What Fantasy Women Think

I've been sick again, so that's probably it.

Despite everything fabulous about me, sometimes I just have a downer kind of a mood.  Yesterday was like that.  It takes energy to keep being fabulous.  I was feeling a little picked on, picked at, picked over, and peculiar.

Even my baby saying, "We belong here," as he happily folded himself up on my lap after several days of quarantine did not completely dispel my mood, although it went a long way toward it.

Then, I had a dream.

In my dream, my daughter had been invited to a wedding of someone obviously older than her that I didn't know.  I went to drive the wedding gift my daughter had picked out to the bride's parents' home, which took me straight east, up a steep hill into a very rich area of town.  The hill was so steep, in fact, that my used car started to slow down and flounder.  If I could only make it to the next intersection at the top of the hill!  I decided to turn off the road and look at the wedding invitation again for the address, or a map.  

This family was obviously way richer than our family.

I don't remember if I got the present delivered before the dream switched on me.

I was back at home, only it was really my parents' home--the one I had grown up in.  The mother of the bride and the bride had come to my home instead of the other way around.  

I wasn't prepared for this to happen.  I looked around me, and the house was a mess and I wasn't dressed. Given the state of things, I tried not to receive these women.  I even went so far as to hurry into my mother's bedroom and hold the door shut.  

The other women went so far as to knock and push on the door, demanding to be allowed to expose me in all my "glory."

They won.

They were in my old bedroom then that I had as a girl, watching me flounder to try to get dressed in front of them.  I looked in my closet and my chest of drawers, but things were not in the order that I keep them.  I couldn't find anything to wear.  I found myself making excuse after excuse. "I've been sick.  I usually plan my wardrobe ahead of time and have things all lined up.  I don't know how I got so behind.  I am usually tidier than this--I don't know what happened.  These clothes fit better before Christmas."  Et cetera.

The other, glamorous (of course), women were patient, but still there, looking in on my disaster.  I felt like, given the evidence around them, they couldn't possibly believe my statements that I usually do better than that.  

In the closet, I found a yellow dress (that I don't own) and tried clumsily to pair it with a black skirt.  I asked their opinion.  I kept talking, hoping to convince them that I am not such a personal catastrophe in real life.

I suppose one could call this a nightmare.

I woke from it feeling like my spirit had holes.

I wondered if I would be able to go back to sleep.

No, of course my true circumstances are not as bad as they were in the dream, but being sick does always put me behind in my personal goals.  Things fall apart a little bit, which I hate but cannot avoid.  I don't like feeling like I'm living in the fairy tale where every time the suitor axes one chip out of a tree that he's trying to cut down, two more grow in its place.  I try to be patient and forgiving of myself during weeks like this.  I try to listen to the voice of the kind me over the one that drives me.

Turning over, I crumpled into a ball, wrapping my arms around that hole in my spirit, so it wouldn't ache.

A "tender mercy" came.  I remembered something I had done last night, right before going to sleep.  I had extended a kindness to my husband by offering to take on one of his jobs to mitigate the extra load he has taken on at work.  I had assured him that I would be able to handle it just fine.  He had seemed so tired that I just couldn't stand the thought of him staying up late to work on something between two extra-long days at work.

The kind voice in my head asserted itself.  "That's the real me," it said.

I smiled and told myself to go ahead and believe that.  Never mind what the rich, glamorous fantasy women I'd made up thought of me.  If I could extend kindness to my husband so he could sleep, I could do the same for myself.

So, I did.