My dreams keep getting stranger and scarier, but at least I get to see my mom. She seems happy, too. Last night I dreamt again of San Francisco, of this strange apartment building that feels somewhat like a transient hotel. What is this coming from? Perhaps it’s a mix.

On my first visit to SF, I stayed at The Hotel Bijou in The Tenderloin, a seedy district with a long history of transience. The neighbourhood butts up against the luxury district that now functions with their windows boarded up to protect the goods inside against rampant smash-and-grabs. Here, people sleep on the sidewalk in front of Neiman Marcus and shit in front of Gucci. The Bijou, like many others in the area, used to be a single occupancy unit residence, like the ones you see in old movies where the unfortunate people live, the ones that are just trying to make it in the big city. The ones for which the Murphy Bed was invented, a device that made it semi-decent to invite the opposite sex for a visit, as it meant you could put your bed away, to hide the inevitable insinuation of sex that being invited into someone’s bedroom implied. Now even the cheapest charge $120 a night and you can buy any drug you want out of somebody’s car on the next block to the east. All of this is just a five minute walk to Trader Joe’s and Filene’s Basement where you can catch the shuttle to the UCSF Mission Bay campus. It is truly a crossroads, a rare find in this day and age.

The next time I stayed at The Rodeway Inn, as it’s closer to the other campus at Parnassus, and after several days of rooming in with Mom on the pull out chair bed, I needed a shower and to wake up in a place that didn’t smell of hospital. The Rodeway is the last stop before the Pacific Ocean and it feels like the world’s end. It’s an old Art Deco era motor inn that still has a beachy, Hollywood feel. If you ever go there, ask for one of the rooms in the part to the left of the office, those are the original ones and they feel like a tiny apartment. If I ever moved there, to the Outer Sunset, I would open a bar or cafe of sorts and call it World’s End and I would offer tonics with CBD and herbal remedies instead of alcoholic drinks. I’d make it strange and wonderful and homey. I’d sell second hand books and local canned food in glass jars.

My imaginary dream hotel also has this hint of New Orleans to it, which is strange, as I have never been there. All I have is my imaginary impressions of it, of the Victorian terraced upper level, creating a dramatic balcony, as seen in A Streetcar Named Desire. What are the common elements of all of these places, real and imagined? Desperation, perhaps, and the threat of poverty. Solitude, with or without loneliness. Mostly though, I think of these places, and of my dream hotel, as the last stop before completely teetering off the edge, and falling into nothingness, no going back, no more normalcy. They are the last stop before fading into oblivion, to live a faceless, nameless, unimportant and forgotten life, with no hope of ever coming back. I think this is my deepest and darkest fear – that I could lose everything at any moment, that any and all stability could be taken away from me, all at once. It’s the threat of the rug being pulled out from under me and it’s always been there, all of my life.

Now, I can bet that I took on this feeling by osmosis, from my mother. This was probably how she felt as she tried to adjust to the mania of my father, a man that would have been happy in a tent, with his dog. He needed nothing, maybe that was the Indian in him, I’ll never know. What I do know now is that my mother was the young sophisticate, growing up in cities, to parents that both worked, and took pride in that, with a mother that had been highly educated, and had left rural Georgia to live her life. She was in New York first, I believe, but I will have to ask my Aunt about that, an Aunt that I need to write back soon, among others. My mother learned to pretend that everything was fine, when it most certainly never was, not during my whole lifetime. Her world had been shattered in the years before I came along – shattered by violence, by silence, by decisions made for her that she didn’t want to make, all taken, all committed, all hidden by the men in her life. Then, without recovering, she married my father. He was probably the first man to come along after all of this, he likely seemed gentle by comparison, and warm, and simple. I imagine he was a safe and an easy place to land, and so she did. They married quickly, and eloped. They’d thought of a ceremony in a sunken garden in full bloom, but for some reason or another the families couldn’t agree so they eloped in October of 1974 and a year later I came along in November. I often wonder if that is the real story, or if they actually got married when she was pregnant with me. I’ve never seen a picture of their wedding, nor an announcement. I don’t remember who told me the story of the sunken garden, but when I heard it I imagined a whole different life for our family, one of beauty and grace and hope, rather than feeling as though we had always reached a dead end, a rut that was just too deep to get out of. I wonder how much of what I think of as my personality, my temperament, is really the years of unspoken exchanges between my mother and my father, the tension, the problems, the disagreements that had seeped into and been absorbed by every cell of my being. If you grow up surrounded by love, you feel love but if you grow up surrounded by this, then what is to become of you?

Back to my dream, I have gone so far off topic, as I do. We were in this hotel apartment, my mother and I, and we needed to go somewhere urgently to do something, I cannot now remember what it was but I think it had to do with administration. Constantin, my son, was there with us too, but younger than he is now. He couldn’t come with us, so we found someone in the building to watch him. I wasn’t too sure about leaving him but it wouldn’t be for but an hour or two, so it should be fine, I thought. We went to a building, of administration, or police, I’m not sure again, perhaps we were there to let them know that her death had been a mistake, as she was still alive somehow, even though she’d been cremated. There was again this brutalist architecture outside, in a terrain that reminded me of the streets of downtown St. Louis, the long empty street with some abandoned building and some vacant lots, fenced in with barbed wire. We made it into the building, with its smell and look of administration, of old papers in tin file cabinets, of cleaning products, of old polish and time. We did what we needed to do, got separated for a bit, as we always did in stores and buildings, as one of us would always wander off without alerting the other, each inevitably in our own worlds. We found each other, finally, and got on the elevator to leave the building, but the buttons made no sense, they were confusing, so I made a guess, perhaps chose the basement, and it was from there that the voyage commenced.

