Why is the question? Well because, after about an hour and a half of sleep, I was jolted awake by yet another nightmare. For the fourth time this week. It’s not like I’ve been reading, watching, or even thinking about anything that would cause them. And after laying in bed, trying to fall back asleep for God knows how long, I think I might have come up with a possible reason.
First, I had already been through a rather emotional experience last month (exactly a month ago, as a matter of fact) because of my oldest daughter’s birthday. And then comes the eighth anniversary of the death of my father, now two days away, on August thirtieth.
I’m well beyond the point where I cry and get depressed when that date rolls around, but I do think about him more around this time. Although I have missed him every day since he died, it seems to be worse this time of year. Maybe because it reminds me of something I try to forget.
There have only been two people in my life who have ever made me feel safe. The first was my grandfather, who passed away in 1992, so there’s a twenty year anniversary looming in the not too distant future. Losing him nearly broke my heart. The second was my dad, who left my heart pretty much shattered.
Now by safe, I don’t mean that I feel like I’m in danger. I think it’s more that any sense of security that I ever felt is gone. And I never even realized, when they were alive, how much I depended on them to just be there.
I remember the first time I felt grown up enough to stay home when the rest of my family had gone up north for the day. I must have been thirteen or fourteen, and I enjoyed the freedom immensely. Until the sun began to set. I was already feeling nervous enough, and counting down the hours until everyone got home, when a couple of cats got in a fight on our patio (we didn’t even have a cat).
The timing couldn’t have been worse. The teacher in my English class had been reading a Halloween story about a coven of witches that turned into cats, and that scared me anyway (yes, I am a chicken who doesn’t get into a lot of scary stuff).
Anyway, the cats sounded like women screaming, scaring the heck out of me…and I was all done with the whole grown up thing…instantly! But my folks wouldn’t be home until close to midnight. What was I going to do? I called Grandpa and told him there was nothing to eat in the house, and could he come and get me. He had to have known it was a lie because my mom is quite the cook, and there was always plenty food in our house. But he didn’t call me out on it. Nope, he drove right over and rescued me.
My dad was a lot like that. I could call him any time things weren’t right in my world. No, I never told him the real reasons, but just hearing his voice made me feel better.
This has been a difficult year for me emotionally, and I guess that these anniversaries just drive home the fact that I will always have to deal with the hard stuff without them.
But I suppose that’s just life. Not much we can do about it. There is, however, something I can do about this blog, and that is put an end to it. Much as I don’t like the thought, I think I need to try to get at least a couple more hours sleep. And hope that if I have anymore dreams, they’re a little more pleasant than the last one. Of course I’d settle for one of the weird ones I usually have. Weird is good.
I guess I’m not quite finished yet. In reading through this to edit and check for typos, I remembered one other time I had been scared silly as a teenager. I was sound asleep in my second floor bedroom when I was awakened by someone knocking on my window. Seriously.
To this day I’ll never know why I didn’t scream. Instead, I sat up and huddled in the corner of my bed just shaking with terror. The knocking continued and all I could think was, ‘If they think I’m going to open that window, they’re nuts!”
And then the knocking finally stopped and I hear, “Kristy! Kristy! Open this window, damn you!”
It was my sister. She’d been babysitting and our mom forgot and locked the door. So rather than ringing the doorbell like a normal person might do, she decided to haul the ladder out of the garage, drag it around to the front of the house and climb up to my window. Because she didn’t want to wake Mom and Dad up. And she had the nerve to be mad at me for taking so long to let her in.