2015
Most of the time I remember only fragments of my dreams, just one or two images, maybe the thread of plot, but I awake swollen with the emotion of it. I wake with the taste of sadness, or love. Sometimes I dream the same dream over and over all night, always waking at the same place. I often wake myself with the word I spent my whole dream trying to enunciate, but instead of help it sounds like hnnnnuh. I will carry a bad dream for a day, sometimes two, unable to leave that murky world that exists on the other side of awake. My boyfriend thinks it is unfair that I tend to blame him for actions he performed only in my dreams. I tell him my dream is a microcosm of my thoughts and unresolved feelings, therefore I can blame him. I think I must be a very hard person to live with.
2009
My big boy didn’t even have a bed at his father’s, so he thought this idea of sleeping in his own room at my house was exasperating and ridiculous, not that he used those words. I was trying to stop dancing him to sleep every night, so I laid down in bed next to him, curling my five feet seven frame to fit in the four-foot-long toddler bed. It was a good thing I didn’t weigh much. He rested his head on my shoulder, his arm across my body, fingers tucked in underneath my side. His light-brown hair smelled like boy-child, like his very own person, like mine. I hated when he came home smelling like Daddy’s house, or when his hair kept the musty smell of church, or the powdery smell of Grandma Kathy. To help him fall asleep, I told him a story I crafted off the top of my head about a pet guinea pig—our agreed-upon reward for when he finally slept in his own room all night long. I made up grand adventures for the pig and the boy until my son fell asleep. The pig went to playgrounds, got pulled around in a little red wagon. The pig went to nursery school. Half the time I fell asleep beside my son in that tiny bed, exhausted from his constant night waking. But it was not always this ideal. Some nights consisted of stories and songs and creeping downstairs only to hear him cry, “Mama!” as soon as my foot hit the bottom step. Many nights were filled with his tears and my begging him to please, just this once, couldn’t he go to sleep?
How do you tell an unbearable story? If I don’t write it down, maybe he will forget the time he wouldn’t go to sleep and I was screaming and he was crying and it was eleven at night and I swatted his bottom through his pajamas once, twice, before I left him sobbing alone in bed, retreating to the porch and dragging the sharp biting smoke of a cigarette deep into my lungs. I needed the smoke to burn me, I needed the ten-minute break to return to who I meant to be. I went back upstairs and held my little boy and told him I was sorry and that he was good and it wasn’t his fault and I held him and rocked him until he fell asleep. He was four years old and this was wrong and I knew better. I knew better because I remembered what it was like to be small and scared in the dark. I never hit him again, and when I ask him about it now, he doesn’t remember it happening. That isn’t enough to absolve me.
2015
“Mama, I can’t sleep,” my oldest child, now ten years old, says.
“Honey, I can’t make you sleep. This is something you have to figure out on your own,” I answer. “I’m not a good sleeper, either. I used to sing songs in my head. You are going to have to find something that works for you.”
“Well, if I can’t sleep, can I read?”
“As long as you don’t wake up your brother and stay in bed, you can read as long as you want.”
Should I have sleep-trained him as a baby, like some of my friends did with their infants, forcing him to cry alone in a crib until he learned to soothe himself? I didn’t have the heart for it. Had all of my bedtime ministrations left him permanently sleep-scarred? Slowly, I have backed away at bedtime. This is the first year I no longer sing lullabies, though I still read a chapter of Diary of a Wimpy Kid to my seven-year-old every night. I’ve outsourced bedtime to the iPod, and let them play talking books on repeat. Now, unless they are sick, once the boys fall asleep, they stay asleep until morning. It’s been years since a nightmare has sent them racing for my bedroom door. If one does have a bad dream, he walks across the bedroom to his brother’s bed and lies down beside him and falls back asleep. Maybe I should encourage them to wake me up instead, I don’t know. I don’t know the first thing about sleep.
brother and girl against the world
Brother was always a head taller and a grade
