Prophecy Or Just A Dream?

When Grandma broke her leg, she needed round-the-clock care because of the heavy cast.  Grandpa wasn’t in good health and needed his sleep as well.  They couldn’t afford a private nurse, so Mom and my Aunt Betty split the week to take care of Grandma.  However, the week wasn’t divided equally because Aunt Betty claimed she had to be home with my younger cousin, age 7,  to get him off to school on time and be home when the kids got back from school.

Mom resented that.  I was the same age as my cousin and my younger brother had just started kindergarten.  Somehow, Aunt Betty prevailed and Mom went to stay with my grandparents Mondays through Fridays until the cast came off.  Aunt Betty took the weekends.  When she stayed at Grandma’s, Mom slept on the couch and didn’t get much sleep.

One clear memory I have from that time is how Mom finally exploded and there was a long breach between her and her sister.  Another clear one is that my dad made Pete and me peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch day after day.  I grew to hate the sight of peanut butter although I’ve come to enjoy it again in my older years.

Today I had a third clear memory: Mom’s dream.  She opened up to me about that dream only twice because no one believed her at the time.  You see, she didn’t believe it was a dream.  The first time she confided in me was when we’d already moved to Baltimore and were going through some hard times. 

This is what she told me:  she was awakened from her sleep on the couch in the middle of the night.  She could see into my grandparents’ kitchen and saw a light shining in through the window.  Frightened, she thought it might be a peeping tom and started to sit up.  To her confusion, she found she couldn’t move.

Meanwhile, something came through the window and in the light, Mom saw it was a disembodied arm, hand to shoulder.  The hand was flexing into a fist, and the arm swung up and down at the elbow.  Now Mom was terrified.  She tried to scream but couldn’t as the arm came through the kitchen and into the living room.  The hand had become a closed fist and was still swinging up and down.

Whatever it was, Mom knew it was evil and that it was coming for her.  She was still unable to move or to scream but felt something building inside her body, some forceful energy.  As the fisted arm came close enough to hit her, she felt something explode out of her chest and fly up at the threat.  Suddenly, the fisted arm disappeared; she could sit up and move again.

Her belief was that her soul had fought off a demonic spirit. 

No one believed her.  I remember that part now too.  She tried to tell my grandparents, father, sister and brothers about what happened.  To a one, they all said she was just dreaming.  Something like that couldn’t be real.  She didn’t mention it again until after we’d moved to Baltimore.  I had had a question about the feud between her and my aunt.  In her telling of it, she confided about the strange dream.  She’d never had it again.

When I was a young adult and still living at home, we’d had some really hard times.  More than the financial issues were the drinking and the domestic violence.  The latter started not long after we moved to Baltimore. 

My parents found a Deaf social club and a Deaf bowling league and became members.  Every weekend, they would go to the club and every Wednesday, they bowled.  At both places, the beer flowed.  I dreaded those times because frequently they would come home completely intoxicated and fight with each other.  My father would hit her, or Mom would hit Dad.  It was brutal.

After one of those occasions, Mom had bruises on her face.  I wanted to know why she didn’t leave him.  She told me she couldn’t because she was trapped with no where to go and a curse on the family.

A curse?  What curse?

First, she said that God was angry with our family because Dad was an atheist.  That set me back a bit.  We no longer went to church but I’d never seen him say he was an atheist.  I asked, “How do you know?”

She answered it was because of that long ago dream.  It was a prophecy, she felt.  The one detail she’d never mentioned to anyone was the arm was wearing sleeve of a flannel shirt.  My dad wore flannel shirts all the time.

“It was Dad?” I was astonished and felt my stomach drop.

Yes, it was Dad.  She’d recognized it was his arm right from the first time she saw it.  She knew it meant there was a curse on our family and that my Dad had set it on us because of his atheism.

Do I believe that?  No.  After I became fluent in sign language, I learned that my father had become very bitter from all of our hard times.  If anything, he was angry with God or perhaps had become agnostic.

Thinking about it now, I can see that it was prophetic in one way.  It does seem to have been a warning that domestic violence was in the future.