dr. karev. (sigh.)

I dreamt of Dr. Alex Karev last night. We were part of a live-in training, like the mission school I had with ICPE, and he was this strikingly handsome guy who wears white undershirts torn at the sleeves and a khaki jacket and pants and says to me “amputi mo yata ngayon?” during my worst hair moment.

In the next installment, he was a boarder at my grandmother’s house in Basco. Someone seemed to have hurt him so he came to the room, where I was talking with Lila, to say goodbye. He said he had decided to go to Africa. He sat beside Lila and reached for me with both arms, kissed me on the lips, and hugged me. It was so real. So real. Surreal. When I woke up I wanted to go back to sleep again.

You know how sometimes, when you have a dream about someone, you wake up with that weird feeling you can’t shake off and that affects you the whole day? The dream seems to change how you see or feel about that person and now you feel a certain closeness to him/her. When that person is a character in a soap opera, you know the warm feelings are silly. Except that in my dream there was no silly.

first storm with baby

What bothered me was not so much the winds that howled that night but the fact that typhoon Frank came and went without my having a clue as to its direction, size or strength. I did not even know its path. I mean, I track storms. I have almost never been through a storm without three sets of projections in my head.

There were heavy rains already by Friday, and, since the power was out we went up to bed early. The power came back on at 8PM. The winds began to whirl violently past midnight, and the power went out again shortly. That’s when I realized it was Frank.

I could hardly sleep after that. It was my first storm with a baby and we were riding out the storm “blind.” I had no information to base decisions or hopes on and I felt helpless.

My mobile phones, my only source of light to check on the baby, went out of battery power before dawn. The windows were all shut except for the small window in the bathroom downstairs, but with almost no ventilation I was worried the four of us would use up all the oxygen upstairs before morning. I feared so much for baby, who was very quiet during that night. She must have been lulled by the rain and howling outside.

All that, and I go to work this morning and read the news about a ferry sinking in the Visayas the night of the storm. 700 were feared dead, including children.

Children. In my mind, while reading that news story, I could see fifty-foot waves (images from Perfect Storm) and the ferry sinking while the rain poured. I could see the ferry sinking, and the faces of the children. And every one of them is mine. They all had my baby’s face on them, as I imagined how the parents who were grieving right that moment felt. It was too much. I ran to the bathroom just in time, and burst into tears.

kid-crazy

Motherhood has opened much more than my cervix (well technically, my cervix did not open, but you get the point). I am all for children, I love them. But now I look at a baby and I know, as in cerebral-know, him or her. How soft, how warm, how wiggly. Suddenly, there are no ugly babies. Suddenly, I am the mother of each infant I see. Each one is special and beautiful — this phrase is no longer air, but hard concrete.

sumdep kamu.

with great expectations, as always.

welcome!