I don’t often remember my dreams but one morning I woke up with a clear memory of this dream about being with my mother. Months later, the dream is still clear in my mind.
My mother and I were walking together in town in a crowded and rather grimy district. We were going under a low dark bridge and we stopped to talk to a man – I had a feeling we had arranged to meet him. He was smartly dressed and had a official air about him. We were talking about houses and he expressed disbelief that we hadn’t sold our house during the recent property boom. I was very annoyed at this and said ‘This is our home, we live here.’
A young policewoman came along . We were talking to her and she started telling my mother where to go to get a plumber. We had by now turned about and were going back in the direction we had come from. My mother and the man and the policewoman were in front of me, and I was being hampered by the fact that I was carrying a large armchair upside down over my head and back. The weight kept slipping from side to side and I kept having to stop to readjust it. I lost sight of the other three but I knew vaguely where we were going.
The chair somehow became a backpack.
I reached a point where there were several junctions in the road. I felt sure that I took the correct turn at the first junction but was unsure about the next turn. I went on for a bit and I was in some sort of fleamarket, possibly Camden Lock? The backpack had vanished.
I realised I had taken a wrong turn but I knew which way to go. A couple of women with a baby in a pushchair were blocking my way but I pushed past them by jumping over a little culvert and went towards home, which was not far away.
When I got to the right area I wasn’t quite sure which was the correct house, although the one I thought it was, was just like a very dilapidated version of the house I shared with my first partner. I called out “Mum, Mum” very loudly several times and there was no response. I tried the front door of the house and went in. The door opened straight into the kitchen, which was dark and dingy and in a terrible mess.
My mother came downstairs – a white-haired old lady with a strange sort of mannerism and, I think, a foreign accent. I was sitting on a high kitchen stool and she was standing facing me, and while we were chatting she suddenly fell over backwards on the floor. I bent over and picked her up and we hugged each other closely and I cried and cried in her arms, and told her how I had wanted her and not ‘that other woman’. And then I woke up, and cried for real.
I think that the official and the policewoman who led my mother away from me probably represent authority – the man being my mother’s husband (who would not let her keep me) and the policewoman being the society that judged illegitimacy to be a crime.
Although I can’t interpret every element of the dream, I believe it shows that I have always, at a very deep level beyond my conscious awareness, been longing to find my way home to my natural mother and a reunion with her.
This understanding has come very late in my life.
If only there had been someone around when I was a child to explain the situation to me, to allow me to grieve, and to comfort me. Maybe then I would have been able to accept my adoptive parents and to settle more easily with them.
The drawings are by Kathe Kollwitz. Kollwitz's artistic work was influenced by her socialist upbringing and by the tragic loss of three of her young siblings when she was a child: also by the death of a beloved son at the beginning of WW1.
