In the bathroom I see wide plank wooden floorboards, the rustic, weathered kind. A gleaming slick, white porcelain bathtub with those heavy pewter claw feet, more ornate than anything I would ever need to have in my own home, is centered right in the middle of the room. There is a window behind it with warm sunlight coming in through thin panes of old glass. I feel like a voyeur as I tiptoe silently to the bathtub’s edge, my white gown easily slipping off to the ground leaving my vulnerable body to the room’s breath. It’s not cold, but the deep shaking in my stomach is so painful. As I get a bit closer, I see the clear, salty water to the perfect height in the basin of the tub, and I want to run and submerge my entire body and let my long, blonde hair float to the top like seaweed. It would feel so good. So warm and quiet and easy. Salt makes you float. I’m not sure I should keep sinking. But I do. To my knees, holding steadily to the smooth, cold edge.
I am in the room, and I’m in the whole thing of it, but I’m watching, too. I’m not allowed in the tub anymore because there is a jellyfish. A pink, oozing creature full of sting and pain and joy and burdensome baggage is taking up all of the space in that perfect bathtub.
“Get out. I want in,” I beg in a whisper. “I’m so good in there. We can’t both be in there. I’m sleek and beautiful and uncomplicated here, not you. I can handle everything in the tub and love everyone in the tub and everyone loves me in there. That bathtub makes me so pretty.”
But, oh no, I’m too late. Neither of us can be in there now. That is an old contract, that bathtub. The giant pink mass is undulating, and the first slip of flesh is coming over the edge. Why did it take me so many years to walk down the hallway to my own bathroom? I’ve always been so slow in getting to myself.
Everything is spilling out of the tub now, my knees are drowning in the slick slime of life as my jellyfish can no longer contain itself in that gorgeous tub. We are sliding into each other and floundering around on wet floorboards trying to right each other. One meant for land, one meant for sea, but now there must be a way to be together. Both of us are full to bursting and spitting saltwater from our aching lungs. We are now a complete entanglement of limbs and shuddering breath.
Together we stand up with our trembling legs, and my hand slips for the very last time from the edge of my tub.
A still, small voice whispers, “Surrender, it’s time to go, babe.”
*********************
I had this dream. In these strange, exact details.
I woke up shrieking and sweating and felt a sharp crack of lightning in my front right tooth. Ok, let’s just be real for a moment- it was weird as shit but I never shy away from weird. I go straight for it. Jellyfish?
I was living on my tiny little island in the South. The island is not MINE, per se, I know that, but I was having a bit of trouble there and the grey-rippled Atlantic and horseshoe crabs whispered healing to me and it all felt very personal. And there were jellyfish, too, everywhere, like littered plastic grocery bags both in the water and out. I didn’t know much about them other than they sting, stay back. Why was I having gut-wrenching dreams about jellyfish?
I grabbed my phone and immediately texted three of my best sister friends and said, “Please send your spirit lights. I’m shaking and can’t stop, and I’m oozing all over like a jellyfish and I don’t know who I am anymore. What is happening???”
In true sister friend form, one of them responded, “Ok, you need a new animal analogy. Oozing is gross.”
Right. Totally is.
But I couldn’t stop. It was a mess. But it wasn’t.
I was getting up in the mornings and dancing to my favorite songs, I was crying, constantly, but mostly from relief and joy. Friends were coming back into my life I had left behind at some foggy point in the past and I could no longer understand life without them. I started therapy to “fix whatever was wrong” and then realized nothing really was wrong. I felt lighter and happier than I had in years. Free from something that had been tightly holding a noose around my neck for over two decades. What had been choking me?
I did what any scrappy writer would do and started researching the creature squishing itself into my dreams. First fact I found, jellyfish and cucumbers are both 95% water. Hmmmm…..nope. That was not useful.
But there was this……I found this fact, in various descriptions, in everything I read about jellyfish:
Jellyfish cut in two can regenerate and create two new jellyfish.
When I had cut myself in two?
Oops. Didn’t mean to do that.
As a woman saddled with all of the 13 billion insecurities I heaved upon my own back and as a mother to 4, I had barely come through the last two decades alive, dripping in breastmilk and fatigue and unmet expectations and diapers and school forms and layered guilt and moving boxes and left homes and wine and lost goals and egos. The only way, for little old me, to survive it, was with the continual splitting of myself into perfect little jelly packages to keep giving and giving and giving. I know, “they”, meaning all of the much more enlightened women than I, say “please don’t burn yourself alive at the stake trying to keep everyone else warm”. Great! I won’t do that. I will instead cut myself up into a swarm of 100 perfectly- regenerated jellyfish until I explode into some weird-ass dream in my 40s.
It is terrifying when your soul starts to come back together. I know now it is the Divine Universe helping take your skin off to show you what is truly underneath and to gently breathe you back to life, kind and painful CPR. All of your pink, oozing bits laid bare to be reconciled, acknowledged and tended to.
“Let your halves rejoin, love. We only need one of you, not 100 tired versions of you.”
The jellyfish journey is not for the weak of heart. You need a fair amount of soft armor, bravery, sword-slashing, boundary-setting, empathy and self-borne permission to fail miserably as you reconstruct everything you once knew to be “true”. After all, you were split into one million pieces for the greater part of your adult life. You might need a minute or two. A very dear loved one called me a “poet warrior” the other day. Maybe. Or maybe some stitched- together Frankenstein-ish, strung out on caffeine, lopsided pink jelly glob who cries a lot and loves hard. That, too. All of the above.
Reunited at last.
“Surrender, it’s time to go, babe.”
Who’s coming with me?
xoxoxoxoxoxox
I love this Cec and I love you❤️!
Thank you so much. xoxoxo I love you, too.