Kindred Souls Adrift: A Mother's Confession
by Lanascopic
Introduction
Forty years ago, I had a dream. It came true as soon as I woke up. While this dream was a mystery to me, it made its intended impression on my subconscious mind.
If I’d have known the dream’s meaning back then and shared my interpretation of it with the world, people would have dismissed my claims as having zero evidence to back them up. Looking backward through time gives me a different view, though. Today, observing my children’s lives retrospectively, I see all the facts that I could never have known at the time. These facts are evidence of my dream’s meaning, which was supportively aligned with my intuition.
I wasn’t compelled enough to follow my intuition despite it being supported and highlighted by this important dream, and I’ll share why that happened. What follows is a braided tale involving four factors: my anomalous dream, an adoption decision, my circumstances, my barrier in making the best decision in my case, and the outcome of all these factors for two of my children.
I do not intend to mislead anyone or cause irrational fear or doubt, which is why I advise all here to use discretion and understand that my circumstances were unusual and took on a rare intensity which permeated every aspect of my life. This probably won’t be the case for everyone who takes an interest in this memoir. It won’t be the case for everyone looking to this memoir for a hint of direction in their own lives. So as a strong disclaimer, please consult with those you trust if you are, like I was, facing a big decision regarding your child’s future.
We often overlook anomalous experiences, misunderstanding them or dismissing them. Why? Because someone else says we should? Often yes, that’s why. In my experience, these unusual spiritual events contain the guidance one needs during a hard time in life. However, I believe they highlight one’s intuition rather than contradict it, and that’s an important point to bear in mind in determining the meanings of these experiences.
I had a hard time understanding the meaning of my dream for too long. I also allowed someone else to virtually make my important decision for me. These factors combined with others to create an overwhelming theme of misfortune and suffering in my life. It’s this suffering that I’d like to help others avoid in their lives whether they feel they've received any messaged from God or not.
Though, people sometimes experience guiding visions or waking premonitions, and since I experienced a dreaming premonition, I'll address this form of guidance. It's important to examine all the guidance we receive, especially when it pertains to the futures of mothers and their children.
One of my biggest questions about this dream was this: What kind of precognitive dream includes two specific details that apparently don’t repeat when that dream comes true? Hundreds of details in that dream, all but two, repeated in precise order the second I awoke.
Besides that, my dream had two distinct parts. The angel was visible in the first part. I relived only the second part. Yet was the angel really gone? What should I think of this angel thing, anyway?
We don’t see angels. We often suspect they couldn’t be real except in Bible times. Some dismiss the idea of angels altogether as a silly girly flowery sentiment, or the object of all kinds of art stemming from that of the Great Masters to coloring book prints.
The world doesn’t like the idea of angels anymore. If they do, they rarely admit it. In my experience, many people appear to regard angels as a frivolous fascination, which I think is both counterintuitive and inaccurate. Mention an angel out in the civilized public sphere and you’ll get eyes rolling and smirks or chuckles. I can see why. Society has fictionalized angels a lot like society is beginning to fictionalize God and the afterlife. From here, heaven looks like an animated paradise.
People seldom see living angels in any form. Instead, they see cartoon angels, digital angel art, happy little cherubs with flowers and candy gifts. We’ve become conditioned to respond to the idea of angels as silly fodder for children's imaginations.
Here's the crux of our counterintuitive inaccuracy: We've exchanged our innate spiritual awareness for an awareness of winged halo fictions. In my thirties, even I came to dismiss the idea of angels in front of other people. I didn’t want to look delusional, unintelligent, or unsophisticated. Deep down I knew angels weren't always pretend, even while I found most of the angel figurines, costumes, and wallpapers fantastical, ridiculous, and repulsive enough to drive everything related to angels from my sights. It all seemed so heads-in-the-clouds.
Figurines, posters, and occasional obsessive collections by angel fanatics: I can’t help it if they have idolized angels to a pulp. That has far more to do with some quirk in their dreamy personalities and far less to do with any real living messenger and his job. While I find this consumerist angel craze repulsive, what I’m about to reveal is why I believe that angels, as ancient wisdom says, deliver messages from beyond the earthly plane.
The living angel in my precognitive dream was superimposed there in a visual context that he wouldn’t have taken on in the waking world. He reacted to the sounds and sights, giving me glances I didn't understand at the time but have since decoded.
So, what was the message here, and if it made an impression on me, then why didn’t I follow the exact buried intuition the dream had dug up?
I'll answer those questions and more. But first, a micro account revealing a moment in the early life of my children, which I dedicate to my daughter, Heather, and to my late son, Jacob, as my validation of their struggles in both early and adult life.
Here is the first priority in my heart, Part One, delivered in the spirit of my sincerest honesty.
Part I Fatherless Kindred Souls
It was 1995. They were born in April 1992 and May 1993. The injustice was already in progress in ‘92, ‘93, ‘94, and so on — this cycle, which pushed on like a gale wind inside an average-looking home where the window blinds hung wide open by day. Routinely agonized here were these two helpless little children, brother and sister. Despite the world-sized anguish they shared here, the whole bustling globe outside was oblivious to this pair, and their tremendous suffering, which was heavier than each of their frail bodies when it weighed unbiased and blind into both their delicate souls.
One might think that with any hurt so large, whenever a child cries out for help at volumes maxed shrill and outspread, the world would feel compelled to stop and go see what’s wrong, peer through the windows, knock on that solid door. Get inside, deliver the innocents to a better life.
But that’s not the way it works. How does it work, then, this grave malfunction, that life should be so unfairly mechanical while voiceless victims are born to suffer, every day? Even in the absence of physical abuse, there is an enormous emotional demon that whirls to life and tortures little children between its gnarled fingers. When conditions are chaotic, denied, overlooked, such a grizzly demon does not hold back, and he sits on their chests in their nightmares when they’re older.
See them. Small. They are like Hansel and Gretel, and I only wish to the outermost edges of the endless universe and every root, bone, and whisper buried in the red earth that this was some antiquated fairy tale. I can only dream that their feathered mother, a humiliated hen by habit, had taken a different path. I fantasize that she had set this pair on a separate road at least, as two infants, a pair of Moses-twins in a basket sailing toward the arms of a new, strong, noble mother, a real woman. I have asked God what he was thinking to have entrusted that meek pair of children to a hen who ran with roosters.
It seems so cruel.
There, at that home, on the loud side of the window’s glass, a small child walks on dust through the wastelands of his abandonment, laying rainwater beads like heavy stones along his pathway to a locked door. It’s a dead end. Sealed — like his fate. He can barely reach the knob, but he’ll never go through that door after mother and catch her. Sister feels it too, those longing teardrops he sheds. They’re under her bare feet. They’re mingled with her own shocking sparks and dripping question marks about mommy’s rejection.
Grandmother rocks in a green wooden chair, dialing a number on the phone with a scowl, spreading the news near and narrow that the mother has done it again — she flew the coop, like a wicked hen leaving but a trail of feathers.
The tiny boy Hansel patters urgently across to the window’s glass, tracing the hen’s trail, believing — needing — to find her, but the car is at the stop sign, turning toward Long-Gone Town. That man is driving.
But why, they think, these tiny people. Why should mommy like him better?
