“Where’d you hide the pot?” he shouted in his sleep.
My eyes popped wide open from a deep slumber, and I sat straight up in bed, wondering whether I was having another one of my crazy dreams. When I realized that my son and I had fallen asleep watching a movie in bed while Wade was out of town, it quickly sank in that this was my teenager talking in his sleep. “Wake up, Brevitt! You’re grounded,” I roared into his sleeping face.
That was the moment we both knew that the innocence of our mother-son relationship as we knew it was over. It was also when Brevitt silently vowed never to crawl into his mom’s bed again when Wade was out of town.
He’d always been like that, our Brevitt: a restless cyclone of a sleeper, yelling out his dreams while sticking a foot in your face. We worried he might have some sort of REM behavior disorder like Mike Birbiglia in the movie Sleepwalk with Me. Although a total chick magnet, he might prove to be an impossible bedmate for all of his beautiful girlfriends.
I used to do something similar. Reading to the boys in an exhausted state, I would drift off and, instead of reading the book, start telling them the story I was dreaming about. They would laugh and tell me I was doing it again.
I often wonder what brought me to the life I’m living now, a life filled with boys, chaos and an empty bank account. Has this always been my destiny, or my creation? Am I living somebody else’s dream and they just haven’t woken up yet? Does any of this truly exist?
