Every night, I drink Damiana Leaf Tea. This is not a marketing ploy, although I would recommend it for anyone struggling to get a decent night’s sleep.
The reason I mention this is the effect it has had on my dreams. They are very detailed, very clear, very ‘real’, although in many cases not entirely possible.
The reason I mention THIS is that, for a couple of nights last week I had very clear dreams about my mother, and it has taken me a couple of days to decide whether the content was factual.
And I have concluded that the majority of it was.
The dreams / memories were fairly random, and scattered over a number of years.
Car journeys, mainly in Kenya, when she would regale us with ‘One man went to Mow’ in Swahili, or what is probably a distinctly dubious rhyme which begins:
One fine day, in the middle of the night, 2 dead men got up to fight; One blind man to see fair play, 2 dumb men to shout hurrah ……..
Family card games when she and I would thrash my father and brother, although in the dream it also involved money, with the losers having to keep dashing off to sell possessions to stay in the game.
And two moments that personified who she really was, the strength, the spirit, the essence.
Although difficult to pinpoint the exact moment in time, it was around my mid teens, 15 or 16, when I was a distinctly non-social, long haired revolt in search of a cause. For some reason the two of us went to a party at a neighbours. The host decided to bombard me with ‘what are you revolting against’ questions, demanding a demonstration of my ‘difference’ from the norm.
I was not, at that stage, able to deal with this sort of situation, but I didn’t need to worry. All 5 foot 3 inches of my mother waded in and very loudly put him in his place for bullying her son. She then proceeded to take control of the evening, as the life and soul she could be.
The second moment was even more impressive. First year of sixth form, and I was struggling with retaking O’Levels – I failed 13 at the end of my fifth year – as well as taking 2 A’Levels. My parents had announced their separation during the summer, I had been diagnosed as a depressive, and was not functioning at the highest level.
A meeting had been arranged with the headmaster – grammar school – to discuss things, with the implication that the A’Levels would be dropped.
The headmaster had one of those traffic light indicators outside his office to indicate when to enter. My mother arrived, with me sitting outside waiting. She marched straight in, even though the light was red, and demanded to know why, if the pressure was too much to deal with both retakes and A’Levels, the A’Levels were being dropped rather than the retakes.
The look of disbelief on the headmaster’s face was astonishing, and although it was against standard practice, he agreed to me dropping the retakes, and continuing with both A’Levels. Interest footnote to that, one of the A’Levels was American History, which the headmaster taught.
I know why the memories came, because last week was her birthday. And it reminded me how much I miss her soul, her essence, her sense of justice that I see echoed in my son.
I miss her fire, her unconditional love, and her sense of the absurd.
But mostly I miss the smile, the broad grin as she went through the whole of ‘Ten men went to mow’ in Swahili.
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