It’s starting again… I hear bath water and feel the heat from the steam coming from the faucet. I hear him laughing behind me… he’s right outside the door. There he is… he runs in and out of his room with only a diaper half strapped to his body. He has the biggest smile on his face and what looks to be the aftermath of his vanilla ice cream smeared across his lips. I scoop him into my arms and blow a “fart” on his stomach… which makes him laugh even harder and yell “Daddyyyy Stop” and then asks me to do it again. Then it fades a bit.
I am asleep and “dreaming”. I put dreaming in quotation marks because even though I have had this same dream at least 5 times over the past few years… it is much more of a re-enactment of actual events as opposed to a dream. It fades back in…
I am wrapping him in his Paw Patrol towel with the hood that can cover his head as his bath is ending… he is telling me that he is cold so I wrap him tight and smother him in my arms as I carry him to his changing table. It gets a bit blurred and then becomes clear again as I am brushing his hair and he is staring up at me… so deeply into my eyes. My eyes begin to water as I feel it seeping out of the depth of my soul and wash over my body… the dread. I know that this moment… this time with him… in this way… has an expiration date. I know that this is temporary. I know that there will come a time when I am taken away from him and will no longer be able to hold him. No longer be able to blow on his belly. No longer be able to physically make him feel warm and safe within my embrace. And it is all my fault. He is staring at me because he knows. “I love you so much buddy. You know that right?” I plead to him. “I will always be here for you… always” I promise to him and myself. He sees me so deeply and I pick him up and walk out of his room into the “white house” that was our new home but never felt like ours or a home because it was neither.
I wake up. And I am smacked in the face with the reality of this dream coming to fruition.
I had the dream at the beginning of this past week. If I was to guess… I would assume it was because the boys were on vacation with their mom and I wasn’t able to call them on our normal day so I missed them dearly. And every time I have the dream… I can’t get it out of my head for days on end.
I remember the actual experience unbelievably precisely… it happened often towards the end… and I can physically feel the pain and sorrow every time I conjure up the memory. I remember that there was a moment… as I was looking into my son’s eyes and hating myself for making the decisions that I made that led us to this inevitable result… where I wouldn’t be able to emotionally handle it any longer. I would succumb to compartmentalizing my decisions and actions and lie to myself. I would force myself to believe… “No. This is not temporary. I will never leave his side. I will figure out a way to make this all work. I will fix it. I will fix everything and I will be there for him and for his mom and for his future brother. I will fix it all.” But even though I would not admit it myself at the time… I was lying… and deep down… I knew it.
And now when I have this “dream” and I spend time in here thinking about those moments in the past with perspective… it is clear to me that the lesson lies with being honest with yourself. Because ‘honestly’… we lie to ourselves more than we lie to anyone else in this life. We tell ourselves things that allow us to make decisions that we know are not correct…”just this one time…”. We make excuses for ourselves when we want to procrastinate or postpone something uncomfortable…”I’m too busy to deal with it right now… I’ll do it tomorrow…”. We put the ‘mental band aid’ on ourselves often.. covering up our wounds and try to make ourselves believe that if we can’t see them… they aren’t really there. But let me speak from earth shattering first hand experience… the momentary relief of that lie is not worth the heartache of the future explosion.
I would do anything to be able to go back and make different decisions or at least “wave the white flag” when I knew that I had dug a hole that I could not climb out of as opposed to continue lying to myself and trying to “make it right”. But I cannot… it’s too late for me to change the past… I can only work on my today’s and tomorrow’s but you may be in it right now. And if you are… if you are reading this and immediately thinking of that thing in your life that you know you should probably stop… big or small… please… for yourself… for the ones that you love and love you… don’t succumb to the lie. Make the decision to make the change… to stop the bleeding… to put down the shovel and stop digging because the sooner you stop… the easier it will be to climb out of whatever hole you have started to dig.
There is sunlight up there waiting for you… you just have to climb back up and find it. And if you look hard enough… you will see the hands of your “tribe” reaching down to help pull you up… but you gotta start the climb…
Stay Healthy. Stay Active. There are no such things at “white lies”…