dreams

I had a dream two nights ago in which me and my childhood best friend found a lost baby. I put it in a room in my house to be safe, but I had so many other things to deal with, I just left it there. I kept on checking in on it, but I would always leave to attend to the other more important priorities with a film of guilt over myself. I felt the nagging in my head, in my heart: take care of the baby! Who's is it? Go give it what it needs! I woke up and thought about the dream, and realized the lost baby must be me.

Last night I dreamed about my adoptive mother, who has been dead now for 15 years. I almost never dream about her. She was holding me as a baby in the present tense, but talking about what it had been like to be the adoptive mother, and the helplessness she felt. How she was counselled that there was nothing to do when she felt those feelings. That there was a break that was made between the baby and its mother, and they were both just going to have to get through the pain. She was explaining to someone how roughly the babies were treated after they were born and taken away from their mothers.
The dream gave me a totally different perspective on my mother; maybe she did have an awareness that never occurred to me that she may have had when she adopted me. Maybe she had empathy for me and my birth mother post-separation. It feels healing.