I was relieved to find myself awake at 3:00 am in order to realize that the tragedy of what I had enacted was only a dream. But that didn’t help me shake the trauma.
After checking to make sure that my son was safely asleep in his bed, I reluctantly woke my husband to soften the burden of my nightmare. Even now, it hurts to retell it.
We had pimped our younger son so that we could attend some affair. It was only a single time and we were paid well for it, but the anguish on my ten year old’s face afterward was heartbreaking; and when I put him in the shower to wash away the disgrace, he complained of a sharp pain that felt like a knife in his buttocks.
“What were we thinking,” I hissed to my husband. “We could go to jail. How could we do something like this?”
This is so far from any reality that my husband and I would ever create, but that doesn’t matter. The dream was that strong.
No one needed to interpret this one. We both knew what it meant, right away. I had a job interview in the morning, and I was afraid of what this new position would mean for our family–particularly my younger son.
I finally drifted back into a troubled sleep around 5:00 am; this time dreaming of my teen.
I had returned home to see him, realizing that I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to connect; but no matter how I tried I couldn’t find him in the house.
There were escalators and staircases and doors, but just as I arrived to the place where he would be, his friends told me that I had missed him. He had left in the time that it took me to get here.
Isn’t it convenient when our dreams are so transparent? Isn’t it terrifying when we realize just how deeply we our connected to our kids–and how fragile that connection can be?
The funny thing is that I’ve always worked. I’ve just never found a position that might capture my heart and soul in a way that has me looking toward the future–without them.
This is the tenth post that I’ve written in ten days around the tectonic shifts this consideration has evoked in me. All of these are posted on my Life Path series, but this post distinctly belonged here.
This post is about saying goodbye to one rich role in exchange for another. It’s not a goodbye that will happen today or next week or even next year; but the seed has been planted and the roots are digging deep, and I’ve always known, that this love story, of mother and son, would some day diverge on different paths.
Kelly Salasin, November 2010
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The Empty Nest Diary 