Everything you ever wanted and more

You wake up one morning and get a frantic phone call. A family member lets you know that a person very close to you, someone you miss dearly, maybe even someone you thought was dead, was very much alive. A dream come true, right? If you are like me you would rush out the door and do whatever it takes to find the person. But it gets better, you don’t have to plan a long flight or find money to make the trip. They live close by, very close. It’s a dream come true.

Looking back it didn’t even make sense, but I guess that’s how those things go. I got a phone call from a family member. My mother, whom I haven’t seen since I was a child, someone I barely remember I was so long when she left, was found. The thing you need to understand about my mother is she, like me, is crazy. Unlike me however, she lost full touch with reality. She heard voices she thought was god, thought people were after here, and one day without any warning just… disappeared. Like one day she was there, the next, nothing. From what I can gather no one in my family has seen or heard from her in over 25 years now. Which should’ve been the first clue something was wrong.

So the voice on the other end of the phone goes on to explain that they are, in fact surprised I haven’t already seen her. My family member tells me that I may have even interacted with her without realizing it, it has been a very long time after all. It turned out she was a teacher at my very university. I don’t get outside of my bubble of engineering often, so it makes sense. She could be down the hall from the lab and I probably would have never known without this call. Fate, it seems, had conspired to put us on the path to each other.

While the bulk of my family, mostly my father’s side, is very physically abusive (to put it lightly) and all sorts of harmful, from what I can gather my mother’s side was not that way.I met my Aunt (mother’s sister) awhile back and she was a lovely and seemingly caring person. She gave me what she could of my mothers, explained the rest of the story, the bits I was missing, and we went our own ways.

From what she told me my mother loved us (I have a brother, who unfortunately took after my father) very much, even when she lost touch with reality she thought we had been kidnapped and wanted to rescue us regularly. There’s a sort of comfort in knowing that not everyone in your family was a total waste of life, even if that person is completely insane. I mean who am I to judge? I’m mostly insane myself.

Anyway, long story short, the phone call ends and I rush to go find her. I don’t know what I would say or do if I found her. Maybe cry, maybe laugh, maybe it turns out she isn’t the person I thought she was and we just look at each other like strangers in passing. Whatever would happen, I was sure that I would at least get some sort of closure to that part of my life. The final missing piece to the puzzle, her side of the story. It’s the one thing I’ve wanted for about as long as I can remember and I’ve spent a large sum of money trying to find her to no avail, so you can imagine my surprise when I’m on the phone being told all this.

Statistically speaking people go missing all the time and are never seen again. For all I knew she was dead somewhere and I would never get to see or hear from her again. So you can understand the sense of urgency I felt when I was rushing out the door to get to campus. You can probably also understand the sense of urgency I felt when I woke up and it felt so real that I was half way out of bed to the car before the reality sunk in that it was just a dream.

Yeah, a bit of a cold water in the face moment, but it was an incredibly vivid dream.

I can’t even call it a nightmare, because it wasn’t. It was a dream come true, except the come true part. The funny thing is that while I think about her often, there was no reason for the dream. It’s embarrassing to say, but she wasn’t even really on my mind lately with all the other stuff I have going on. Maybe it’s just that I’m so close to graduating (hopefully) that I’ve been thinking about who I would be there to cheer me on as I get my diploma. I’ve never bothered with the graduation ceremonies, but this one I’ll be attending. I have people that will be there, people I care about, people who care about me, but no birth family, so maybe that’s why I had the dream.

At the end of the day I don’t know why. I don’t usually have dreams like that, certainly not any of her being found. This was a first, but hopefully last. As much as I miss her, I would rather not have to deal with that letdown repeatedly. I do want to find her one day and maybe I’ll get lucky, you never know. Then again maybe I won’t and I’ll have to learn to live with that too.

So now the real question is why am I bothering to share? Well first I’ve learned not to keep this stuff inside. But also it’s been on my mind for a few days since it happened and I’ve found writing helps, so here I am once again using this as a cheap alternative to therapy. For whatever reason I feel compelled to overshare this story, I’m glad I could write it out.

The experience reminded me of a long forgotten comic I stumbled upon. It’s sad, but it feels pretty appropriate for the topic. So I’ll just leave you with that for today.