Awaking Alone
The eldest and only daughter, I had always liked being alone with a book in my hands, and my bedroom door closed. If the chaos of my three younger brothers seeped into my imagination at work, I’d lock the door. My mother called it my retreat from the noise but often would disrupt it herself with chores or babysitting for me since I was the right hand she turned to when she was overwhelmed. Growing up, I heard my mother yell my name from afar more than I heard it any other way.
“Laurie?” First, she’d try a verbal vicinity check. Raising my head, my gaze would move from words on the page to my light green bedroom walls, while I’d reach for a bookmark or fold the page over. When she was still in question mode, I could usually squeeze in a few more paragraphs.
Then, “Laurie!” Louder, more demand than request. Tensing up from her tone, I’d sigh again, trying to shake it. I’d swing my legs from the bed to the floor, unlock and open the door to hear my name yelled again, more urgently.
“I’m coming,” I’d respond into the hallway air, hoping to diminish her angst with me when I’d arrive, feeling her frustration. She’d list my chores. I’d nod and sigh. My sighs were my language with my mother, the only sound I could use without appearing rebellious. I would do what she asked, but imagine my way through it, a story always writing itself in my head.
Outside of our house, my mother was a popular leader in our community, volunteering for the hard tasks, organizing and cleaning and peptalking and fundraising. She excelled when she was in charge, efficiently handling crises after crises with ease.
Inside of our house, my mother was bossy. We four children were not as eager to help her as her volunteer corps and she spent much time correcting us, the louder her volume, the larger our margin of error. I longed for imaginative freedom in the spaces she limited. I wanted to lay in my bed with a book, even if my bedspread was wrinkled and messy. She wanted me always prepared to tuck my sheet into a hospital corner of high, if not impossible standards.
My childhood and teenage years were spent under her command. I could follow her directions; sometimes, I just wanted to do it my way. Less rigid. More open. Mostly alone. Away from all of her expectations of me. I knew she loved me, but I felt more loved when I did what she told me to do. Her hugs and praise came more easily that way.
Something would shift when I went away to college. I knew she had started talking to a counselor. I’d like to think she felt heard and seen in a way she hadn’t before. I noticed, soon after, she tried in her own way to see and hear me.
“What would you do if you were me?” I’d hear her ask over the phone. At first, I didn’t have words to fill the space of surprise I felt, like my every day absence mattered to her. My mother became soft with me in a way I had never experienced. When I was home on vacation or break from school, I didn’t want to be alone or retreat to my room. I wanted to sit and talk to the mother who wanted to sit and talk with me.
A few weeks after I’d graduate from college, my mother would die in a car accident on her way home from work. It might seem silly to say this now, but in the twenty minutes before I heard the news, I felt her leave me. I felt more alone than I ever had before without knowing why or how. I could only think of her.
And then, for months after, I didn’t know what to think of her. For so much of my life, I had wished to be alone, away from her and her requests. Now, it wasn’t even this new and vast alone that bothered me. It was the void of her commands. It was the space where I couldn’t hear the lilt in her voice, deciphering her urgency at my arrival. I longed for her to tell me what to do in her absence, to demand something of my grief-stricken heart to move me where she wanted me to go. The absence of her voice was almost more than I could bear.
Then, one night, soon after she died, she arrived to me, in my unspoken, urgent grief. I dreamed about my mother.
In the dream, I sat in our church pew with my legs up, a rebellion of sorts. Other people were in the sanctuary, too, and everyone else’s attention was forward-looking, except for mine. I was distracted and couldn’t dream-name why. Suddenly, my mother showed up next to me, wearing a pink silk blouse and gray wool skirt I’d seen her wear so many times. She sat so close, that even in the dream, the closeness startled me. For what seemed like hours, she whispered things in my ear. Even in my dream state, I felt like I held my breath, trying desperately to hear what she was telling me. But I couldn’t hear her. She was so quiet. I leaned closer to her, trying to focus solely on the whispers, but I still couldn’t hear. In my dream, I was so disappointed in myself. Here she was and I was missing it. Missing her. Missing what she was telling me to do.
