You Make Me Feel Like I’m Living A Teen Mom Dream

The first time I had a pregnancy dream, I was in eighth grade. It went down like this: I was sitting on the field outside of my middle school, and my stomach was beach ball-ish. I was on top of a blanket, wearing a white dress. It was springtime, and it was very bright outside, and there were flower petals EVERYWHERE. Like, in the sky, on the ground, in my hair… just imagine a Free People maternity ad.

I was **glowing**, like all beautifully pregnant women do. I knew who the father was because he was sitting right next to me, also **glowing**. He was this guy in my grade at school who was really shy, but really hot. He was every girl’s secret obsession and fantasy; he was the guy who always came up in “what if” and “would you?” conversations. After I woke up and continued on with the rest of my life, never forgetting that time I was pregnant and angelic, I flirted with him a little, but not significantly. I had a warm spot for him: he was, after all, the first boy I ever had a pregnancy dream with. However, I held him at an arm’s reach: I never let the crush burn the insides of my soul because, just like every other girl did, I made him an “almost” and left it at that.

After that one, the dreams started coming in truckloads. Unfortunately, they are almost never as peaceful but always as vivid. Now, they reflect boring and stressful things like real life and real relationships and the fact that somewhere out there, there is a girl exactly my age with her vag at “10 centimeters! 10 centimeters!” filmed for an MTV reality show.

The dreams aren’t anxiety inducing because I think I’m pregnant or even because I think I’m going to get pregnant. Pregnancy, it seems, is just my dream drug of choice. When I’m on it — or in it?… doing it? — I see other things about my life more clearly. In general, my nightly dreams are so vivid that I could wake up the next morning and spend twenty minutes recounting them to you. So consider that, and then consider how scarring a pregnancy dream might be, and then imagine how vivid those are. Like, you don’t forget going through fake labor. You just don’t.

My most recent pregnancy dream, which happened last week, was on the scarier side. And by scarier, I mean I woke up sweating with an increased heart beat that even the most flamboyant SoulCycle instructor can’t bring on.

In this one, I had already given birth, and the baby was a newborn. Yes, these post-preg dreams happen regularly, too. The father of the baby was an ex (sometimes, I don’t know who the father is, which is super scandalous and exciting) but he was totally MIA, AWOL, TTYL, PCE, C YA, ETC. I was in the baby’s room, holding the baby, and kvetching (see the Everyday Yiddish Dictionary for People of All Faiths if you need translation) about “WHERE THE F*** IS HE!!!!” I put the baby down and disappeared into another part of the dream where I think I may have been in a water park, not quite sure though. Then a week went by, and I’m like “Holy shit, I just remembered that I have a baby,” and I went back to the baby’s room to take care of it. It was in the fetal position, had somehow grown to be a very skinny toddler, and was trying to get milk out of a cat bowl. Is that what you call the things cats drink out of? A cat bowl?

I started freaking out because I felt like the worst mother ever so I picked it up to breastfeed it. I think it was a she, BTW. So now I’m pacing, breastfeeding this baby that was visibly mad at me (again, how that was, I don’t know) and crying to my mom that I’m going to need to give the baby away because I couldn’t do it alone and Whathisface wasn’t around to help me. It was like the climax of a perfect Teen Mom episode where she’s like “Yeah, you know what? I finally realize I’m a fucking idiot for thinking I had the ability to take care of a child before I’m old enough to vote.” Then, I walked with the baby into the kitchen, whilst breastfeeding (this I’ve never done in a dream world or in real world before) and the baby was so mad at me that she jumped out of my arms and onto the floor where she kind of became a cat and drank milk from another cat bowl because I was THAT BAD OF A TEEN MOM.

So what did I learn about my life from this? About my inner subconscious? It meant that I probably shouldn’t see my ex, because I know that he won’t change, and that the relationship isn’t going anywhere. And I shouldn’t have makeup sex with him either, because that will only lead to bad things as well. Maybe not babies, but it won’t help me move forward. It’ll set me back. It represented the expectation I have for myself to be old and responsible, yet at the same time, I’m admitting a certain defeat that I never have before. Yes, Mom is always right about everything.

In the end, I don’t think the breastfeeding represented anything too significant. Disappointing, because that was one of the most engaging parts. Oh, well.

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