Five Months In...

For the last two weeks or so I've been battling one of the worst insomnia stretches I've had in ages. It's the kind where I'm exhausted but just cannot manage a full night's sleep. And when I am asleep I'm just inundated with full on nightmares at worst, or unsettled dreams at best.

Lots of family drama in the dreams. Not with Brent and Christopher, though sometimes they are there. Not as they are now, but when Christopher was little. And if they are there it's because someone else is telling me what I'm doing wrong in that moment that I desperately need to fix before the whole thing ends in catastrophe. Which, of course, the part of my mind that never shuts off quickly reminds me that Christopher is fully grown, this is in the past, so clearly I already fucked it up.

It's been lovely. 

And so I've been trying to figure out why my subconscious is so worried about all of this. Why now?

And I'm sure it's tied to my mother dying. I mean how could it not be? And I've settled on part of the reason why I'm having issues right now is because I was so braced and ready for the holiday onslaught followed by Mom and Dad's Anniversary that when I got past that I sort of felt like I was done. Which, of course, I'm not done. It's not like grieving has an end date. There is some part of it you carry with you forever. And you don't really know what is going to trigger it. I mean the other morning the song Convoy was on the radio and my brain went from that to a song about the Silverton Train from the same artist to thinking about how much my dad loved trains and that one in particular and then I was crying. It took about 5 seconds to process all of that and then poor Brent was looking over in the car wondering why in the world "Pigpen, this here's The Rubber Duck..." would make me cry. 

So the nightmares...

I think it's my subconscious trying to figure out where I fit now. I mean with Mom and Dad now both gone my birth family (as opposed to Brent and Christopher) has no center to hold it together. At least to hold me to it. I'm not like the majority of my family. I'm just not. We don't have a lot in common. We don't have much to talk about. If we met each other now we would be polite (as we were raised to be polite) but we wouldn't be friends. I have a relationship with one of my three nephews and my niece. That's really pretty much it.

I mean, obviously, I have a relationship with my sisters and my brothers, they are my sisters and my brothers, but it's just that. They are my sisters and my brothers. We don't have much in common beyond that. World views are different. Even memories of growing up are so different for each of us that it would be hard to find pieces that fit together to make one complete puzzle picture. 

And honestly I dealt with all of that ages ago. I am who I am. They are who they are. And it's fine. I left home really young. I set off to be different. They have decades together doing family things having family get togethers, family church times, raising their kids together that I don't have. I also know I have a reputation as the problem child and I kind of like it. Because it makes me laugh. For a lot of reasons. But I dealt with all of it along time ago.

But that was when Dad and Mom and then just Mom were still alive. 

There were ways of dealing with things because of Mom.

Now Mom is gone so the center isn't there.

So what is the new dynamic?

And I don't know.

So I think that's what is causing the insomnia and the bad dreams. My subconscious is cranking up things that I had dealt with in the context of Mom still being alive, and keeping that relationship together and now that it's gone? What changes? Does anything need to change? 

Well of course it changes. Everything changes. That's life. It's a constant state of change. 

Now to just get my subconscious to stop feeling the need to stress about it and just let what happens happen.

Easy right?

Sure.