Hansel is like a tiny soul trapped in the bottom of an unused glass which is overlooked, at risk of someday being filled with water, but no one knows the time when he’ll become pinned beneath that pressure. He is the more dramatic one, as if he somehow knows deep down his own fate. He slips over mingled dust and tears, rushing to the portal, capturing the doorknob, rasping. “Mommy!” He can hardly breathe, his face is red as beets, his emergency musters a distorting grip upon his tiny face, scrunching it like he is paper trash. Breathe child, the passive angels whisper, who are hiding from the sight of things which are not supposed to happen. The anguished angels look away from one another’s wincing observations, “Breathe, boy,” this command echoes across three decades, then it stops.
Gretel holds it in more. Her breath is scorched. The child stares like a stone full of magma, cooling lava pressing through its cracks to form scars that scold her tears like ants that march right back into her watchful eyes and disappear. She blinks to see what comes next, red ants nipping at her subconscious soul.
Grandma hollers, “Hush it. Quiet. I’m on the phone.”
What embraces them? There is nothing left to measure their existence but the ceiling they can’t reach, the walls expand like megaliths around them to a distance which represents their mother’s withdrawn arms. What embraces them then but the chilled, indifferent air. It takes her place in the folds of their little necks and ears.
Defeated, Hansel stills himself, slides down to the floor, he cries right there, rocking his small, strong head against the door, exhausted.
There was a photograph on the kitchen table, there in that place, in early 1992. A childless couple. What a match those sweet people would have made, being tangerine capped in the exactitude of amber locks. What were the odds of that, in an era when a match like this transplanted any rescued child in unquestioning assuredness? It was such an era.
Take notice of those odds.
Grandma rocked them sometimes, but she wasn’t who they clung to. She might as well have been the rocking chair itself, which would hold them both together like a wooden substitute for mother. Mommy would almost never sit there, even when it seemed she should. So, its green emptiness must have glared down at these living little amber-haired wrecks of wants and needs in the cold, false accusation of its empty seat.
No. No? It wasn’t their fault that God’s gift lingered in a photo and forever went unwrapped.
Aren't children supposed to be protected, somehow?
Part II: Smokin’ in the Girl’s Home
Let me start from the beginning, in my own early life.
When the soundless, guiding voice of God came to me decades ago, I didn’t know how to recognize it. When God gave me the first part of the earliest, most important direct message of my life, it didn’t come through the mouth of any psychic or prophet, nor did it enter into the material world, and it didn’t form a single word. No, there were no words. How do you speak an image in a language of compassion and guidance that a reasonable teenage girl can understand and translate into compassion and courage?
What if she won’t be reasonable, though? I wish I had been. I traded reasonability for the responsibility of delivering this message, though I wish I hadn’t. Yet, that will always be the trade off, and it may be tragic. For me, it was.
Only today have I discovered the meaning of that precognitive dream, which I had nearly 40 years ago.
This dream appeared to be showing me not decades into the future, no, not years or even hours, but a mere minute into my future. I would contemplate it, perplexed, for decades. Only today did I set out to write the whole story of the dream. In this enlightening process, my dream’s profound meaning became clear to me. It feels like I peeled back the big blue sky this afternoon to discover the answer staring right at my soul.
It was around February or March 1986, seven years before my late son would be born, when images entered my sleeping head.
I was a highly sensitive daydreamer, a repeat runaway, and a painfully shy girl who never felt sure about what the social rules were in almost any circle, even at fifteen years old. I ran because I thought I could understand a world outside my reach and be accepted there.
A large brick home in South Louisiana had been converted into a girl’s home called Pilate’s House. We never pronounced it right: It was always Pah-lucks House, or that’s what it sounded like to me in other people’s Cajun accents, so that was what I said. Since this rural facility had no sign, I never saw its name in print. So, its pronunciation became something of a skewed oral tradition. This was where I had been living for about six months, and where I’d remain for about another seven months. Twelve months was said to be the maximum stay here, but my stay ran over to thirteen agonizing months.
The girls here were given allowances and one of the supervisor women always loaded us into the van every Friday, drove us to the store, where those of us who smoked bought cigarettes. No ID required. It was this sad perk, in which adults okayed kids to smoke cigarettes in the facility’s backyard, that gave me a rare, invigorated perception of privilege.
There were four or five bedrooms, and newbies started out in the level one bedroom, closest to the office and dining room. I had made it to the level three bedroom early that year. My bed was in the corner, straight across from my bedroom door. That room had two other twin beds to my right and a walk-in closet across from the middle bed. The bed at the opposite end of the room was by the window.
The facility had a long, paved driveway and big carport, and if I’d have stuck my head out my bedroom window and turned it to the right, I could have seen the van parked in the carport, about fifty feet away. It was quiet out there.
I was technically a ward of the state, under the state’s control. My mother had no legal rights over me during this time. She was allowed to take me home on the weekends. Never during the week. It was none of the staff’s business, but my mother had been without power that winter. She was living in a nice newly built townhome, using the gas stove to heat her cute little place with its colonial inspired furniture, lots of greens. There was a Christmas tree decorated in the living room. I had never lived in that townhouse because she moved there after I was sent to Pilot’s House, though she had a weekend bedroom set up for me upstairs. When I was there, I stayed inside, I never left, and I had no friends to visit me. I don’t think anyone visited us there much.
She wasn’t a drug addict or anything like that: She was a fat, proud, old-fashioned, religious woman with a soft spot for homeless people. I think her lights were turned off because the rent was too high, and her means were limited. She was going through a stage in which she became too stubborn to live in any plain place more within her means. After discovering this delightful townhouse, she refused to resist.
Then again, maybe she had to pay for car repairs so couldn’t afford to pay the lights, but she kept her plight silent, and so did I.
Late winter arrived and brought with it the flu, my belated Christmas present. Though the gifts my mother had given me while I was living in the girls home consisted of a luxurious pair of black leather ankle boots with tall, squared heels. They zipped. And she gave me a suitcase I normally would have hated because it looked like it could have been named Chadwick or Finley, being red plaid. I hated red, hated plaid even more. I preferred a muted blue or any dusty tone — comfort-seeking colors that were quiet and withdrawn, like I was — I generally found any attention from less quiet people to be scary and disturbing.
Such people liked red in my view.
My mother had more traditional class than I did, so sometimes bought me ugly classy things no matter how expensive. The only reason I completely forgave that ugly little suitcase was because it was round. It had four red knobby feet to stand on, a thick red leathery handle, and a long zipper inside the edge of its flat face that followed its curvature. Inside, it was black. I had never seen a round suitcase, and I just loved it; rectangles seemed too serious to me, intellectual, unfeeling.
She didn’t want us to be this way: poor and troubled. Some people appear to accept their plights, if you wanna call it a plight, but my mother pretended to be better-off instead. She pretended well in front of people who were better than we were from her vantage point. I believed her, that so-and-so was better, more conforming, better educated, more ownerly — though my perspective of them extended like auras around their forms which revealed they were also colder, crueler, and that their tighter structure came off as unnecessary and soulless. I found such people invasive and presumptuous, third-eyesores in the innocence of my gentler, friendlier mind.
Living in this highly structured, pressurized facility, I felt defeated, trapped, taunted, and unimportant most of the time. But I got by, felt accepted by my outgoing house peers on an odd day here or there. Sometimes I even opened up. Lilly, our cook, was the only adult there we all loved. She was always available to talk to and the only reason that my situation wasn’t a full-on nightmare.
I remember Pepper and Anna, and Becky, Libby, and Melony, Drucilla, and Angela, only a handful of my peers there. Never saw any of them after I left there, except for Becky, briefly.
