I am forced to create a whole new category of notes to contain these recurring dreams I am having lately with babies and little girls.
The latest features both. I am in an Uber or taxi maybe. But instead of heading home, I get dropped off at a cafe. All of a sudden it doubles as a creche (or nursery for the Americans).
In comes this woman that is juggling a load of babies so big, it is hard to see how she is not dropping a few to the ground as she walks into the cafe. There’s a baby carriage in there somewhere but it is covered by babies.
Then, mothers (presumably) rush to get their children and I realize the woman must be their minder. One of the mothers puts her baby down in the baby carriage next to me, but she puts the baby in the under-carriage! I worry so I check on the baby. It is not a baby, it’s a stuffed doll!
Incidentally, I saw something similar here in the lift the first days in this building. This young Southeast Asian woman, young in appearance, had a bunch of kids, one in a baby carriage, occupying most of the lift. She had this intense, urgent look going in her face as if she was determined to do something. What, I don’t know.
At this point, I am at the cashier and I am getting food. I think to myself, I should watch my spending because I still have no job (true in real life). There a young girl with two pigtails standing with her mother, smiling at me. She comes over in the manner that kids can be precocious and I tell her she has a beautiful smile. I want to tell her she has nice dimples but I get interrupted.
All of a sudden we are playing a typical childhood girl game that I swear is universal the world over. I played it in Sudan and girls in America play it, too. You clap your hands and “high-five” each other in a set sequence. I forgot the sequence of the hand movements. So I ask the little girl to show me how the game is played.
Instead, as happens only in dreams, I am painting her nails red. Surprisingly, her mom doesn’t object or even come over. I don’t know where the nail polish materializes from. In real life, I had an enviable collection of nail polish but that got purged. I finish one hand and start only one nail in the second hand. While the polish is drying we are playing the hand-to-hand clapping game.
They are about to leave and I insist on finishing the second hand. It won’t look good otherwise. Her hands are strangely adult-like with long fingernails. I don’t finish the second hand. She’s gone.
I start to worry about paying for the return Uber. Maybe I should have gone straight home. I console myself that it is the same price since I “split” the trip when I came to the cafe. It is on the way. I wake up.
I am immediately reminded that my first nail polish as a girl, was a gift on my 10th or 11th or 12th birthday. I don’t remember which. My mom’s friend, Badreia, gave it to me and Mom was upset because I was too young for beauty products. Badreia told my Mom off (kindly) and I kept the polish.
Baderia passed away years ago in the Eighties, apparently because of a contaminated blood transfusion at the local hospital in Abidjan which gave her AIDS. Or so the story goes. I spared a thought for her daughter, Roshan, this morning, growing up without a mother. She seemed to have done well in life living in Canada. Maybe her mother is her guardian angel.
I am reminded that Susan recently wrote she’s attending a creative writing class in central London when I first started sharing these emails with you. That is quite the coincidence since I am writing almost daily now, here in Virginia, USA. But it is not “creative”, it is non-fiction and straight from the heart.
Susan and I had another coincidence when we first met. I baked a marble cake bundt for a special occasion and all of a sudden she became a cake baker overnight, as opposed to her day job as a sub-editor for some medical journal. I even went to Graceland’s, our next door cafe, which at the time was newly opened, to lobby on her behalf to sell her cakes. She was too timid to do it. Being an American, I had no qualms about marching up to management and asking if they would consider selling Susan’s Babycakes.
Like my dream, there were lots of babies at the cafe, and a little corner that was a play pen. Aymen spent a lot of time there. Susan and I were such fixtures, this other woman, Bronwyn, would make fun of us when she walked in. “Oh, you two”, she would say as she waltzed in. She also sold cakes at the cafe. Susan looked down on her, calling her a Woman’s Institute lackey. Wait, doesn’t Woman’s Institute double as WI, as in the state of Wisconsin. You can’t make this shit up.
I’m sharing all this with you so that you are under no illusion of what Maysa is doing to me. Do not turn a blind eye. Ignore Maysa’s “sorrys”, she doesn’t mean them. Please stop Maysa from invading my dreams and my life now.