dream hangover

I should really be grading and doing some class prep this morning instead of being here (the weekend in Louisiana was quite good...old friends, dancing, lots of government criticizing...more later). The problem is that I woke up this morning from a dream about my mom. My mom died a little over 3 years ago and, dammit, I should be past these crap dreams. Her death was kind of unexpected. She had survived cancer and ended up passing away in her sleep of a heart attack. I suppose I spent more time in the land of denial than most and buried myself and my emotional health in other things in order to sleepwalk through mourning. And, at the end of the day, I am a bit of a different person than I was then...more insecure, more of a struggle to find joy in things, less likely to want to emotionally invest in much of anything (work, play, love). Y'know the fairly mundane effects of loss.

Anyway, the dream about my mom began in a bedroom of the house that my dad is finally going to put on the market to move closer to his sister and to his new girlfriend (I have not met the new girlfriend, but she makes his life much better so I am all the way behind their relationship). The bedroom was my original bedroom in the house that was, until I turned 13, a work in progress. The "upstairs" bedroom with blue shag carpeting, white twin bed frame, and white metal dresser (now part of my current guestroom). In my dream I was upset and because it was during the hazy liminal "about to wake up but can't" moment in the morning, the mood morphed between the dreamscape and my avoidance of having to grade and teach today. My dream self decided to get up and eat. Pizza (my great comforter). So I not only ordered a pizza from Mellow Mushroom (even in my dreams the Krazy Karma calls my name), but threw a DiGiornio in the oven for good measure. It is at this point that my mom came into the kitchen and began to look at me as I stood at the counter next to the sink. The look that I dreaded throughout my childhood. The look that I felt as both judgment and sentencing---jeez what a look! I hurriedly tried to hide one of the pizzas. It ended up careening into the sink of dirty dishes. Flustered, I promptly removed it and began to wrap it in foil that I pulled from an uncharacteristically barren cupboard. My mom began to describe the dinner that she was planning to make that evening (some sort of fish dish...sketchy at best in northern minnesota norwegian country...ever heard of lutefisk?) implying that my pizza binge was going to disrupt family eating time. I retorted by commenting that I didn't feel like eating fish. She started to yell at me about being selfish, and her face began to redden and scrunch up. This is the point where the dream turned into scary-icky territory. Tears stood at the corners of her eyes and her yelling turned to weeping as she complained that I never thought of anyone but myself and that she was only trying to be a good mom and that she was tired of being taken for granted. This quickly shifted to her declaring that she must not be a good mother, that she is a complete failure. When she was alive, my mother put on this face twice that I can remember. Once when I was about 12 and she got pretty drunk, decided she was an unfit mother, and started to pack her bags to leave (thankfully she never finished packing). Once when she was flat out on a hospital bed after having major surgery to excise her cancer (as well as her bladder and all of her reproductive organs). In my dream, I got very mad. "How dare you make this about you, mom! Can't you see things from my perspective?" The combination of the anger and the memory of that particular mom face made dream-real was enough to propel me up to a coffee-less real world and a stack of papers to grade. Yep, I woke up from a nightmare triggered by my passion for pizza. go figure.

Thanks for letting me vent!