Pepper had an open, genuine way of having the house mothers treat her with more dignity, almost like an equal to be reckoned with during disagreements between them and her. She had a unique, forceful walk, like a freight train with legs. Broad shoulders, vividly blonde, tan, mature voice, from California, super cheery yet thunderingly authoritative if pushed; her wrath was what southerners might call righteous indignation. I don’t remember ever making her mad. Interestingly, she paid attention to me without making me feel put on the spot. She had a generous goodwill toward me, which I found curious.
Anna was short, petite, wore glasses, had dark beige hair that was so short I wondered if she’d really picked that haircut for herself: she read books, got into medieval lore, fantasy and such. An open giggler. On the flip side, she had a feisty broodiness and suffered from not being taken seriously by the adults while she was upset. An arm-crosser. I consciously did not anger her, though that wasn’t always a subjective matter for me. We had a few good conversations, both backyard smokers, listening to Led Zeppelin on her portable in the grass.
Libby had developmental problems and unusual girth on top, was tall, had a gummy smile, smiled a lot, and was easily hurt to a point of timid silence and retreat. Though when she was happy, she was more outgoing than I was, despite her disability. I wondered how that could be, then assumed there was just something wrong with me. She was super sweet, innocent, and well defended by the bolder girls from the occasional frank or unaffectionate house mother.
Angela had straight, long, brunette hair and I thought she was a lucky kind of pretty. She was soft-spoken and subdued, a background person who didn’t seem to care whether anyone here accepted her or not. She was depressed, wanted so badly to go home that eventually she and Becky and I all ran away together. I eventually followed Angela to meet her dad, out of town. I very quietly witnessed what looked like a loving relationship between them, and she cried her eyes out to him because she didn’t want to go back, but he gently explained that she had to. In the sometimes-inaccurate perspective of the poor and fatherless child I was, she seemed so protected. Then I was asked to leave. So, I left.
I was a little dirty, ragged, and had no one to trust. I didn’t see things clearly, but in retrospect had been technically raped by a few adult men in runaway-world in the last few days. But I walked off the property alone. That’s what I remember. No one was rude to me. I was just in the way, I figured, like a third wheel.
At some point, either before or after that, a staff member did some biofeedback experiments over several days on most of us, one at a time. I remember that I responded with ease to the process, relaxing my toes, then my soles, my ankles, up to my head. It was a nice escape. I think I volunteered for it twice, and I’m pretty sure we were rewarded with candy or something enticing. On the first day if this, when one of us was curiously summoned, the girls had gathered, clinging together in unifying whispers, mystified, trying to glean why the staff had anyone going upstairs to the administrative offices.
Though on this particular day I was there without any of them, who were all at school. I was in bed with a fever, no appetite, and a tray on the floor by my bed that held a cold bowl of chicken noodle soup. I was asleep. I knew nothing of my mother’s mission to come over and swoop me up, take me home early for the weekend.
This was around midmorning on a Wednesday.
My mom didn’t like this facility, didn’t approve of me being placed here, thought the other girls were questionable and the relatively young staff were sassy and, well, ‘trashy.’ Normally, she’d wait outside in the car for me rather than come inside. Yet she remained reserved during the few times she entered the facility.
My energy was crushed by this flu. I was knocked out in my level three corner bed. Behind my closed eyes, I was dreaming of that moment — or the moment after it — of being in that room alone, lying in that bed. But in the dream my eyes were open, and I gazed at where the bedroom window was supposed to be. The whole dream was through the subjective perspective of my eyes, not from outside of myself.
Part III Doorway of Angelus
Consider this retelling a slow-motion presentation of a dream that lasted only a minute or so. I don’t know the exact time of this experience. It was a Wednesday, maybe 10:30 in the morning. I was still asleep. And I was dreaming about one minute into the future. In this dream, I noticed an angel just outside of, well, not the window. The window was expressed in my dream as a set of French doors, both wide open.
The angel and I observed one another in silence.
His features looked masculine. He was at least six feet, six-one, a white gown draping his full, strong form. His hair was blonde, straight, and hung to just below his chin. This angel had human-like clear blue eyes, void of mystical or sparkly effects, a light golden skin tone. His wings were impressively large, full, and appeared heavy. They stood a foot taller than the angel did. The realism of this exceptional being was remarkable, and he was as calm as I felt.
In my dream I thought without words but with impressions, so felt from an artistic angle that he was pristinely, aesthetically beautiful. He was irresistibly curious to me. Why was he staring at me? He offered no scowl, no smile. The expression was almost like a mannequin’s, but with moving, blinking eyes, breathing, living tissues.
His pale lips never parted to speak, gasp, or sigh, so I didn’t see his teeth, in retrospect. Also, in retrospect, I’m certain of what that look was. It was not sheer curiosity. It was his question of if—? If what? If I recognized him, perhaps, or some point or theme here, and he felt a sobering suspense every progressing second that I did not recognize either him or this communication or something he wanted me to see.
I remember that look vividly, but interpret it through mature eyes now.
During the dream, I had the feeling that he had been there watching me a few moments before I noticed him. We had been looking at each other now, unstirred, hushed, for barely ten seconds when I heard the hum of a car in the driveway. He also heard, turning his head in that direction to stare a moment.
From my bed, I could not see the carport.
I watched him watch them, though I did not know who had come over. It was odd that anyone would drop in during the week. I was aware of the weekday and general time, even in my dream. He stared at them like they were significant somehow.
When the car’s rumble thickened, I knew it had pulled underneath the carport. All I could see was the angel and the sky over the prairie behind him. I remember having the impression that this was an ironic day, being cold as winter is yet looking as clear and sunny outside as if it might be a perfect 72 degrees. The visual quality of the air’s particles was of an elusive crystalline mist which infused the bright blue day with a sub-visual spark, nothing flashy, just clearer, cleaner than I was used to, if flourishing, healthy. It was like I could have reached through that doorway, touched the physical day with my hand, palpitated the texture of the vast, oxygenated midair.
What would a day feel like if you could literally touch it with your hands, though? In retrospect, I think it would have felt like a clear sea of gently stirring talc in contact with my skin, soothing, cool.
Inside, my bedroom was uncharacteristically bright, like when a long-shaded room has all windows and doors open because you’re cleaning and carrying boxes out to a truck in the process of moving out. And it felt that way, emotionally, like today the routine was broken.
I didn’t realize I was dreaming. Aside from nicotine, there were no chemicals in my life, no drugs.
The engine silenced. Then, for a few seconds more, I watched the angel observe this person. Keys jingled briefly. I heard a handful of footsteps on the concrete, sharp-heeled strikes breaking into segments of distorted tones, almost Doppler, almost digital. It’s the same intricate sound as the same in the waking world. What wasn’t usual was that I took such a keen notice of every rich little noise, one after the other, and the duration of the silence between them. The car door shut with a decisively brief, sawed-off echo. Also normal.
Again, the angel glanced at me. Keys chimed. The tips of those heels struck the ground in an unhurried rhythm that ended with a curious knocking on the sliding glass door in the carport, which led directly into the big open dining room.
When someone came to the door and slid it open on its faintly rumbling tracks, distant utterances entered both my awareness and the angel’s. So, he stared at the carport area again. I noticed no outward reaction: no movement in his wings, no heaving in his chest. He was still, and no sounds came from this living being at any time.
