I fill in the picture: Bill as a boy of eleven stretched out on a sofa, legs going long and lean, magazine folded back on itself. He sits up to look closer at the words in an advertisement. A book: The Magic of Believing: Get what you want through the power of your belief.
He saves his nickels and dimes and trades them in for one-dollar bills. He sends them in, orders the book. The beginning of his searching self.
The books he’d read since that first one, his self-exploration, classes he’d taken. What did he want to believe? What was he searching for? In all of that searching, hadn’t he ever questioned the absence of his desire for a child?
Finally, in one of my times of pressing for more, he offered a new clue, something I hadn’t heard before.
He said, “If anyone had told me when I was a boy that I wouldn’t have children of my own, I’d have said they were crazy.”
My body leaned into this surprise. Heart-skip beat of possibility. Was there really a time when it had been as natural for Bill to think he would grow up to be a father as it had been for me to think I would be a mother?
The magic was in me now. Maybe this was the clue, the key to the hidden door that would open his mind to the possibility of a child.
“But after I grew up, every time the idea of having a child came up with a woman,” Bill said, “my answer was no. A strong no. I didn’t want kids.”
Oh.
The key drops, the door is solid. Back to where we’d always been.
“Then I took a class on dreams,” Bill said. “This was a few years before I met you.”
I leaned in again.
“I told the teacher I had a recurring dream. I’d had it for years. In the dream I’m accused of killing someone. Everyone says I did it. They say it so often that I start to think maybe it’s true.”
The dream leader asked, Could it be that, in this dream, you are killing your child self?
Again, the possibility. If he knew the source of his no, maybe he would change his mind. “It made so much sense,” Bill said. “I had to grow up way too fast. I didn’t get to be a child when I was a child. Having a kid would be giving up myself all over again.”
He said this like it was true. That it decided everything. Door locked, barricaded, sealed.
I wanted to push into this dream, to ask, Isn’t it possible you are killing possibility? The hope for a child you might have? Isn’t it possible that having a child would make up for what you didn’t get from your dad?
But I am no dream guide.
The meaning in our dreams is only what the dreamer makes of it.
Bill said, “After that workshop, the dream stopped.”
Can a man who never got to be a child have a child? Would he know the child’s need to play, laugh, shout, be selfish, cry, need, need, need, demand? Could I give him a crash-course, fast-course, learn-it-now-course in childhood so that he could overcome? Does anyone ever overcome? Why should he have to be the one to overcome?