A blog I follow linked to a blog she follows who shared this set of whacked-out, insomia-induced dreams. I can identify with the vibe of these reveries as I’ve had a few doosies myself from time to time…

Like the one where I’m suppposed to be photographing a wedding, but I have to take a canoe to get there. And I keep dropping the film overboard so I’m late. And my assistant is supposed to be covering for me but instead is in the church balcony eating ice cream, naked. Or I’m supposed to be playing an orchestra concert but my feet mysteriously weigh eight hundred pounds a piece so I’m late. And when I arrive I find my bass is broken in half. And instead of my concert black I’m wearing a metallic leotard.

But I also have another kind of recurring dream, maybe you guys do too. It’s the dream where you discover the extra room in your house that is totally awesome. Sometimes in dreams I find that outside of my basement window is a massive abandoned green house populated by the most beautiful trees and birds. Or a door I never noticed at the back of a closet leads to a wing of our house we didn’t know existed. And it has a hot tub.

There’s an essay out there about having a child with special needs called “Welcome to Holland”. Here’s the premise: If you were planning on going to Italy for your honeymoon and for some reason got dropped off in Holland instead you would be initially disappointed because you had packed all the wrong stuff and were expecting pizza and gondolas. But eventually you would figure out that Holland is also cool and has wooden shoes. I think this is a charming story and a good way to describe the bewilderment and overwhelm that comes along with discovering that parenting your child is going to be different than you thought. But here’s my dilema, “What if I don’t want to go to Holland, even after I’ve checked it out and discovered how cool it is? What if I still just really have my heart set on Italy?”

But this dream thing really has me thinking. The feeling of wonder, of sacredness and mystery that I feel as I pass into the secret places in my dreams is so wonderful. It brings to mind John 14:2, “In my Father’s house there are many mansions”. Maybe this is a better analogy for the experience of having Ramona in our lives. Of course it’s scary. Of course we worry. But our experience with Ramona is also a portal that leads to places in our hearts we didn’t know were there. Mysterious and fearsome places. Sacred places. And we get that now, here on earth. Our love for Ramona and what her illness brings to our family is really a bit of the Kingdom of God.

Hope that makes some sense, it’s giving me some peace and comfort today. Please pray for Ramona next week. She has a study to evaluate how she’s doing with her swallowing. It will let us know how we should proceed with her speech therapy and whether or not we should continue to expect her to go to oral feeding only or we need to reconsider the G tube. Here’s our little slice of heaven in the play tent that Grammie sent. She’s taking a breather after crawling straight through.

Love, Jane.

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