Then the angel watched me yet again. It felt like only seconds had passed in this dream. While I didn’t understand the blank stare on his face at that time, I knew he wasn’t malevolent in any way. Though I’ll say that for an angel, he seemed wholly present and fleshy; not misty, not glowing, not shimmery, not glittery, having zero fantastical qualities.
Instead, he was earthy, opaque. High definition. Solid. Alive.
During the brief seconds our eyes met, his gaze felt engaging, sobering.
As I wondered in abstract, not what he was thinking but rather what the meaning was of an angel staring at me, and here, and now. What was the meaning of this moment, this overall scene?
With arms at his sides, he looked away from me for the last time. Though he didn’t look toward the carport, but off to his right.
His overall body posture didn’t change much if at all. He simply turned his back to the carport. His whole body pivoted forward at the slightest angle. From what I could see from my bed, the angel lifted centimeters off the ground while drifting in the direction he was aimed, and seemed to dart off headward, out of view, away from this facility.
The double doorway was now abandoned. Gazing past my roommates' empty beds, I saw only the open doors and the outside world beyond my wall. I felt the cool air on my nose, and it didn’t bother me.
Curiously, I don’t recall any flapping in his wings, no rush of air from them. No sound. In retrospect, any sound from his wings might well have startled me, or the sight of large wings in motion may have frightened me.
Perplexed yet tranquil, as if disembodied and aware of it, I didn’t feel the suffering of my sickness.
I wanted to walk through the doorway, was considering how easily I could go that moment, barefoot, how I could step from the carpet to the short green grass. Though I was still in bed.
After a couple of breaths, and while staring past the open French doors, there was a knock on the bedroom door.
Around half a moment had passed up till now in my dream, which continued. I looked toward the knock.
My mother opened the door, asked me how I was. Her keys jingled. She was dressed in that familiar blouse of hers, the mauve one with the darker mauve dots on it, wore her mauve knit skirt. She wore her dress shoes with the blocky heels, closed the door behind herself, alone.
I was now in a stunned, or stoned-like, state. My mother had never been this deep into the facility. It was almost the way you’d feel if Santa Claus walked into your bedroom. Disbelief yet wonder — which, in retrospect, is how I should have reacted to the angel, not my own mother.
But I didn’t feel that way toward the angel. Instead, he was like a stranger I trusted.
And she was like someone I trusted who now felt like a stranger.
I guess that’s odd.
She said, “Gather your things. They said you can come home early this week.” That was her aged voice. I knew it well. But she didn’t feel like my mother here, maybe more like a distant grandma.
I didn’t move quickly because my disbelief was that powerful. I sat up, hesitated, turned myself on my bed and put my feet down to the floor, but I felt my right heel barely dip into that bowl of cold chicken noodle soup. I was moving so slowly that I felt the liquid before my foot plunged into the bowl, barely skimmed the surface of the soup before I reversed motion. I was in no hurry whatsoever, so I leaned forward, looked down at what my heel had just touched.
Oh yeah, I thought. I had forgotten there was a tray on the floor.
I stood onto the carpet.
She said, “Come on. Where’s your things? You want me to help you gather them?”
I don’t remember saying anything to her other than closet. I crept towards the closet as she opened its folding doors. She tried to turn the closet light on, but it was the wrong switch. Inside, I pulled a chain, clicking the light on.
She made some quiet comments, but I wasn’t listening. I took my red, round suitcase first thing, set it on some surface in the closet. Unzipped it. Reached for my black boots. I started putting one article of clothing into the suitcase at a time. Then I started looking around for my hairbrush, asking in a faint monotone, “Where’s my brush?”
“Look, it’s there,” she said.
“Oh.” My voice was dull and low. I didn’t look toward the window — it was out of mind. The closet felt dingy. In this dream, I was unaware of any concrete thoughts, stunned by an overwhelming sense of uncertainty like I was between worlds. I reached for my brush handle.
Abruptly, there was a knock on my door again. But I wasn’t in the closet. I was in my bed again, watching the door open again. My mother entered the room again. No, wasn’t dreaming now. This real knock had actually awakened me.
My mother asked me how I was. Her keys jingled. She was dressed in that familiar blouse of hers, the mauve one with the darker mauve dots on it, wore her mauve knit skirt. She wore her dress shoes with the blocky heels, closed the door behind herself, alone.
I was now in a stunned, or stoned-like, state. My mother had never been this deep into the facility.
Again, she seemed unfamiliar.
If I were to give an account of what happened over the next waking moment, I could do so most accurately by simply pasting my account of the dream from above. No, not the whole dream, only from the point where my mother knocked on the door in the dreamworld.
There wasn’t a microsecond of detail that occurred in the waking scenario that didn’t occur following the last knock in the dream.
Nor was there any detail that occurred after that knock in the dream which was absent from the dream.
I saw no French Doors now. And, of course, I saw no angel.
If I were to break this dream into two parts, I’d say the first half ended with the knock on my door and the second half began from there.
It is worth noting that I didn’t relive the first half of the dream upon waking, the part where my mother drove up as the angel watched. My waking mother must have been an eighth of a mile down the road while I was staring at this dream angel. I think the fact that I relived the dream from the knock onward is interesting.
I was asleep when she drove up, immersed perhaps in the second half of this dream. And as I slept, as she drove up in actuality, where was the angel? In the waking world, had he observed her driving up?
I knew why my mother was here when I awoke to her knock. Experiencing knowledge of what will happen over the next seconds does nothing to prepare you for it because it's so overwhelming, like nothing you've ever experienced: alien.
Today it occurred to me that, during my dream, I had forgotten about the soup on the floor. Then, seconds after I woke, I had forgotten about the soup all over again. On waking, I was mind soaked into my conscious experience of how each tiny segment of right now was identical to what I’d just dreamed. Immersed, mind blown, I examined each microevent as it occurred.
Imagine waking up from sleeping in your bed and you're not at home. Instead, you're touching the moon, tasting its dust, aware that this is indeed the real moon that you're standing on. You're awake. Yet, your acceptance of this reality teases you like windchimes that dangle at the edge of your outstretched fingertips while you manage to tap them but once or twice. They make a faint sound. Yet, you don't even have the strength to gasp. That was exactly how I felt.
Until today I had never analyzed any of this, even though I’ve long been fascinated by this experience.
What followed that knock, down to my waking feelings of immersion into this tranquil strangeness, was identical to my experience inside that dream. And all concrete thought was suspended as I dragged along, limp in wonder.
Though I was not afraid once.
This mesmerizing waking echo finally reached the dream’s ending-threshold when I reached for my brush. It was as if life was paused, and I was suspended in a quietude of the mind and soul until I felt my brush in my hand. At that precise point the whole experience ended because waking events had progressed beyond the dream’s conclusion.
Oh yes, I knew with certainty that I had been awake now for about the last minute. I also knew I had dreamed roughly one minute into the future.
Emotionally, crossing this threshold was similar to Technicolor. I now came alive, started whispering to my mother that I’d had a dream, that there was an angel, that I dreamed all this before I woke up, that it had all happened again immediately.
Although I couldn’t tell you precisely what her response was because I was so taken by these mystifying thoughts that flooded my mind, entranced by the question of How could have happened?
Yes, she and I later talked about it down the road and at home, after she felt like Mama again to me. Although she didn’t know how to receive my account of a precognitive dream. They tended to see that as witchy back then around there, I guess. So, she told her church friends, who replied, “It must have been the Holy Spirit showing her that God is good.”
