Conceived in Love

Personal reflections on having high expectations, loving, losing and loving again, and my own parents' lost love

I wrote in my dream journal this morning for the first time in months. I have dreamt intensely on and off throughout my life, and dreams have been the source of extraordinary guidance and healing. Recent events in my waking life have kept me distracted from the underworld of dreams, but gratefully the portal has opened back up. 

This morning’s dream was so real I felt it echoing into my past and my future, in waves that hummed to my marrow. In the early pre-dawn hours, I dreamt of my mom. It was the first time since she died that she visited me in my dreams. After I woke, I went for a walk in the dark with this dream, thinking I would be processing alone, but I ran into my best friend’s mother-in-law. It was one of those moments that felt guided, like mom couldn’t be there for me so she sent a mother figure for me to walk with. She hugged me and listened as I told her of my dream.

The dream:

I am with my paternal grandmother, mother, and father as we are going through boxes of things, photos and documents. I come across a photograph of my parent's marriage ceremony, with vows written on the back. I show it to my mom and grandmother, and I say, “Do you think this is from the first time you both got married or the second? Is there a date…”

And then my mom wavers, taken by some grief, and she begins to collapse, but my father rushes over to her and lifts her up, holding her in his arms as she weeps. I am stunned, to see this kindness and love between them, so much so that it cuts me off mid-sentence. 

And then I wake up, rocked by the feelings of witnessing this tenderness between my parents. A love that I always knew existed, but never remember witnessing in all my years as their daughter. I knew it existed for two reasons, why else would they get married twice (almost three times), and why else would they hate each other so viscerally throughout my life?

After mom died I found a third reason to believe in their deep soul love. I found photos of them while I was going through old photo boxes and albums in my mom’s attic. Photos that were stashed away in an intricate wooden photo box with a latch. Photos of them when they were young before I was born. Their love for each other was tangible to the touch, like the darkroom paper they were printed on. Especially apparent was my father’s love for her. His head was tilted toward her in the most innocent way, surrendered, and their eyes were for each other and not even aware of the camera. 

It was stunning and I can’t get the image of it out of my head. Nor do I want to. A very essential missing piece of my life fell into place upon witnessing these photographs. This was the love I was conceived with. This is the blueprint for love that was written into my soul when I entered through the veil. A tsunami of understanding my own yearnings and beliefs about love has washed over me, over and over, ever since. It keeps bringing shiny new realizations to my shores, as well as sharp objects to pick through.

The joy I felt seeing this love captured, has been counterbalanced by the crushing grief that it was lost. I didn’t grow up in that cocoon of love, quite the opposite really. So many feelings juxtaposed in my little brain right now. 

And then this dream, a reenactment of that love, that is now held inside my body as a dream memory, as real as any other memory. 

The way he showed up for her in her grief in my dream, willing to hold her up in the shared devastation of their lost love, the capacity to grieve together with her, the protection and mature masculine presence he exuded… those were things that I’ve always longed for in my own life from a partner. And I’m certain they were my mother’s greatest wishes in love too. And these vulnerabilities of love are universal, to hold and be held, to grieve and love together.

I understand my deepest desires for love now. I understand why I’m twice divorced, and why anything less than a legendary love, why anything less than that level of depth, reciprocity, and maturity was never enough. 

I’ve carried a burden my whole life, of having ‘too high expectations’ for people. I’ve loved men deeply, and then at a certain point, if I see that they cannot live up to their own potential, I don’t try to make them. I’ve learned a lot from that drama triangle, of staying too long past the point when I knew, trying to change them. It’s a double-edged sword, seeing people that way. It’s not always felt like a gift.   

I’ve been spiraling down in my heart, feeling myself wanting to give up on love, after seeing the photos of my parents. If they had it and lost it, how could I dare to hope to find it? Why can’t I just give up? What is worth all this heartbreak? What has all this taught me, except to be vigilant and cautious?

These are familiar feelings, they come to me after every break-up. But I’m in my 40s now, and I’ve had enough big loves and big losses to see the pattern here. I falter, doubt, deny, and then love rises back up in me, like a tide that I cannot control, that legendary love that I’ve been dreaming about since I was conceived. Something is guiding me, all of this is not for nothing, I am more than a woman with a lot of baggage because I endeavor to learn and inquire of love’s plan.

The feeling of longing I carry is tacit, it’s in my bones, in my blood, my DNA. Maybe it has something to do with Union. Polarity. Masculine and feminine energies uniting. The Great Mother. God…  

The feeling that there is a greater compassion, a holy emergence out of this darkness that we are all facing. That the light of love and union will prevail over the darkness in men’s hearts… 

With this dream fresh in my mind, I revisited the images of my parents and wept the complicated tears I could spare, and then wept some more for the intense suffering and devastation of so many lives in the holy lands. I don’t understand the correlation, so much grief that has no place to go. 

I took a shower, got dressed, and sat down to do the only thing I could do with such content. Write.  

I don’t know what the takeaway is here. Just me vulnerably writing my process in hopes that something lands for you, that some deep knowing or calling you carry can be validated by it. 

I am uncertain how my family would feel about me sharing such things. I have a feeling some wouldn’t like it at all, but as much as I fear them misunderstanding my intentions, I value my own process with grief, and with the conviction to share about love at all costs.

I don’t know if the connections I’ve made are true or not, but I do know that my dream of love and union for the world isn’t a delusion. I think now, in this tender state I’m in, that I’ll let the love I see in my dreams be the real thing. 

I choose to believe in union and love, and in the face of all the pain and grief and war in the world at this moment, that’s the least I can do.

Sending love beams to you, in your dreams and in your waking lives, and circling the world to all our brothers and sisters in suffering.

love love,

Sarah WM