I woke up suddenly, and it felt like she was still right next to me. I closed my eyes again, trying to hear her once more. I felt like I had done something wrong, that I wasn’t present enough or quiet enough or daughter enough to hear what felt like her last message to me, the final command.
For months, I walked around not just in a daze of shock and grief, but not comprehending what my mother wanted me to do now. I wished for her detailed directions telling me how to live now that she was dead. For a long time, I had felt alone alongside her. Now, I was alone without her. There was not a book or a retreat that could diminish this noise of grief.
Her friends and family members often told me what they thought my mom would say.
“She’d tell you to hold your head high.”
“She wouldn’t want you to be sad for her.”
I knew they were trying to help me in my emptiness, but I knew what she’d think or do better than anyone and I couldn’t even muster up a sentence for myself, in her language, with her tone, in her voice. There was only her absence. Sometimes, I felt like that absence spoke to me more than her presence ever did.
The second time I’d dream about her, I’d be in someone’s upstairs apartment with a group of people, figuring out what shoes to wear to go out that evening. The dream camera kept focusing towards the floor, zooming in on everyone’s shoes, like we were trying to pick the next activity leader at recess, one foot in the group’s circle and one foot out of it. The shoes were all different colors, all different styles. At some point in the dream, I noticed another shoe, a red sneaker, away from the group. One sneaker faced towards me and one faced away. In the dream, I knew instinctively that it was my mom’s shoe. I didn’t hear her voice. I didn’t even see her face. I just knew it was her shoe. She was absent, but her shoe was present. I was alone, but I was with her shoe.
In my waking hours, I tried so hard to discern what the shoe of my mother meant. I started religiously researching dream interpretations. Shoes could mean, for instance, a path you’d chosen in life or a stylistic representation of your identity. Well, I never would have chosen this death that followed me wherever I went. I especially loathed my new identity as a motherless daughter, so surely, the shoes meant something else. I would relish and resist these dreams. They happened so infrequently, but I’d cling to them, recalling every detail, trying not to feel so alone alongside her absence. I hated having a glimpse of her but not understanding what I thought she was trying to tell me.
In the next dream of her, I sat at a long table in a great banquet hall. Many students I’d mentored were present and it was a big celebration. All of them smiled and laughed, and I wondered why they were so happy. Music played in the dream background and these former students of mine started dancing, like they were in a conga line together. They’d move past me, waving, smiling and laughing, their joy contagious. When they circled back around to my table, my mom was leading them, wearing that pale pink blouse and gray skirt again, dancing them into another room. In the dream, I wondered if I was supposed to follow them, this conga line of loved ones, one dead, the rest alive. This time I saw her face, smiling and talking to my students, but it blurred, and she never turned towards me. She guided them forward into the next room, an unknown place.
When I woke up, I knew something was wrong if she was ignoring me. I didn’t need to research dream meanings about banquets or conga lines. This dream mother was familiar to me. I felt innately that she was mad because I hadn’t heard her the first dreamtime, when she’d actually had something to say. And now, she refused to meet my urgency, to tell me what I most needed to hear. She was rebelling against me now. I could feel the shrug of her shoulders. She had had it with me in this dream, just like she had had it with me in real life. I could just stay alone, retreated, since that’s what I had always wanted anyway, while she danced the dream night away, moving further and further from me. I sighed loudly in this intuitive state. I was still disappointing my mother who was dead everywhere but in my dreams.
The next one came soon after. In this dream, some of my outdoor furniture had been stolen from my backyard. But someone had discovered and returned them. When the dream camera zoomed in on my patio, it surprised me to see the chairs and table there because I thought they were gone for good. In the backyard, the furniture was so wet, drenched with rain. I walked toward it, to touch it, to make sure it was real, that it was really returned to me. At the touch, I started throwing a dream tantrum. It was my turn to be angry now. In real life, I wouldn’t know the posture of an emotional frenzy like this, but I was so angry in the dream about what I thought had been stolen.