Okay? No? No. There’s something much bigger than that here, I thought. My experience had felt so broad and vast that I dove into my recollection of it often at first, swimming there in sheer leisure because I didn’t know what to do with this oceanic experience.
And most baffling was the presence of the angel. Rest assured, I did look back at that window before we walked out of the room. I saw no set of French doors but a plain, closed, draped window again. That room had resumed its usual dinginess. I couldn’t have been happier to get out of there.
Rescued. I had acclimated to my drab reality, hadn’t been looking for any rescue. So when it came, my relief was actually sobering, like how could I have accepted being so glum and hopeless before? It almost felt like my whole stay and the past several years of my sad life had all been a dream, not just my moment dreaming into the future. Remember that great sense of invigorating privilege I had felt outside on the lawn smoking cigarettes openly in front of adults? It now looked flat and so small compared to the sensation of this unanticipated privilege of openly escaping in front of those same adults.
I walked out of there with my stranger-mother, my personal Santa Claus, feeling grateful and unoppressed.
Now, if my dream accurately portrayed the sounds of a car driving up, engine shutting off, door slamming, keys jingling, and heels clinking against the concrete then did it also accurately portray the presence of the angel who was watching it all from outside?
Whether my dream was in my head, mind, soul, or on another plane, I can’t know. Wherever it was, I in fact experienced it.
The angel standing in those French doors gave the scene its intended interactive coherence. Obviously, earth physics won’t allow a window to morph into a set of French doors. Angels won’t appear in the waking world anytime such an anomalous dream begins manifesting in reality. As far as I know, we don’t see angels as such on the earthly plane. That doesn’t mean they aren’t here, though. We just don’t see them.
I’ve long suspected the angel was present on the earthly plane when my mother, in waking reality, drove up as I still slept. I mean, all the immediate waking events actually followed the dream’s sequence with mind-splitting accuracy in the waking world. So, during that one minute I dreamed into the future, why wouldn’t the angelic visit also have been accurate at some point in the waking world?
I believe this angel was there, watching me from outside my actual earthly window as easily as if there had been an opening in the wall.
But why might an angel be watching my dream with me, engaging, visibly noticing what was intended for me to see, hear, and both?
Looking back now, I feel as though he was literally trying to coach me.
Still, what sense does it make for there to be a dream like this, in which all details from start to finish are repeated on the waking earthly plane a minute later — except for the details of the angel and the French doors? Was symbolism at play in the dream?
It’s possible that the angel appeared in those two opened doors as a symbol expressing God’s intentions for my life, as if God were saying to me, “I have opened the doors wide for you. You will be guided by an angel. When you look, you won’t see him. Yet he will be there. He will show you what I'm doing.”
It’s possible, sure, but the intended message didn’t hit me until much, much later.
Part IV Intuitive Message
It’s not easy to reach a fifteen-year-old girl, but there were numerous points in this message. This was the best moment for God to make his point to me, the best stock image of my life, if you will.
Still, if the window could appear as a set of doors, then during my precognitive dream, why didn’t the Universal God alter anything else in the room to make the message clearer to me? Why didn’t God cause the radio in my dream bedroom to blare the message?
Now that I understand the message with a hundred percent certainty, I almost scoff at myself for never getting it before. I was preoccupied, immature for my age, and glued to a hideous urge to irrationally please other people. So, it took decades for me to see that this message, delivered by Angelus in that doorway, meant this:
“Look around yourself here, girl. This moment is a gift, Lana. Does it not feel just? This moment is an example, child, to show you that your future children will deeply appreciate having an accessible mother who comes to take them away, to protect them from a state of abandonment. See this motherly figure, and how she carries out a rescue which isn’t customary within these walls? Who gives this privilege, who receives it, and who benefits? Look. Those in legal charge of this home, who make decisions on your behalf, who hold you here in the bondage of your misery, who keep you outside of all access to a mother, who now determine your fate, have granted this woman the right to take you from them. Compare how sick and tired you were when they held onto you, when they kept you as if motherless, to how rejuvenated you feel now that they have let you go. Is this not mercy?
“Look, look. Listen, listen. Understand what is repeated.
“There is a cycle which, like this dream, will absolutely repeat itself. When it does, you will be like those in charge here, having sole authority to free your children, to release them to the childless saviors who long to rescue Wednesday’s Child from a motherless and fatherless plight, from a life void of real relationships with real parents.
“When this cycle repeats, ask yourself whether you are the mother figure or the institution from this dream. I tell you now that you shall be like both. Understand that. Understand that.
“Without intervention, your children are at risk of repeating this cycle which grips you. Please, wake up now, and realize what your mercy will feel like from the perspectives of your children. They will feel anything but abandoned if you take heed.
“What is the answer to your puzzle, my lost little child?
“I know who you are. I know that it will take decades for you to heal from the deficiencies you’ve inherited from your own childhood desolation. Yes, it takes decades, though you can’t understand that now. Such sadness as this cycle afflicts produces real symptoms to include the fever of anxiety which paralyzes young human beings every day. You can’t see this now.
“Look at my angel. He points toward the arrival of mercy. You may not understand how sensitive children are to the wrong upbringing, how devastated their lives may become as a result, how easily the blindness of the broken children increases suffering in the world once they bear young who only repeat these cycles. This cannot be reversed. You don’t understand that now. Yet, even now, you can understand the joy of being rescued as such a child, if only for today.
“I can’t change the childhood you've experienced. Though, today, I free you to begin your healing process. Take my gift. Then you can break this cycle to free future generations. Today, you experience firsthand the power of the mercy which I have granted you. Pass this on, yes, this. Today, you must see that you alone may save your children.
“While you can’t know what is to come, you must remember my message. I will send you hope, for your children’s sakes, and for yours. I am merciful.
“Gain this awareness now. You will not be alone. My angel will guide you through. You will know the signs. Have faith in me, in the power of such mercy, heed my message to you. I am your God, and I will save all those involved, but not without your faithful cooperation, Lana. You are at the center of whatever will be.
“Be free today in joy and remember this blessing. Double it. Replace the old cycle with my enduring compassion, and I’ll take it from there. No one in your life has discussed any of this with you before. You don’t know about these things. You are naïve about the world, about life. That isn’t your fault. Though it is the reason that I come to tell you directly that you must break the cycle. Wake up. Wake up.
“Remember this.”
Obviously, if God had given me an extended verbal message like that in my dream, I wouldn’t have remembered the whole thing. I would never have comprehended all those words in my heart as a fifteen-year-old. I had to experience the feeling of joy instilled in me on that merciful day, when I was granted uncustomary freedom, if only for a short while, by those in charge of my life. God was trying to infuse me with compassion, the non-verbal, feeling-based form of this message, because even void of wisdom one tends to act on a compassionate drive.
There was only one way to avoid doubling this cycle. That was for me to double this mercy, granting one like it equally to each child concerned. How? Through adoption. I was to at least think about how the personal disfunctions resulting from an upbringing involving poverty, psychological damage, and people-pleasing, void of good parental relationships and guidance, the sad things that lead to generational cycles. I was to understand that I was an at-risk youth, void of the skills to raise children until I would grow up myself.
I was to see my limitations in the truest light, to realize that my personal limitations had the potential to seriously harm others if even inadvertently so.
How can an unskilled person pass on valuable skills if she is oblivious to them? God wasn’t looking for me to experiment, to gamble with my children’s lives by saying, “Eh, let me raise them. I might figure it out in the process. Let's see what happens, coin toss."
