But I don’t want to.

Seriously, sleeping in would have felt sooooooo good this morning! Alas, it’s not meant to be.

In this random post, I want to talk about a dream that I had. This post might get a bit personal. The dream has made me think a lot this past week about a lot of things, in that random way dreams do. I’ll explain.

In the dream, I was waking up from a nap, but I was not in my house or any other home I’ve ever lived in. I was sleeping on a couch, curled up at the end, using an arm rest as a pillow. The couch was not in a house or an apartment – it was in a library. The library didn’t seem to be open – the lights were mostly off except for a few. It took me a few minutes, but I soon realized that I recognized the library as the one that I worked at when I was in college. I didn’t remember a couch being in that spot, but I did remember the room I was in.

I look over and notice that I’m not alone sleeping on this couch. This is the weird part. My ex-husband was sleeping on the other side of the couch, slouched down, his head resting on the back of it, snoring lightly. That’s when I should have known it was a dream – he never snored that quiet! Before I could even process this, I hear someone running towards me. I look up and see my daughter, arms outstretched, a big smile on her face. Only it’s not her now, as a teenager. She looks like she’s maybe seven or eight years old. I ask her what she’s doing there and she throws her arms around me, tells me she missed me, and that grandma “brought her early.” I look up and see my mom walking behind her. She waves at me. My ex wakes up. And then I wake up, for real.

So, a lot to unpack here.

While I’m not necessarily a person who believes that ever dream is meaningful, I haven’t been able to get this one out of my mind, so I’ve been trying to process it. The only thing I can come up with so far is that I am feeling very nostalgic for a particular part of my life, which the location of this dream would point to. I loved being in college. I loved everything about the environment, which is part of why I had originally never wanted to leave. I wanted to either be a professor once I got my Master’s degree, or to come back and work at the library as a regular employee. Neither of those things ever happened for me, and I’m starting to realize that they most likely never will. It’s next to impossible for me to ever get my Master’s and I would need one for either one of those scenarios.

This also fits with seeing my daughter as a happy little girl. As much as I was stressed as a parent back then, it is so much harder now! I worry constantly about her mental health, her safety, her school, not to mention the fact that the world is getting to be a much more negative place. I do miss when she was little, but mostly I miss how easy it was to make her happy. This has been an ongoing thing with me. I see a cute little outfit in a store and literally start crying. I would give anything to go back to that time and spend more time with her.

The only thing that doesn’t quite fit here is my ex-husband (yeah, he didn’t quite fit in my life either). I don’t miss him or miss being married to him. At all. Those eight years were some of the hardest of my life. The only thing I can think of is that maybe I miss him living closer because of our shared kid. He lives several states away and it has put a mental toll on our daughter and, as such, put a toll on me as well. I don’t miss him as a husband, but maybe I miss him as a father since he is missing out on so much.

I don’t think my mom in the background represents much other than the fact that she is always there in my life. With everything I have been through, she has been my constant, my rock.

So maybe this dream is just a way of acknowledging things that have been and finding a way to say goodbye to them. Saying goodbye is always hard, but maybe it’s just time. Time to accept that this is where life has taken me and, even though it’s not where I thought I would end up, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a good place.

Categories: Drabbles