The Guamuchil Tree

I have the same recurring dreams. I know where I’m at and I know what I am wearing. What I don’t know is why am I back here, again.

In my dream, I’m about 7 years old, with a school girl outfit. It’s blue with a white color.

I’m on a road surrounded by mountains, lots and lots of mountains.

There’s a wooden house just before a cliff. A Guamuchil tree sways near the front door. I can hear it swaying back and forth. The breeze is so fresh. The smell from the tree reaches me and I take a deep breath.

Sweet and smooth.

I feel peace.

I am standing on the road alone.

The breeze travels from my face to my feet. It wraps around my foot. The once sweet smell of guamuchiles grabs my ankles and pulls me toward the cliff. I struggle to grab on anything but the roads are clear, the ground is clear, there’s nothing I can hold on too.

At first, when I was a child, and when the dream became clearer, I fought with every might. I tried so many things to release me from the hold, but I never could.

But now, I don’t fight it anymore. I let it take me.

It pulls me to the edge of the cliff and when I look down, I see a dry arroyo waiting for my splattered body to fill it as water once had.

Just before I hit the ground, I wake up.

Since I was a little girl, this dream replays in my head and haunts me in my sleep. It’s one of many dreams that are so vivid but I cannot control. I have learned to identify when I am dreaming, a tool I learned through self-meditation, but this one, I just can’t change and seems so real.

I always wake up with questions.

What was in the house? Why the tree? The smell seems so familiar but I’ve never been next to a guamuchil tree. I have never even seen one.

But my mother has.

Since I started to work on our relationship and allowed myself to accept her venting to me with minor judgement, my mother has opened up about her childhood.

I think I have been dreaming her all these years. Her trauma. They say that trauma, although we don’t physically live through it or witness it, our mothers, pass it down through birth. A little of our mother, our grandmother, and so forth, have been embedded in us since birth. Their memories, their pain.

The Guamuchil Tree was not too common in her neighborhood growing up. A man, a family friend, had a huge Guamuchil Tree outside of his home. My grandmother would tell my mother to cut down strands of the sweet fruit and take her into the city to sell it. She had mentioned this family “friend” so many times while I was growing up that I never really paid attention to who he was. He was a nobody. A molester, a rapist, a demon. But my mother talked about him as if he was just another uncle. From the recent stories my mother has vented to me, he molested her and my grandma stayed hush about it. They needed to sell guamuchiles, after all.

My mother kept going back, and he kept molesting her.

When my mother was 12 years old, she became pregnant. She claims that it was another man. A man her mother was dating at the time. She claims he died a long time ago, but I have my suspicions.

I’ve learned that it’s common for a child or adult to suppress the memories or feel guilt or disgust with themselves and that is why they remain quiet about their offenders. I wonder if it was him.

It would explain why the sweet guamuchil wasn’t so sweet in the end.