They say that all parents make mistakes, and no parent is ever truly prepared to be a parent. There is a large distinction between that situation and my situation, however. The fact is that it would be a very long time before I grew up enough to make common, as opposed to uncommon, parental mistakes, to make normal as opposed to destructive mistakes that would cripple my children even in deadly ways.
The message must have had some influence on me, because I knew, as if by instinct, that I had nothing to offer my children. I didn’t even have anything to offer myself back then. I needed a lot of work and a lot of help. People don't want to believe that a mother may well be entirely unsuitable. It happens, yes, it does. I was more than just unprepared, and that distinction is an important one when society assumes that just because a girl's body can produce a baby, she is suitable to raise her own child. A girl's mind will heal when it heals and not before. There is no express train: All healing is on foot. Healing will not be rushed.
These facts are not shameful, either. They are just the reality. Denial of it isn't helpful for the mother or the child. The problem is that I denied what I knew.
My life didn’t start to stabilize until I married my current husband in 2009. Though I dare not say it was perfect, or in time to rescue my second and third children, Heather and Jacob.
I did, however, raise my youngest child free of the cycle. I always call him my lucky child: he was raised by both caring parents and never had to sleep homeless in any backseat and was never abused in any way. He never went without protection, dignity, comfort, and guidance. In fact, he is the first of my children to graduate high school despite me and my mother having dropped out of school. He’s never been in trouble and isn’t interested in using chemicals of any kind.
He’s everything I wasn’t: responsible, confident in his skills, and undamaged by issues of abandonment and poverty. Yes, I had the potential to be a decent mother — but only after I matured, not before.
Back in 1992, I was so vulnerable, so gullible and simple, that despite having resolved to give my daughter up for adoption I didn't go through with it.
The cycle continued as a direct result.
Heather and Jacob were born at a high risk of living displaced in the world because I was routinely paralyzed in a dangerous, people-pleasing frenzy that had to stop.
However, it didn’t stop, and that was my huge mistake. The way I hurt other human beings with that mistake is comparable to having committed a crime against their minds and their lives, if even through sheer, unintended negligence.
Heather and Jacob had almost nothing that my youngest child was raised with and everything he didn't have. They had no father, had a mean stepfather for a decade, were passed around from my mother to me and back often, to a woman I hardly knew once, back and forth between my mother and me again, to my sister for a while, then back to me when I lived in a house inside a fenced junkyard. Finally, they lived with my husband and me for a while before I let them go off on their own while they were just sixteen and seventeen.
Yet that open confession doesn’t really explain the poverty, the abuse from their stepfather, the screaming my mother did too often because she was stressed out but wanted to keep my children living with her anyway, and it doesn’t explain how Jacob was especially sensitive to all this hell in a way that ate into his practical functionality in the world.
He lived for thirty years yet, being one belonging to the crowd of those like himself on many levels, he started using drugs at age fifteen — and for the entire second half of his life.
He died as the result of a heart attack. Whether it was caused by the drugs he'd used was medically inconclusive. Yet using chemicals for years will take a toll on someone's mental and physical health, obviously.
The details leading to, and surrounding Jacob's death are another story. Though I’ll say that he was heavily stressed out the week before his death, exhausted, overworked, in need of professional help no one could afford at the time because my husband had been injured on the job. My son was lonely, convinced he had no purpose and would never be important or achieve anything, suffering prolonged insomnia, and just needed rest more than anything in the world. He was often depressed. I couldn’t help him. I saw his depression and I felt it when I’d look into his eyes. I’d hear it in his tone. He loathed his life, like I used to loathe mine. Though it was me who designed his life, who repeatedly dragged him around and dumped him off his whole childhood.
I can’t begin to express my sorrow. Like me, he had no kind mentors in his younger life. He was withdrawn, like I was.
Why can’t we make our children rise above us? If they see violence, they can’t unsee it. If they hear screaming and vicious arguing they can’t unhear it. If they feel slapped around and attacked by a person in their own home, how do they go to bed at night and unfeel that? How do they feel safe?
How do they stop having nightmares in which they can’t breathe because something grips their legs, pulls them from their beds to the floor and tries to drag them off? How can they not feel like timid people-pleasers while simultaneously infused with the secret rage of being treated as less-than, while everyone looks better than they do, has something positive going on, and gets more love and protection than they get?
Heather has always had her own way of dealing, but she’s suffered a lot as well with understanding what’s expected of her from society and with feeling unsure about herself, in my opinion at least.
How could I take two children back then when I was unripe myself and ripen them into members of society who were any better than the one who gave them life and held all legal rights to them to the end? It’s not uncommon for children to turn out like their parents. I was too inexperienced in life to know anything about that when I decided to opt out of an adoption that had been practically expedited.
When I imagine how they'd have found themselves under far healthier circumstances than those I provided, I feel like I robbed them all red-handed, my children and the almost-adoptive couple.
Jacob was fascinated with longevity technology, the medicine and such that extends longevity. He’d always had a heavily pronounced aversion to the concept of death: he wanted people to live, not die. Like me, he suffered impostor syndrome, though, despite being pretty intelligent. In fact, all my kids have suffered impostor syndrome except my youngest, and all are pretty intelligent.
I’m not sure if most people would want to come out with the truth if it was similar to mine. Yet, myself aside, I have seen the worst that I caused so I can’t bear to keep the truth from others because from my vantage point the lives of children are extremely delicate: their minds, their internal experiences, their identities, can all be crushed by a broken upbringing.
I used to fear that I'd accidently let my firstborn son starve to death or get a fever without me knowing it. I knew he was delicate, though it freaked me out to realize how easily an infant can die if they don't get fluids or proper care. I'd never even babysat in my life. My firstborn was the first child I'd ever taken care of, far away in Germany, by myself and with his army father off in the field for weeks at a time. It was scary for me. I was only 18. I was right to be concerned, though I wasn't concerned enough. Lucky for this one his father raised him.
I was a wanderer, state to state. I was like a beach bum without a beach.
Young humans are vulnerable. They need much more than whims, wanderings, and a daily meal. They need a real relationship with functional, involved, mature, capable parents.
Incapable, immature parents are people too, though, so when they fail it’s because another failed them. The last thing I condone is these vulnerable misguided people being talked into keeping a child then being crucified for it: that kind of activity is not beneficial for anyone, nor is it necessary. Sure, naïve parents like these will mature and heal eventually, but when? After they’ve raised their children? Sometimes, yes. And that's fine, for them alone, but it's not fair to the innocent children.
When deeply damaged parents turn perfect babies into broken, lost adults like I did we are seeing the cycle at work.
If this cycle did not exist, we would not recognize our planet or society because it would be void of so much of the suffering and injustice we are used to seeing or living in. I believe adoption can help to break that cycle in many cases. It’s impossible to have any human system which has zero flaws, and adoption is no different, yet I believe adoption helps in these extreme cyclic circumstances far more often than it hurts.
Whether adoption is good for many or just a few, however, I can't erase what I've experienced as a woman who overlooked the intuition highlighted by a direct message from the Universe. How could I have come to make such a poor decision?
By giving control to another. This has been the number one most painful lesson in my life, which is what gives this lesson the value which qualifies it to be shared everywhere.
Part V: The Barrier
I'd like to explain how bad decisions are made, how the consequences I caused by backing out of Heather's adoption bled forward through time and into last year, when my beautiful middle son passed away in his deep troubles.
