which your baby is wrought.

And perhaps, sometimes, this is just a bit heavy.

You have a tendency to intellectualize that which is inherently emotional, my therapist says, and it’s true.

Maybe my nightly absence, an unmooring of the mind that draws me to a field party smelling of campfire and cheap beer, or that sends me wandering the streets of New York or New Orleans hand-in-hand with a friend I haven’t seen in fifteen years, is part of what keeps me grounded in my real, brilliant waking life. It offers a dream state midlife crisis, rather than a real one that jeopardizes all that I have gained, the family and home that have quieted those more intense and lonely longings of early adulthood.

Cheryl Strayed wrote a brilliant “Dear Sugar” column in 2011, responding to a 41-year-old man struggling with the decision of whether or not to have a child. While the writer fears regretting not having children later in life, he describes his love of “quiet, free time, spontaneous travel, pockets of non-obligation.” He writes: “On the grand gradient of the human condition, I feel I sit farther to one end than most.” And I did too, dear Undecided. In fact, I probably read that column in my underwear in my backyard in Harlem, cat on lap and vodka tonic in hand, maybe even saying aloud, “Hell yes, Undecided,” when he hit that line.

Sugar, like any good advice columnist, leads him to water rather than making him drink. She encourages him to step back from his life, imagine his future, a future with children and one without. She asks him to explore his fears and desires, to reckon with these divergent paths, to listen for which calls to him. But of course, we will never know the delights and tragedies of the road not taken. We can only speculate.

She writes (nodding to the poem “The Blue House” by Tomas Tranströmer), “I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”

Sometimes, I wonder what Undecided decided. If he is, at this moment, at his ten-year-old daughter’s dance recital, beaming with pride (or rubbing his eyes with exhaustion). Or if he is ending his day at rooftop bar, toasting friends and wondering where the night will take him (or dreading his empty apartment). I will never know, just as I will never know what Sarah would be doing in her sister life, the one in which I stayed in Key West, where I kept editing the newspaper, where I didn’t meet Andrew, didn’t get pregnant. During my waking hours, my real life is full of enough joy and responsibility, that I rarely take time to contemplate it.

Still, my brain sometimes wanders onto that ghost ship at night. It is fitting that the floating trajectory to the “BAR” sign at Louie’s backyard just offers a hint of what and who await at the Afterdeck. I feel the breath of the ocean; I hear the familiar laughter; I reach out my hand… but I always wake before I open the gate.