It is 4:30 in the morning, and I have been up for an hour. I was having a nightmare – in the car with work colleagues driving to a client’s site when the facility blew up in the distance. Flames and sparks, a black cloud that began to spread across the sky and quickly blotted out the sun. We had been coming to investigate an OSHA complaint and knew that the cloud was filled with poison, and so we made an illegal turn on the highway and sped away while others in the cars carried on, or parked to gawp at the scene and call 911, oblivious that they were about to die. Sparking, chemical flames began to move out in an ever growing circle across the landscape, a line of fire marching inevitably toward our speeding car as we tried desperately to stay in front of it. We turned on our lights as the cloud hovering miles above overtook us, and then the soot fell to ground level and we were in the cloud, in pitch blackness, speeding at 100 miles an hour with zero visibility to try to find a place untouched by the poison, and running out of gas.
So. That was a peachy dream. Its one saving grace was that I did not have children in the dream, so I wasn’t worried about somehow finding and collecting them. When the baby woke me, however (THANK YOU BABY FOR BEING HUNGRY AT JUST THE RIGHT TIME), the Dream Remnants kept running through my head, and I inserted my child-anxiety into it. What would I do? What if this happened, and they were at their three different schools? Who would I get first? Should I make time to grab diapers, since they would be hard to find in post-apocalyptic America, or would that be a foolish waste of time. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT TO FIGURE OUT AT 3:30 IN THE MORNING, YOU SEE.
The only cure for my rat-in-the-maze anxiety was to wake myself all the way up so I could not slip back into the dream, and then come downstairs and check cnn, npr, and bbc to make sure that the world has not ended. Then I watched a cute video of a baby snuggling his dad’s face after dad shaved off a beard, which was the sort of Soothing Nonsense that the internet is good for. Now I am watching some old favorites on netflix, which will help slow my rapid thoughts and lull me back to sleep juuuuuust about when the boys wake up.
But first, a little check-in post. Bad dreams aside, all is well. The boys are well. The husband is well. I myself am hanging in there. I consistently bump up against the limits of a 24 hour day, and desperately wish I could bill 12 hours, sleep 8 hours, and still have about 10 hours leftover to play with kids/relax/do domestic chores/write blog posts. Daily I am too busy to go to the bathroom, to eat well, to exercise – it’s a constant pell mell dash from one deadline to another. I hope things slow down soon – I need more downtime than this. It’s like tech week level stress, from back when I used to do plays, every single day of the week, every single week of the year, for years on end. But, you know. Not much I can do about it at this juncture. The only way out is through.
I want to write more happy thoughts, but the Dream still has me in its grip a bit. Plus I’m starting to wind down back into a sleepy state, and must grab those few Zs while I still can. Maybe I will post again soon – maybe thirteen days or more will fly by.