Protector

 It was Friday night. I remember specifically because it was our Australian Football Grand Final the next day. 

I had a nightmare. 

With the benefit of hindsight I can see what happened. I had read recently that people pleasers (like me) were generally attached to some form of guilt.

Guilt!? That surprised me. I pondered. What did I have to be guilty about? What kind of guilt would lead me to a life of wanting to please people?

It's so interesting and mysterious how the mind works. My mind had dreamed up a scenario where all would be revealed.

In this terrible dream I found my father crouched by his car parked on the street. He told me that there were criminals looking to kill him and I said to him that we couldn't stay where we were. He was too exposed and we needed to find shelter.

Right across the road was an apartment, several apartments that he owned and rented out. Since he had the key I said we needed to go into one of them and hope the tenants weren't home. They were home and so we made an excuse that we were checking something. 

We couldn't stay there, eventually had to leave. My father was ahead of me just enough that when I turned around to say goodbye to the tenants he was already out on the street and making his way to the car.

Incidentally, my dream had used a whole lot of truths. My father did go to collect rent from tenants in his earlier life. And he did tend to skip ahead across roads, quite proud of his ability to speedily get out of the way of a moving car or perhaps an incident.

As soon as I saw him on the other side of the road I realized his vulnerability and I ran towards him. But it was too late. The bad guys had been hiding around the car, threw a sheet over him and pulled him into the mob. In spite of my efforts to get to him I didn't stand a chance and he was gone from me; out of my life.

In my efforts to get to him and save him, I had to wrestle with one of them; a strong, well built man painted up like a clown. (There's context from his life around that too.) He had me horizontally on the floor although we were moving quite fast, as if on an electric cord. I was slapping him in the face, trying to get him off me but he was far too strong and simply laughed in my face.

I became aware of police officers, American police officers standing in a huddle, either oblivious or disinterested in what was going on right before their eyes. I tried to scream but no words or even sounds came out. 

It was at this point that my husband very gently shook me, 'cindi, cindi, you are having a bad dream'.

I couldn't shake the dream in that I was haunted by it but sort of awake now and I lay there quietly, weeping.

Eventually I got up to pee and then went back to bed and enveloped myself in my husband's arms, told him about the dream and I remember I said that all my life I tried to protect my father in a myriad of ways.

I am not sure quite when but some time soon thereafter, after a little more sleep, I had an epiphany.

This was grief; 31 year old grief that hadn't found expression before.

My father was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor when I was living in the USA and bringing up my young family. His diagnosis had been held back from me until they could hold it back no more. 

To my mind, though I could never have expressed this before, I wasn't given the opportunity to protect him; to save him, as I would my mother a few years later. And this had played on my mind all that time without my having consciousness of it. 

(Well, not quite. I have many times replayed the feelings of being told and being upset; of calling the surgeon; of coming home to see him; of speaking to him for the last time on the telephone when he was in the hospice; of deeply regretting that no-one was with him when he died.)

Even more poignantly, I came to understand that under the sadness I was feeling after the dream, I felt something else - a fierce love for him. And that was a very good thing; to get in touch with that feeling, elusive to me for many, many years.

Over the years, I have come to understand that rather negative titles can be directed towards me, quite legitimately; people pleaser, codependent; caretaker.

But what if we could look at it another way?

Today, I did look at it another way.

I'm a protector. A fierce protector of those I love. 

Today, I am proud of myself for that.