Good afternoon, my friend. Recently, in a dream that was both foggy and shimmering, I encountered a woman drifting along the pavement in Oxford with her little daughter, perhaps eighteen months old. She walked as if carried by an invisible current, paying no heed to anything or anyone. I had to call out quite loudly before she realised I was there at all. When she recognised me, for a fleeting moment her face brightened, but then a pale mask of indifference slipped back into placea strange, distant look that seemed borrowed from another world. I asked gently what was the matter, and in the peculiar dream-language people speak, she unwound the tangled threads of her family troubles.
They had married out of love, she told me, in a time that now felt like another life altogether. The engagement was a tapestry of courtship, secret gardens, and tender laughter. After the wedding, her husbandEdward was his namehad actually carried her across the threshold. Together they sought peace and understanding, navigating the rain and sunlit mornings even as their paths beganimperceptibly at firstto part ways.
But with the birth of their daughter, everything changed with the surreal abruptness only possible in dreams. Edward suddenly felt the razor-edge of parenthood and, to his dismay, found he could not bear it. He tried to work from home, but the child was a restless spiritcrying and wailing through every meeting, shattering his quiet. Most of the care, naturally, fell to his wifeAlicebut even Edward would sometimes be scolded for his lack of grace.
As time passed, and the household finances shrank with Alice on maternity leave, Edward used this as a subtle excuse to slide all the childcare upon her. One night, beneath a sky stitched with odd, floating clocks, he suggested Alice return to work and let her mother or his fathergrandparents whose hands trembled like leaves in windcare for the baby.
He dismissed every hesitancy about the grandparents frailty, insisting they needed the extra pounds in the family purse. He pored over options in a bizarre whirlnurseries, child-minding clubs, even a Victorian boarding school flashed pastanything so he wouldnt have to tend the child himself. From then on, he stopped giving Alice any money for shopping. He took to wandering through Tesco himself, muttering that Alice wasted their pounds on useless knick-knacks and fripperies.
So Alice, feeling the walls tighten around her, began to steer her pram more often through Regents Park, letting her little girl chase sunlight on the green. Shed visit playgrounds, where swings seemed to move by themselves and voices echoed from distant corners, all to avoid the suffocating quiet of the house and her husbands presence.
My troubled friendher words moved with the liquid logic of sleepasked what she should do. I was adrift in the fog of the dream, unable to offer true advice. Divorce? She shook her head; for all his faults, she loved Edward, tethered to him by invisible threads. She could not bear the thought of her daughter growing up in a home split in two, believing that a family must stay whole whenever possible. Besides, she was weary, so tired of being accused of failing to bring in money, when it had never even been her fault.
As I left, the dream began to dissolve. I offered only the sort of vague reassurances one gives in such momentsunanchored phrases like keep your chin up, and these things will pass, and itll all work out in the end. Even now, caught halfway between waking and dreaming, I dearly hope that it will.
