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The night before I gave birth to my daughter, I had a dream. No big deal really -- I had been having strange dreams during the whole pregnancy: in one, I gave birth to an avocado and the doctors told me they had to ‘put it back in’. In another dream, a medium-sized stone came out of my ear and everyone started calling it my ‘child’. But this dream was different. It was fully immersive – I was walking through a forest towards a deep pool of water – there was a cave, a waterfall and a voice. The voice seemed to come from the rocks, the trees, from everywhere. And inside the cave, next to the waterfall, there were prisms glimmering in the dark -- little points of light, tiny glinting rainbows of color. The voice said to me: “those are souls.”
I woke up from the dream, remembering only pieces of it, and I started my day. I went to work, I forgot about it and, that evening, I went into labor. I gave birth.
. . .
It took me a long time to recover from the birth of my daughter, which was just so intense. My body was so beat up. I had to sit on a hemorrhoid pillow for a full 8 weeks. Tears came to my eyes when I tried to walk. I was a mess! And it took me even longer to adjust to being a mom – I felt like I was terrible at it! I was completely lost, confused, and worthless. I felt like I was doing everything wrong. And I also felt like I had lost some essential part of myself, too.
Being a writer (or at least having considered myself a ‘writer’, up until becoming a ‘mother’), I tried to document that first year. I had no confidence in the quality of what I was writing, and I only had about 5-10 minutes a day where writing was even possible. But I couldn’t help but attempt to explain, on small pages, the madness and wonder of suddenly having a newborn in my life. There was the need to describe the sleep-deprived other-world I was living in. And that dream – the birth dream about the caves and prisms -- that dream began to appear again in the hazy, exhausted mind-space in which I was writing.
That dream became a poem. The poem became a film. The footage was shot on two separate camping trips in Iowa and Wisconsin (Lake MacBride State Park in Iowa and Governor Dodge State Park in Wisconsin.) The children in the film -- ranging in ages between 3 and 9 -- they are the children in my life now: my own daughter, my daughter’s friends, this whole group of humans that share this landscape with me.
It took four years for me to finally be able to recreate the dream. The poem and subsequent film are about as close as I can get to the realness of it now. And my daughter – now four – well, it is just amazing to me that she appears in the film. It is her very presence that allows me to explain it, create it, share it. Which is perfect really. Because, in the end, that dream was all about her, even before I knew her.
. . .
This is a film of the poem '05/22' in Calenday, which is, you know, a book of poems.
The footage was shot on two separate camping trips in Iowa and Wisconsin (Lake MacBride State Park in Iowa and Governor Dodge State Park in Wisconsin.) I made the masks that the children are wearing, but the children were key: starring in this film are Shiloh Graham, Alasdair McLeod, Eleanor Fortune, Annika Sean Batten and Finnegan Morningsnow.
Music: Miłość Jest Wieczna by Lee Rosevere | CC BY-NC 4.0: bit.ly/1s3IVoZ