I’m not beating myself up in grief, though, as one might assume. To the contrary: I’m understanding more clearly that which I've long suspected. Naturally, I regret my mistakes. Any human being would deeply regret mistakes like mine. Yet, my eyes have been opened at the very least. This is why I must share this experience, its causes, its outcomes, and how I believe others can prevent its dismal results.
Among my at-risk issues was that I was susceptible to being misled by a particular person in my life who made a deep impression on me when she lectured me to abandon adoption. This was a person who I more than looked up to, a relative who I long idolized with the same intensity as when teenagers idolize music artists and want to emanate all they do.
I'll call her Ahi, which refers to the conjunction between heaven and earth, at the center of which I placed her, between God and my children.
In 1992, I was in the process of signing my unborn daughter over for adoption. I had the perfect plan, two healthy accountants who lived near my town, and they couldn’t bear children. Let me add that they, like both of my children, were fair redheads. Like my daughter, the prospective new mother was petite. What were the odds of such a match, and so quickly? I didn't have to wait long at all. That's all I remember.
To this day I can't remember who arranged this for me and I don't know why that is. Maybe I blocked it out because I felt ashamed of doing the wrong thing after someone tried to help me take the right path.
It was cold outside when had taken a city bus, alone, to a church where I signed some papers. I remember wearing a long grey coat. I was to go back a week or so later to finalize the arrangements.
Instead of finalizing, I backed out of the deal, and I have felt guilty about it ever since. I didn't pray often but I prayed for forgiveness because I knew I had disappointed God, and backing out didn't feel right to me. I had disappointed myself. I vividly recall experiencing cognitive dissonance.
Within a few years of that mistake my guilt increased: I just knew deep inside that I had done something destructive. I didn’t realize yet how profoundly destructive it would all turn out to be.
To introduce another vicious cycle my ongoing guilt didn't make things easier. It was no secret that I had longtime problems with myself, either.
In 1986, God was aware of my struggles and pathologies and the high likelihood that these would result in the suffering of my innocent children, so he created the dream opportunity to try to reach me far in advance.
Had Ahi known what would happen if I obeyed her sentimental urging of me to keep my daughter, I sincerely doubt she’d have given me the long lecture that led me to reluctantly change my mind and keep my child.
And, when I saw during that lecture that Ahi strongly disapproved of adoption, period, I not only reluctantly kept my daughter, but a year later also unenthusiastically kept my son; I didn’t even attempt to put him up for adoption to a better home, because I didn't want to make Ahi unhappy with me. I just played along by her rules, even though I was already struggling with taking care of my daughter and struggling with my own childhood demons.
I was about 20 weeks pregnant with my son when I dropped my medical assistant course. Chasing city busses down with a sack of heavy books in all-weather had become draining for me. One OBGYN doctor even barred me as a patient because the busses often ran late so I was late to one too many of my appointments. I didn't have good resources. I had no help. Other than living at my mother's I was alone. I had no friends, no income, was depressed, and a high school dropout.
Over the next decade, my life became harder and harder, and I dragged Heather and Jacob around with me in that hard life between dumping them off on other people.
This precognitive dream experience had offered me the clarity and encouragement that could help me to carry out my highest priority: to go to any lengths to save my own children from suffering precisely what they would suffer. They struggled far too much with socioeconomic conditions, personal demons, an unavailable, damaged mother, and an abusive, mean stepfather.
The cycle was hungry, and like a ferocious lion it never missed a chance to feed well.
Heather and Jacob didn’t deserve that kind of life. No child does.
What could have encouraged me to do the right thing more than a pre-arranged understanding between God and my intuition? I think his message was the most powerful guidance I could have received.
I also think that sometimes these messages aren't meant only for the recipient but by way of the recipient actually sharing the spiritual message with a wise mentor, as you'd expect them to, the message eventually reaches those who are skilled at managing big decisions and giving good advice.
I will always tell anyone that it’s important not to file these mysterious events, these anomalous messages from God, away as the intrigues of entertaining personal stories rarely shared, but to talk to someone about them.
I didn’t talk in depth to anyone about my dream, not in 1985 and not in 1992, while pregnant with Heather, and wish I had.
I also wish I had revealed to somebody, anybody, that ever since I formed my earliest memories, I remembered being consumed to my core with pleasing Ahi, and that I still was gripped by my idolization of her. I was too embarrassed to tell anyone something like that. So, I never even said it out loud to another human being until after 2020.
And I didn’t follow my heart, either. I ended up overlooking my direct message from the Universal God, far too unwise to help myself, not knowing who to turn to. I tended to be the subjects of loud arguments between people in my family. No one could agree on what to do about me and my mess-ups, or whose fault it was that I was so abnormal, so I was afraid to speak up. I absolutely did not want any attention, not from them; I can't stress that enough.
Instead of sharing my message, I turned my strange dream experience into butterflies to behold, something beautiful and mysterious to file away, an anomaly: A Spiritual X File. And an occasional popcorn attraction, a mere undecipherable wonder to revisit now and then.
I suspect that, had I revealed to anyone that I was in the grips of Ahi's unwitting control over my decisions, that I had this weird problem of obeying her much and more readily than was healthy, my mother’s friends or the pastor, somebody, then might have taken the time to mentor me at least a little.
They might have said to me, “You are a separate person from Ahi. Who is Lana? What can Lana do that Ahi can’t do? Let’s talk about your gifts, your value, your right to be treated with dignity and not treated like a push over. Surely you don’t always want to please Ahi, do you? Are you just scared of her making you feel small sometimes? Let me help you to think about your priorities. Let me prove to you that Lana’s priorities are not other people’s priorities. Let me help you feel autonomous. Let me help you shatter the myth that Ahi is perfect, because you think she is. You have been long blinded. Feel free to come to me if you feel like you're at risk of slipping into her priorities again. I’ll support you; I'll remind you that your priorities aren't hers. I don't mind being here for you. Everyone needs a helping hand sometimes.”
Then, when I backed out of that adoption, this hypothetical wise mentor certainly would have said, “Lana. Hold on. Are you trying to please someone else again? What does your heart say? And that dream you had, what do you think God was trying to tell you? He wasn’t telling you to let others make your decisions. Would you like to talk about how you feel about raising a child, why you think you should or shouldn't?”
The only reason I can imagine such interactions is because there were many similar interactions between my mother’s friends and me. They acted as my mentors now and then. I should have opened my mouth to them. What could it have hurt? It could have prevented so much pain.
This is how bad decisions are made. We give power to another human who is not going to take control of what happens next. Instead, they'll leave you high and dry after you do what they want you to do. We end up in a bind because of it. We feel too embarrassed to confess this destructive tendency to please others. I never said to anyone, “I do everything Ahi tells me to. I’m scared to open my mouth, talk back, or disagree, because nobody ever disagrees with her. Plus, she holds her head up, sounds so wise that if I don’t have her approval, I’ll look dumb next to her. Then everyone who listens to her will shun me or scold me and I’ll feel only more like the black sheep of the family.”
Even when fears are irrational, we must tell someone what's driving our decisions, and never make decisions for all the wrong reasons.
Part VI: Are the Children First?
While I can’t speak for all the girls at Pilate's House, I can say that I strongly suspect many of them were, like me, products of a sad cycle. We were all wards of the state for a year. We were good kids with hard childhoods.
