Nathan Dumlao
This week, I’ll likely become an aunt. Little Harry, at this moment curled tight in my best friend’s warm watermelon belly, has my parents and my siblings and I on the tips of our toes, ready to drop everything and run to the Texas island where he’ll be born (BOI—born on the island—as the Galvestonians refer to it).
This is where I got my beginnings too—living in a womb on that slab of brown beach off the Gulf, the sound of seagulls mixing with talk of medical school and the future. My parents—at the end of their medical education—managed to get me back to the mainland, to Cajun country, before I emerged. This won’t be the case for our Harry, who—though his father’s accent and cooking will surely infuse him with his heritage—will spend his first several years playing in the sand.
I’ve had two dreams about Harry so far. In the first, which happened a few weeks ago, his mother and I were in a coffeeshop, full of masked strangers. I smiled and touched the top of her belly. Suddenly, I could feel the baby’s tiny fist, pushing against my palm. He pushed harder, harder, too hard—cracking her in two, oddly bloodlessly. In my horror I called for help, and the masked strangers went on by. Suddenly and confusingly, in the way that dreams can be, I had him in my arms. And she was on her feet, literally holding herself together, latté in hand, suggesting calmly that we go to the doctor.
It’s nothing new for my subconscious to go rogue in this way—I’ve had hyper-detailed, off the rocker dreams for as long as I can remember. Sometimes I’ll write them down, less in an effort to interpret than in vain fascination of the less familiar (perhaps more creative) realms of my mind.
It’s not so very difficult to guess how this particular dream came together, though. Though they aren’t necessarily lived or outwardly expressed, my anxieties about Harry’s arrival—fear for his and his mother’s health, for the way her life is about to permanently change, for how this world will look as he grows in it—seem to have manifested in a tableau of absurd, indifferent violence.
My nephew is entering an odd and turbulent world. And in total obliviousness, he comes nonetheless, eagerly—knowing nothing of the virus threatening he and his mother’s health in every breath, nor of the unprecedented havoc it’s wrought across our globe. He won’t miss the traditional hospital-room welcomes we would have wished him if things were different. He’ll know nothing of this moment of racial reckoning, nor all that came before it. He doesn’t know, yet, that his entrance into the world as a white male at this time comes with higher expectations than the ones before it. The way the world rages and shifts now prepares a path, one hopes, for his generation to be better than ours—to embrace love and respect and kindness with more clarity than we, or any of his ancestors, have.
On a more immediate scale, Harry has no idea how his birth will change his parents’ lives, how it will change my life. I look at my brother and my best friend, early twenties—one in school and one just starting a career. Until now, we’ve been on the same plane—so focused on discovering ourselves, exploring the realms of possibility for who we are in the world. Soon, though, so soon, they will both shift outward, placing their focus and responsibilities on something greater than themselves—something in so many ways unimaginable, mythical even, to me.
Over the weekend, I had another dream. I met him, really met him—in an anticipatory memory-like haze of what is to come. All soft skin and fresh new-life smells and bliss. He was larger than a newborn should have been, with blue eyes, and he smiled at me. Love was everywhere. I texted his mother when I woke up: “Met Harry in my dreams last night. He had really full lips and you loved him so much.” Her response: [Three smiley faces with hearts] I can’t wait to meet him. He needs to come this week dammit.”
She’s ready. Aware of all the weight and responsibility and sacrifice to come, with the world seething around her, she is ready for him. As in the first dream, she’s prepared to hold whatever needs holding—all in order to hold him. The world will greet Harry fitfully, but his family will do so with such overwhelming, enveloping love. And even of this, he has no idea. We are eager to teach him.
