Yesterday in “real” life, waking life, I was cleaning out two laptops back and happened upon the 15 poems I wrote to my niece 20 years ago when she was pregnant with Chase and he–who at that time was not known to be a boy or a girl–was due on my birthday.  The least I can do, I thought, is write “it” a poem every day for the final two weeks.  So I did.  It felt like I was channeling them from the womb.   I call them “PoWombs.”  They are adorable and I recorded them a few years later but the recordings were of terrible sound quality though the readings were great.  I spent the afternoon and evening enhancing the audios of all 15, now that I have the capacity to do that.   They are ready to pop onto the website.  In the last two days, I also thought about a Christian Romance novel that my niece had given to me and I even journaled about it.  I felt the novel behind my head in the bookcase where its 500 pages sit.  If I can boil down the message it is:  you won’t know how to love a man until you love God.  Now, OK, go back 20 years and the due date  9/9 comes, no baby.  9/10 comes – that’s the day after my birthday that my husband died 2 years prior; no baby.  9/11 comes and that’s the day and year that the towers come smashing down; no baby.  Chase didn’t pop his head out until a week after his due date.  So I was thinking of birth, wombs, babies, Bruce, bombs, and that book.  I go to sleep.

In the morning in deep sleep, I dream.  It is voting day and I am also scheduled to get an abortion on this day.  I am my own current age and God knows how I got pregnant.   I was thinking deeply about the Immaculate Conception just the other day, but, you know …  I have my ballot, all filled out.  It was a ballot where you not only vote,  but you could also put in long-hand your reasons.  I had done that and it was beautiful.  I needed to deposit it but along the way I see someone swapped it with a blank ballot.  That whole matter had to be resolved and I end up driving of a winding road up on a tall thicket, but I get the car down and I still make it to the abortion clinic only a little late.  There things start to go awry.  Maybe it was their way of saying, what are you doing here at your age, but my procedure was delayed and delayed and the minutes turned to hours.  Towards the afternoon, someone started giving me a haircut!  Left side of hair only–the feminine side.  I can hear the really sharp shears going clip, clip, clip near my ear.   I stop that, but then I need a fresh operating gown.  All kinds of mixups.  Then an administrator man comes in and sits me down at a consulting table.  By this time, I have already taken my hand and reached “down there” and much to my surprise a stalk is coming out of me.  Oh my, I think.  I could just take it out myself but maybe not.

The man says basically, “Look, it’s late.  It isn’t going to kill you to wait one more day.”  Kill me?  I am distraught.  Was God giving me another day to think about this?  I look at the black and white clock on the wall and it very clearly says 20 to 5.  Sure, the doctor was no doubt ready to go home.

There I was, the patient.  What to do?  I wake up.  I reach for my phone in the dark and there’s a WhatsApp recording from that very same niece.  That Christian Romance Novel is being made into a movie, due date January 20.  She sends Universal’s trailor.  I watch it.  The dream floods back.  I calculate how old my little baby would be had I not ended her life in the way back.  Do I know any young women about that age?  I’m sure it was a girl.  Could I find one here on earth?  I saw the clock from the dream:  20 to 5.  By this time I had been rustling around for a few minutes, but calculating back I realized that when the dream clock read 20 to 5, it actually WAS 20 to 5.

Who knows what this all means?  I do think it means God gives me the go-ahead to post all the PoWombs on this site today.