While Pilot’s House represented a hard time in my life, it was like a moonwalk compared to the hardships that were to come for both my children and me. One thing I’m grateful for is the counselors there. They introduced me to considerations that were alien to a girl brought up in relative isolation by a fanatically religious mother. Honesty about how one feels then understanding why were among the concepts I learned to be open to even if I wouldn’t practice these for a while longer.
We must be honest, and that’s hard to do when you are seeped into a narrative that you’ve believed all your life. How was I to know anything other than what I learned throughout childhood? How was I to know that the cognitive dissonance I experienced every time I engaged in pleasing others was exactly what would have justified me in openly revealing my occasional passive resistance to other people’s control over me.
I had been brought up in the Deep South, learned to submit and obey. Now here was Ahi, who’d told me what to do my whole life. In retrospect, though, she did so on whims and wasn’t around that often. We weren’t even close. She sometimes asked me questions about myself but never volunteered any comparable information about herself. I felt like a bug under a microscope so clammed up, didn’t answer much because I was oversensitive and afraid of being scoffed at. My obedience to her was like that of an unwilling subject to their dignified queen. If she said wear this and I declined, she’d nudge me until I wore it. If she told me to wash her dishes and it wasn’t my job to do so, I said nothing, revealed no facial expression, walked like a zombie with its head down and washed her dishes, even when I was almost thirty years old.
I know that sounds weird to most people.
If I upset her, and she took on a harsh tone with me, I held it in. Then the moment I could get out of sight, I hid some place and bawled. She seemed like the gold-standard scale of justice, and if she deemed anyone wrong, it was like the infallible God himself had judged them as improper. I didn’t want to do wrong. It hurt me a lot to disappoint anyone, especially Ahi. So, I did whatever she urged me to do. And if I couldn’t bring myself to do it, I at least hurt myself deep down by trying.
This was a behavioral pattern that I had ever since I could remember.
We all deserve to be treated with dignity. When we are brought up without it, we may not learn autonomy for decades. We can be made to do almost anything when we lack dignity.
This was one big issue in my subconscious mind throughout my youth and until recently. I had long wondered, “Why do I idolize Ahi so much?
Is something wrong with me?”
In recent years, that question rose to the surface of my self-awareness. I believe it is one of the top three best questions, perhaps the top best, that I can ponder about myself. What on earth influenced me to exalt Ahi since before I could even remember, despite my mixed feelings?
Clearly there was something that occurred early in my childhood, because my idolization of her was already in progress by the time I was four years old. In fact, I don’t remember a time when I didn’t vulnerably idolize her. Ahi was like Kryptonite to my willpower, and my soul dropped, debilitated, to the floor of my stomach when she was around, allowing her to do all the talking, to tell my timid head what to do.
God saw that this Kryptonite was a problem in my life. He knew I was damaged in such ways and desperately in need of his intervention. This is the reason for that anomalous event, not to dismiss it or ogle over it but to let it guide me since I was too weak minded to lead myself.
There is no shame in being weak minded and no one should ever feel insulted by their own truth, even when it’s unideal. Shame deflects healing.
I’d like to add that living in the Bible Belt, I see a lot of myself in the young people here while I’m out and about. I relate. I know that no one has ever taught some of them that they deserve to be treated with dignity. They may not understand the negative cognitive dissonance they experience when they unenthusiastically, quietly do as they are urged by uninvested individuals.
People will urge you on impulses and whims, never looking back while you go the way they told you to, trip in a hole, and cripple your leg. Not their problem, is it?
I realize there are a lot of nuances involving urging a young person to do this or that, yet despite those, many teens and young adults aren’t given the dignity necessary for them to live life without being taken advantage of. They experience impostor syndrome, feeling alienated, questioning their identity, or making all kinds of false decisions that are harmful.
This message is about interventions for children at risk as well as their mothers, and about our human failures to decipher or care to decipher spiritual guidance directly from the Universe, or God. We are distracted from putting children first and distracted from the mysteries that aren’t meant as mysteries but intended to help humanity, these particular anomalous events. The world is distracted from these priorities on an epidemic level.
Even when people appear to place unborn children first by sentimentally urging their unwilling mothers to keep them and raise them, they aren’t actually putting any child first. They’re indulging in sentimental feelings, perhaps trying to intercept the development of events that frighten them personally or things they don’t understand. This offers no hope to the unborn children or young infants who are at risk of being brought up in the cycle. This kind of misguidance is a bad idea, and the children involved won’t have improved lives as a result.
Some personality types may not understand what it feels like to be a people pleaser, how debilitating it can be. They may not know a people pleaser when they see one.
We must never assume that a young person is on-board with whatever we advise them to do just because they nod or appear to respectfully agree. This is a matter of insightfulness as opposed to the dismissiveness of the mature, though uninvested, self-designated guide. People-pleasers hide under the covers of nods. Deep down, they often feel obligated and resent persuasion.
Young people tend to know when they’re lacking life skills, social skills, financial opportunities, feeling crippled by isolation, damaged by overwhelming sources of harsh criticism, screamed at often, psychologically abused, depressed, anxious, engrained with impostor syndrome, living in an ongoing identity crisis, too submissive, and have even developed rage and irrational terrors. They know. They aren’t just lazy or stubborn.
No. They have reasons for looking unenthused. They may not be as capable of taking care of a child as their elders may like to pretend.
We must never contribute to anyone keeping her child for the wrong reasons: there is only injustice and deep sadness down that road. It’s gravely important to advise responsibly, not sentimentally and not out of irrational fears.
Support the mom-to-be in her sincerest decision.
Everyday innocent children are slung into awful upbringings. I’m deeply saddened to have played my part in exactly that sad scenario. There is nobody, nobody to take responsibility except for me.
Though there is still so much hope for others. Yes.
This is why I want every last young person, pregnant or not, to know this: You deserve to be treated with dignity, you can heal, you must absolutely avoid those uninvested people who lead you around by the pinky, at least until you feel more stable, more in control, wiser, and stronger.
You have a right and an obligation to do what your conscience tells you at will.
Consider this tall, clean fact: It generally takes two specific kinds of people to fall into an unhealthy dynamic. One is a short-sighted leader; the other is a vulnerable follower. This kind of relationship is also an epidemic. Often only one party gets hurt, and that one is left responsible. Don’t fall for it.
Stay aware.
The greatest value my confession holds today is in revealing it to help others. My hope is that these facts spark other people’s contemplation about their situations and inspire them make the best decision they can, especially for their children.
Honesty, compassion, and courage are among the highest ideals. These come through the presence of mind. Talk to a professional if you can’t find help otherwise, because a little encouragement can go a long way.
Today I couldn’t see more clearly how my dream message was intended to take a troubled young person and give her courage. Though if that message didn’t awaken me fully on time, it can still awaken others. It’s a message that touches on the interactions between abandonment and rescue, resolve and people pleasing, failure and fear, life’s long roads, tragedy, and awareness.
I am in both awe and deep regret today, examining my ownership of my unhealthy decisions. It’s not a comfortable thing to do, I’ll admit. I have the broadest insight ever into my painful mistakes, accepting that ultimately, I alone caused harm to other human beings, beautiful, innocent human beings.
This doesn’t have to happen to anyone else.
I sincerely hope this message will find those in need of it, that it will activate an intervening awareness in their hearts and lead them to examine their own mysteries, both anomalous and internal. I hope others can thus make choices that are suitable for themselves while there’s still time to ensure a better future.
May God. always bless. Jacob Isaac, and all my children, and your children, and all the young mothers who face a scary decision about the future.
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Never Silence Intuition