scary dreams about delivery

I recently had a dream about having the baby.

This wasn’t my first delivery dream. Early in my first trimester, I dreamt I gave birth to a baby girl with enormous anime eyes and black pigtails in a room full of other women giving birth on metal tables. It was like something out of a science fiction movie.

My latest dream wasn’t any more comforting. This time I was in a private room with a doctor, nurses and JB present, but it was February, and I was trying to tell the medical staff that my baby was due until July. They laughed and said my due date must have been wrong. “No, that’s impossible!” I cried. “It’s too early!”

I delivered a baby girl (yes, another girl) who weighed 14lbs and was 10 inches long. I didn’t get to see her because they whisked her away immediately for some standard tests, but I could only imagine that, with those measurements, she resembled a bowling ball.

JB had to return to work right away but called the nurses’ station shortly after with concerns about the baby’s size. The nurse informed him that he would have to call the 800-number on the baby’s hospital band; an outside party handled all of the records for the hospital and she no longer had access to them.

The staff never brought the baby back to my room, which was probably a good thing, because when my family arrived more chaos ensued. They wheeled me down in my hospital gown to the hospital’s indoor swimming pool and immediately began complaining about the humidity and the heat. “But it’s an indoor pool!” I cried. “What do you expect?”

I was devastated because nobody seemed to be concerned that I just gave birth to a bowling ball. It was all about them, them, them when I was expecting it to be all about me, me, me.

When I retold my dream to a friend, she laughed at its obvious meaning. It didn’t take a dream analyst to pinpoint two of my biggest fears: One, that something is going to be wrong with the baby. And two, that having my extended family in Omaha when the baby is born is going to be stressful.