Should Have Known

I was taken down by a barometric pressure headache last week- Sunday was a wash, and I called in sick on Monday as well to wear the ice cap I fell for on the internet. Monday night I went to sleep easily, but somewhere in the night found myself in a wild dream driving in reverse in the mountains. I vividly remember thinking what a pain it was to have my head turned to see behind me, and how I would wind up with such a neck ache. Then, I flashed to having responsibility for our four grandchildren. I decided to take them to McDonald’s, and let them out of the car only to have them shoot off in different directions to little self-serve ordering machines.

I’m always fascinated by dreams, and feel even more excited when I remember them long enough to get them written down. However, the next series of thoughts came in not so much a dream, but a slideshow of my shortcomings as a parent. One after another, they flashed up for me to regard. I got a bit uneasy- why was this happening? I can’t pull them up specifically now, but during this time, they were showing up, clear as a bell- the times I spent on the phone talking to my mother and my friends while ‘watching’ them play, times I took odd jobs and traded babysitting with my friend because I felt I had to do something ‘legit’ to demonstrate my value? Was I patient enough with them when they were struggling? Did I cause the anxiety they have today? I questioned myself. My children were born in 1990, 1992, 1994, and 1996. I felt lucky to be able to stay home and care for them until the youngest was in kindergarten. But did I need help and didn’t see clear enough to get it? Was I depressed during their childhood and checked out, shifting the narrative to assuage my guilt? The questioning waterfall continued until I awoke, feeling like I should DO something. Maybe I should write the children an email. No- too informal- I really needed to share my true emotions with each of them personally. I should write each of them a card and really get these thoughts and feelings conveyed effectively. They NEED to know I love them, loved them, and will keep loving them.

I wondered if I was losing it. “Is this what people feel when they break from reality?” I asked myself as I weighed my options of what to do about my heavy documentary. My conclusion was was to write about it, just to myself, in my computer documents. I mean, is it a good time to invade my grown childrens’ lives with my revelations and subsequent apologies. I asked myself what I thought the overnight slide show was giving me in terms of self-evaluation and growth. My children are adults. We’re all still here, we all have contact, and if they ever want to have a conversation about their childhood, we can do that. In the meantime, I can make sense of my thoughts of myself, and the many years I spent living with someone I thought was a good match, but what I realized was more of a convenient time in my life to get married (age 22- really?), I knew him in high school, our best friends were brother and sister, and my parents loved him, so I had all the signals, albeit lame and distorted ones, to go full speed ahead.

I was a wife and mother like my mother was a wife and mother and her mother as well. The family pattern was heavily focused on the husband as the provider, and the wife as the backstage coordinator of all events and sustainer of positive vibes, and the main parenting figure of the children. Like my father, my husband worked and continued to move higher in rank in the Navy, ultimately becoming a physician. It seemed right, or I MADE it seem right in my mind that he required all the time he needed to reach his personal and professional goals, and the rest of us were a unit who functioned like a separate household. Even writing this, I am trying to be conscious of not saying anything disparaging about him- that’s not the intention of my writing but I feel myself still deferring to him as I explain myself out of my marriage, which ended in 2004, because I asked for a divorce after seeing a counselor twice. She never said much, but she was a great catalyst to help me say the thing I realized. Nothing was going to change. We could move and move and change the furnishings and get new shower curtains but ultimately we would end up the same- he would be working and me and the children would be waiting.