guardian spirit

When I was in labor, I had a vision of my paternal grandmother who passed away when I was ten. It was as if she was checking in, letting me know she is thinking of Jonah and me. I acknowledged her wishes and thanked her.

I've been told this grandmother, or babicka Bedriska as we called her, felt the closest to me of all her relatives even though I was just a child. I remember often rubbing her shoulders with tiger balm. She had a lot of pain in her shoulders. I can't imagine living through what she had lived through. She survived a concentration camp during the war. Her first husband did not. She remarried. Her second husband Otto, my grandfather, survived Auschwitz. I imagine his story of the last months of the war was very similar to Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, which I conincidentally taught a unit on to tenth-graders last year.

After my grandmother died, I had a dream that we ate cookies together. Since then I dream about her once in a while. At first the dreams were often scary. I'd call out her name, looking for her and she would answer with an enormous thunder and lightning that would awaken me. Or I'd meet her in her dark kitchen, afraid of her. But in one dream she was a teacher. She invited me into her classroom and had me copy a rhythm she was tapping out on her desk with her palms. I asked her if she could feel when people were thinking about her and she said she could. Then I asked her if people, especially her sons, thought of her often and she looked down, implying a no. This made me cry. She then gave me advice a part of which I remember clearly and a part of which is very hazy. She said I should never let anyone tell me what to do. And then she begged me to not let the world get red, the earth get brown and the fairy tale green.... or something like that. It was very symbolic, but I don't remember exactly how this went. I know I have it written down somewhere in a journal. I should go look it up.

Before Jonah was born, I imagined he might look a lot like me as a baby. And as a baby I looked quite a bit like babicka Bedriska. Sure enough, Jonah does look like me as a baby and a little bit like my paternal grandmother.