The Toiletry Bag (Reflections on my eldest daughter the summer before 6th grade)
Ever have a dream so vivid and emotionally raw that it wakes you from a deep sleep, face wet with tears, breathing interrupted by muffled sobs? …right. It’s a jarring way to start the day, so I hope they’re not too frequent for your sake. This happens to me a few times a year and the dreams stick with me for days. They’re usually dreams about loved ones who’ve passed away or awful nightmares where I’m grieving the loss of someone who is still very much alive. I can usually find some peace after processing such a dream – grateful to have felt briefly visited by a grandparent no longer with me or relieved “it was only a dream” when I realize no one has actually recently died in my real life.
Well, it happened again early this morning. I was awakened with eyes welling up with tears, with a few that actually streamed down the side of my face when I was realizing once again “it was only a dream.” The difference today was that I wasn’t mourning the loss of anyone who passed away in real life or in my dream. Rather, I felt a deep sadness around the loss of the little girl my first born is no more. In the dream, my 3 girls and I were all at an end-of-year party for my youngest’s 1st grade class, surrounded by sweet giggles, messy hands and rambunctious play. Familiar feelings of reflections on another fun year of early elementary school were flowing through me until they were abruptly halted by my 11 year old’s presence.
As soon as I noticed her in the dream, she ran from me and hid in the bathroom (which turned out not to be a school bathroom, rather one in our home). When I followed her to ask if everything was okay, she hid behind the shower curtain, demanding I leave her alone because of how embarrassing I’d been to her. At that moment in the dream, I could literally do nothing right. My dream-self started clumsily dropping things, breaking the hook of a toiletry bag that crashed to the floor, while I felt powerless to connect with my eldest daughter, whom I hardly recognized.
During the dream, my angst and aggravation evolved to grief over the loss of my little girl and frustration with the new moody tween that was taking residency. My dream-self picked up the damaged toiletry bag from the floor and was surprised to locate a new fabric loop embedded in the design that I’d never noticed before. I tried to hang it back on the bathroom hook from which it fell and was surprised to find that it hung just right, taking the place of the broken metal hook that I’d simply tucked back into one of the bag’s pouches.
At that point, my sleeping self started to feel the welling up of real tears in my actual eyes, which always wakes me up, but my feelings of grief were still very much present. In fact, they’re flooding back to me now as I relive this dream and experience it all over again. And now I’m starting to realize – the simple symbolism of the toiletry bag.
The bag is my daughter – in the remaining summer weeks before she starts a new chapter of middle school and all the changes that come with it. The small bag is now starting to pull at the seams with all the new products (emotions) being crammed into it and the simple, functional hook that once kept the bag readily available and ever-present can no longer do its job. So it’s out with the old and in with a new hook that was apparently there all along, but was never called into action because it wasn’t yet needed. But now… here it is. Patiently waiting to pitch in to help until a new, larger toiletry bag with more compartments and pouches is brought in to take over.
This analogy is helpful to me as I process the changes she’s going through, but it doesn’t negate the sadness I feel at losing the consistently happy, cheerful, giggly little girl that used to cartwheel through our house. My hope is that with time, I still see those glimpses of her within the amazing young woman I know she’s evolving into. I know it won’t hurt this bad all the time, but for now (and during my own perimenopausal hormonal shifts), I’m granting myself the permission to live in the discomfort of the in-between.
(Side note: I cleared the content above with my daughter before publishing. While it created an impactful chance for us to talk through both our experiences of the changes she was feeling, she found amusement in the fact that she was being compared to a toiletry bag. But that’s the funny thing about dreams. Sometimes the simplest analogy can provide the most clarity.)