The elevator did not go to the exit floor. Instead, it took off horizontally, then it turned to glass, and sped out of the city towards the ocean airport at a terrible speed. It moved with such velocity that I was terrified, as I felt the glass exposed me. I feared that I would be triggered into one of my episodes, that I would lose all control and leave my body, and that I would never get back to my son. Everything was exposed now – the sides, the floor, and the ceiling of this glass elevator – leaving no protection from the outside world racing by at an incomprehensible speed. I crouched in a corner and held on to the rails, hoping to find a position of security, but there was nowhere to hide, to feel safe. I watched the world speed by as we left the city. The highways seemed to crawl in reverse and my vertigo increased as we got closer and closer to the ocean and the airport. Somehow I have placed these two things together, on some sort of peninsula, removed from the city as they often are. The elevator makes no stops, zooms by platforms where there are people waiting. I am reminded of a platform in another dream, underground, missing my stop, trying to get back to where I should have been. Maybe this is all me processing the what-ifs, the could-have-beens, if I’d only made another decision, taken another exit, not missed my stop. Always travelling, but never arriving, never settling down.

On this express trip I am crouched in the corner, terrified, as my mother is somehow calm, with her serene smile, a smile that only a WASP can have, as it gives away nothing, means nothing, and hides all. Only now it seems real, as though she is completely, and reassuringly, unbothered. It doesn’t reassure me though, as I know the further I go, the further away I am from my son, and the more time it will take for me to get back to him. I cannot leave him, this was not anticipated, he is not going to be ok if I am gone too long. Worst of all, he will be scared, as he wasn’t expecting this, and he will think that I have abandoned him.

The worst thing really is, though, not the dream, but the reality of me, me being a mother, me not being able to handle my kids in the way that I so desperately want to – with kindness, understanding, and love in my actions. I’m instead yelling at them to be quiet, breaking promises, losing my shit, and threatening to take away toys and so on, to try to get them to comply with my demands. I’m currently sick, with Covid, and the irony is just horrible – after all of those missed hugs and avoided kisses with friends and family for how many years now, three? I finally relaxed, we had people over on Easter Monday, and I kissed everyone hello, as you do in France, and goodbye. That very evening I felt funny in my throat and my ear and the next day thought to take a test and voilà, Covid positive. It is exactly one year after the day my mother, two days after Easter, tested positive as well, when the boys and I were there to visit her.

Fast-forward a day, and I’m home with my kids as I am every Wednesday as there is no primary school on this day in France. I am alone, as my husband is working in the UK, and I live too far away from town to have regular help, so I’ve no one to call on. I’m tired, more crabby than usual, and trying to keep them from fighting with each other and out of the mud that they love so much outside. Gone is any attempt to greet their frustrations with positivity. I lose it in the car, scream my head off when they can’t be quiet so that I can call a doctor’s office. I call them names and say terrible things. My son in the front cries as now today he wont be getting the skateboard we were supposed to go and pick up, he calls me a liar, and my son in the back apologises for upsetting me. I see my daughter turn her head to hide her face in the crevice between the seat and the door. Her gesture especially stays with me. What have I done, what am I doing to these poor children? How do I stop unleashing my madness upon them? This is the last thing that I want, to hurt them like this. The worst thing is, I think that I’ve begun to desensitise them to my yelling, which means that they’ve heard it so often that it’s become normal. This makes me shudder to my core. This is what it was like with my mother. I have to stop this, but how?

Back in my dream – The elevator finally stops, but we are on the ocean, on some kind of inflatable platform on the water, like a big bouncy castle. I must step out of the elevator onto a big bright blue cushion of sorts, it’s huge in all directions, but I am still scared that I will slip and fall into the ocean and never get back to my son. I never should have left him. My mom goes ahead first, not at all concerned of these things, and with no fear. Now she is just enjoying it all, finally. I see up ahead that there is a solid part of this terrible structure, a staircase made of metal that leads up to a part that can be crossed to get to the other side, where the express elevator can be taken in the opposite direction, back to the city. I struggle to get my footing on the stupid slippery blue thing to make my way towards the platform, and back to my son.

Then I wake up. I catch my breath. I thank god this was a dream. My son is just down the hall, I haven’t abandoned him, and his brother is next to me, sleeping peacefully. The sky outside is a dark blue; it is almost morning. I keep myself awake a few moments to make sure I don’t continue this terrible nightmare, just as Mom taught me to do when I was small. It was nice to see her, though, and to know that she is finally enjoying herself.

I must remember though, this feeling of the terror of uncertainty and instability, of teetering on the edge of some giant horrible inflatable thing that I could slip off of and fall into the bottomless ocean, of racing further and further away from who I want to be with, of being terrified and out of control, and how I took on this feeling from her. Now I know I must give my children a different and better feeling – of love, safety, stability, stillness, and peace – instead of just passing on to them that which my mother gave to me.