The monkey made me do it

Southern nightmares

When I graduated college the first time my parents and brother came to see me in Texas. It was a first-time trip for all of them, and they stayed after the ceremony was over to sightsee and to get ready for my brother and father to drive back to Washington with me while my mother flew home (she’s not the road-trip type). We were staying in the same hotel room on the last night before the drive home, with my father and brother in one king-size bed and my mother and I in the other. It was the first time in memory that I’d shared a bed with her, and the evening was not exactly a restful one for many reasons. I had wrecked my car the week before and had been running around getting it fixed before the migration plus getting ready for the graduation ceremony, which in Texas is a big occasion (every opportunity to dress up there is exploited mercilessly).

I didn’t sleep much, and when I did doze off I had a series of horrible dreams. I dreamt that my sister was run over by a semi truck, my aunt had met with an accident, and finally that my mom had passed away in her sleep while I was right next to her. That one shook me, and I woke up with a start to see my mom very still across the bed from me. She wasn’t moving a muscle (strange, I know, to be sleeping and not moving but I wasn’t exactly thinking straight) and I couldn’t see the rise and fall of her breathing no matter how hard I looked. And I was looking pretty hard.

I scooted a little closer to her, leaning in to see if I could see her nose move or eye twitch or any indication that she wasn’t dead like my dream had predicted. I worked myself into a frenzy (a very quiet frenzy, just in case she actually was sleeping) and started to panic a little. My brain was whirling with options, from jumping and shaking her awake to saying her name (I just know it would have been a shout if I’d tried that one, given my state), to tapping (shoving) her shoulder. Finally I settled on a trick that I’d read about in books, where you put a mirror or glass under their nose to see if it fogged up. The only problem was that I didn’t have a mirror, or know where to find one. I decided to use my hand, and to try and feel the breath under her nose.

You have to picture this: A fully grown daughter who really should know better sneaking up on her own mother with her hand flat below her mom’s nose, holding her own breath to better gauge the possible air flow of the potentially deceased mother. Of course my mom woke up. “What’s wrong?” How do you answer that? “Nothing… I just had a bad dream and had to make sure you were still alive so I stuck my hand under your nose.” I think I did end up saying something like that, and apologizing a million times because I knew she’d have a hard time getting back to sleep. She knows me, though, and if anyone can understand a little childish midnight death-related paranoia, a mother can.

posted by LadyJay @ 11:14 AM