Pathways

On dreams, motherhood, and paths not taken.

It’s always the middle of the night when the pathways find you. Your husband on one side of the bed and, these days, your three-year-old between you, sprawled out in her easy sleep. She always has her list of nightly demands: her own pillow with the forest animal pillowcase, socks or no socks depending on her mood, and, most importantly, not ever sleeping in her own bed, ever again. These days, you and your husband take turns losing sleep, depending on which of you she kicks through half the night. But neither of you can find it in yourselves to move her back to her room. 

The pathways that come in the dark are not necessarily dreams, though there is the recurring dream recently, always set in your old neighborhood in the town where you grew up, and, for some reason, always featuring you coming in or out of Midway Market, the little neighborhood grocery built of brick. The dreams always have that particular feeling of childhood: how, as a child, you don’t consider that the place where you are growing up entailed someone making a choice about where to live, it simply was, and you accept it wholly and simply for what it was.

The pathways come in the liminal space of half-asleep, half-awake, when your mind is both malleable and vulnerable; when there are not the day’s routines, rituals, and needs-to-be-met, all of which keep your thoughts in order. The books to read aloud, the alphabet to sing (again), the park to walk to and from, and then the carving out of your own time, always precious, always limited, and therefore either highly focused, spent in writing or answering emails, or sinfully (deliciously) squandered in television and chocolate. 

In the dark, in the silence, without the barriers of an itemized life, the pathways unfurl in strange, looping shapes. Not quite questions, but more like possibilities, guided by an unfettered imagination. Sometimes this imagining is terrifying. Sometimes the pathways lead to dark places. These you try and fail to redirect, unable to gain full control over your mind. Instead, you lie there, pressed under the weight of your own mortality, and worse, your daughter’s.

More often, the pathways are neither good nor bad. Sometimes when you wake up from the dream of visiting Midway Market, they bring you on a long consideration of what your life would be if you still lived in that town, that neighborhood. Even though you haven’t been back there in years, the dreams are so vivid. You realize just how much you remember—how the exquisite details of your childhood have stayed with you. How your successive heights as a child are still marked in sharpie—Chelsea, 1993—on one of the market’s walls, alongside the noted heights of the other neighborhood children. And how easy it would be to return there after all these years and fold back into that place.

Most often the pathways are like this: other ways you could have gone or could go now. What would be different? What would be the same? What would you be?

And you always realize, too, rousing yourself at last into full consciousness, looking over at your daughter, deep in her own dreams, that these pathways are, perhaps, your mind’s small and gentle way of allowing you to miss those other lives that will not, now, be yours. You have chosen, and will choose again and again and again, to go this way, to sleep next to this beautiful child, to be her mother.