Still furious, my attention moved from the furniture to the house next door. The music was loud, a party underway. In the windows, I saw heads bobbing up and down to the beat of the party mix. Urgently, I needed to look for my mother inside. I knew I’d find her there. Stomping up to the porch, determined, the door was blocked and I couldn’t get inside, so I walked up and down and up and down my neighbor’s driveway to try to see in, to see her. I wanted to yell, “Please just let me see my mother,” but something in me was blocked, too. I didn’t have the oxygen or the energy to make my angry heard. I dream-sighed instead. Suddenly, like she had heard my sigh and wasn’t happy about it, my mother popped her head out of the window, so I could see her, but she turned to talk to someone else inside. I threw my hands up in the air and glared her way. Was she just going to ignore me one more time? She looked at me then, irritated as always, and turned away to rejoin the party. I couldn’t believe, even in the dream, that she’d leave me so alone when I was clearly so agitated about what had been stolen from me.
When I dream-blinked, I was back in the house I own, but I stood in front of a sliding deck door, the one from my high school house. I looked out the door and saw again the once stolen furniture, wet with rain. I felt suddenly terrified. I tried and tried and tried to lock that deck door, to keep out what scared me so. Was I scared of my mother or was I scared of my anger? But the lock was broken. It wouldn’t latch anymore. I banged the door against the frame over and over again, trying to make it work. Trying to protect myself.
I woke up, breathless and frenzied, shaking, living in the haze of my mother’s irritation at me, the way she had left me outside, the way the fear had taken hold. In my life awake, whatever dream emotion I felt would stick to me, staying with me for days after. Almost every dream made me feel more alone than the one before, her absence even more pronounced upon waking.
One stormy morning. I woke up hazy and blinking, hearing distant thunder, but my subconscious knew my mom was just there, had been just there. I remembered in this dream I had talked and talked to her about my deep sadness, pouring truth out of me. Using my dream voice and sometimes, not talking at all, I felt all my emotions gush forth from my heart towards her. She just looked at me, her profile fuzzy, not speaking. I wanted most to hear what she’d say back to me, what she’d tell me to do now. But instead, I was awake and alone one more time. And so frustrated. Why couldn’t she just tell me? In an emotionally exhausted huff, I sat up quickly, sighing. My breastbone, just near my heart, audibly popped. It scared me, the loud crack of it, echoing in my dark bedroom. That day, I was so sad, like the sadness in me had cracked open in that dream like no dream before it. All day long, words formed in my mind in multitudes. I struggled to write them all down, words about my mother and these dreams I’d had, words about her absence, and words about this kind of alone. Had she just been waiting for me to use my voice, to tell her that I did miss her, that I didn’t know how to proceed without her, that I just wanted her to be in charge, so I didn’t have to be?
It would take me years to understand what this dream version of my mother was doing for me in my aloneness. In every one of these dreams, she had given me what I’d hoped for so long ago, finally permission to make use of my imagination, to finally acknowledge to myself how alone I felt without her, to figure out how to be free alongside and in spite of my grief. After that dream, I kept writing and writing and writing about the loss of her until I could write about the presence of her. And I haven’t stopped. Somehow, when I put the pen to the page, or my fingers to the computer keys, I feel less alone. A present absence in my life, she somehow still dream-yells my name, demanding it’s time to write, to free myself from what I don’t understand without her, word by word by word.
I stopped writing down every dream I had of my mother, but I know I still dream of her. And the sadness I have when I wake up still clings to me. We get along better in these dreams, like I’m back in college and she’s listening to me, longing to hear what wisdom I have to share, what stories I have to tell her about this time. There are still mornings where I startle awake to see I’m alone in my bedroom. And suddenly, I feel an ache near my heart. I touch it, tenderly, and sense something familiar on the edges of my imagination, almost close enough to grasp, and wonder if I have just met my mother in my dreams.
-Laurie Zum Hofe
Laurie Zum Hofe is a writer and teacher, living on the Great Plains. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska and an M.A. in Writing from DePaul University in Chicago.