Bothersome dreams

It's 3:30am. I've been awake since just before 3:00, woken up by one of the most disturbing dreams I've had in a while. I'm one of those who rarely remembers her dreams, so the fact that I remember this one is something of note.

My dad, as a father, was not a very nice man. He was physically abusive, more so to my older siblings than to me, I think. I remember one horrible beating he gave one of my brothers when we were little. Other than that, it was just spanking for me. And the beating he gave my brother was just for playing in my grandparents' car. I was given some pretty bad spankings by him, and his belt hanging from a hook (nail?) in the doorway between our kitchen and living room was our deterrent when we started acting up. (In other words, being kids.) The physical abuse did stop for us after we got older, but that just meant he switched to emotional abuse. I got it the worst for whatever reason. My mom says she can't explain it either.

My dad passed away years ago, but in my dream he was alive. And although the memory of the dream is getting foggier now the longer I'm awake, I think I remember knowing my dream was a dream because he was in it and I knew he was dead. There was just me, my mom, my dad, and my niece in the dream. We were all in the house we had through my entire childhood, the house where all my siblings and I grew up. My dad, niece, and I were in the living room and my dad was berating my niece about something (very much like he had done to me a few times). In the dream, my niece isn't the age she is now. She was younger...perhaps junior high school age. I knew my mom was in the house and I went looking for her and found her in one of the bedrooms at the back of the house. I remember a whispered conversation with her about how my dad was a bully and that it wasn't fair or right what he was doing to my niece. My dad then came down the hall to go into the bathroom and my mom and I stopped the conversation while he walked past, but continued it until he came out again. We followed him into the living room and by the time we got there, he was again yelling at my niece who was curled up onto a chair in the living room, trying to shrink herself, make herself small. She turned her back to my dad which apparently really made him angry. (Interesting, I'm remembering I never once heard any words coming from my dad during the dream--but I knew what he was saying. Sort of a telepathic thing, I guess.) Anyway, he raised his arm and his telepathic thought was: "Don't you turn your back on me when I'm talking to you! Look at me!" In the dream my mom went to grab his arm and said "Don't you dare hit her!" My dad didn't even acknowledge this, and when my niece turned toward him, he hit her. Hard. I heard the strike of his open hand fall across her face. And what I remember clearly in the dream was being afraid. Afraid like I had always been of my dad, but deciding to take action anyway. I remember thinking, "Fuck this. He's not getting away with this." And in the dream I headed toward the phone, the intent being to call the police. I was furious with my dad and by God I wasn't going to have my niece suffer through what my siblings and I did as kids. Then, in a rare moment of dream clarity, I remembered thinking: You know this is a dream. So wake up and end it.

At that moment, I did wake up. The dream clung to me for a while. And as I sit here doing my crude and non-professional analyzing of it, I haven't come up with any hidden meaning really. I am really proud that in the dream I was still afraid, but did something anyway. And while it's just a dream, it's a bit of a metaphor for my waking life. For years and years I had been living a fear-based life. Doing or not doing what I did because of fear. Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of being hurt, fear of doing the wrong thing, fear of upsetting someone, fear of losing affection and friendship...the list could go on and on. But I'm a stronger person now than I ever have been. I've faced quite a few fears in the past year and while not all of the "risks" of trying turned out well, I'm still here. I'm standing. I'm broken, but I've gotten up and am trying to put the pieces back together. I've proven to myself that I have grown and I have changed. And maybe me waking up and realizing it was a dream was me knowing that I do have power, even when it feels like I might not.

D is for Dancing

I've just come from one of my ballroom dance lessons. As usual, I learned more than just dance steps and technique.

I've always loved to dance. Put some music on and if I wasn't out on the dance floor, I was be-bopping in my chair. The dancing I've always done before the ballroom dance lessons was I guess what you would term "club" dancing. Just getting out there and moving to the music. No steps (unless it was a line dance), just movement. Interestingly, dancing is where I've always felt the least self conscious. As a consequence, I've often been told I'm a really good dancer.

I became interested in ballroom dancing when I was in middle school, perhaps earlier. I would watch ballroom dance competitions on PBS more often than not hosted by Juliet Prowse. I loved the smooth elegance of the waltzes and foxtrots and the fiery stalking moves of the tango and the romanticism of the rumba. As I got older and they stopped airing the competitions on PBS, I gobbled up every dancing movie I could.  I had always thought about taking ballroom lessons but had always left it as a "someday" idea. Last year, I realized I could wait around forever for the exact right time to take lessons, so I bit the bullet and signed up for some introductory lessons at a studio close to my house. I was immediately hooked.

My instructor is the right mix of demanding and gentle for me. I am challenged by what he asks of me and I don't always get the steps perfectly, but he never allows me to feel bad about it or beat myself up about it. I have learned dance steps, yes. I have refined my technique within the different dances most assuredly. But I have also learned patience with myself. I have learned that I can do something difficult and be good at it. I have learned that I can be elegant and graceful--two words I would never have used to describe myself a year ago.

Ballroom dance lessons are the best gift I have ever given myself.

P is for Practice

When you come from a not-very-functional family, oftentimes you're not given the life tools you need to be functional and emotionally healthy in your adult life. Skills like resilience, anger management, self-esteem, assertiveness, speaking up for oneself, and a slew of others didn't manage to get instilled in me. What I'm finding out as a trying-to-be-functional adult is that all of the skills require practice.  What a bummer *that* was!  I thought that just because I wanted all those things, that <POOF> they'd automatically be mine. The reality is that just like a muscle, emotional skills require maintenance and upkeep. It's very much a "use it or lose it" reality.

I also believe that people and situations are brought into our lives in order for us to practice what we most need to learn.  Often, however, we see these things as annoyances, or the world being against us (not true--the universe is always for us and never against us), or some people even see these challenges as "just my lot in life."  I think if we take the opportunity to look at the situation and ask why this might be happening and ask what we could possibly learn from it, then we can see it for what it is. A chance to practice. A chance to become something beyond what we are now and move forward into something new and maybe wholly different than what we could have ever expected.

So, what have you all been "practicing" lately?