Anybody getting married in there? |
I’m living the life of a faux single mom these days. I’m handling everything fine – I’m picking up the dog poop from the back yard, adding chemicals to the hot tub, bugging the kids about their grades – in essence being the dad.
Not having a husband around every day has an impact though, in that I don’t have anyone to tell my dreams to. Not dreams as in hopes and dreams. Screw that. I’m talking about the stuff that happens in my brain at night.
A typical morning conversation between my husband and I used to go like this:
Me: “Oh man, you wouldn’t believe what I dreamed last night.”
My husband: “STOP! Don’t say another word! I don’t want to hear about your dream! STOP TALKING.”
Me: “Okay, so I was getting married, but I was wearing a purple bubble top, white patent leather shoes and soccer sox, and Bunny from Gomer Pyle was there . . .”
My husband thinks that conversations about dreams are about as useful as conversations about what you’d do if you won the lottery. There is no bigger waste of time, in his opinion. You may as well be yelling, “Blah, blah, blahblahblah,” into the Grand Canyon or outer space. A much better use of your time would be to check the back yard for more dog poop.
So now when I have a really good or really bad dream, I have to resort to talking to myself, since I’m nowhere near the Grand Canyon or outer space.
My dreams are mostly about weddings. My wedding, specifically. But I’m never marrying my real husband; in fact, the groom is rarely in my dream. He’s so minor a character that he’s nonexistent. The major characters are the guests, who are book and TV characters, people from old PTAs I belonged to, some ladies from my church, and whoever recently hosted Saturday Night Live.
Second in importance is my wedding party, who I’ve invariably forgotten to ask to be in the wedding, forgotten to order their dresses, forgotten to order my dress, for that matter. This leads to the part of the dream where I’m in a phone booth in Hayman’s Drug Store in Hubbard, trying to make the calls to pull together a wedding hours before it’s to begin, and I keep dropping the quarters, forgetting the number I’m calling, tripping over a garden hose that someone has weirdly left in the phone booth, my fingers slipping halfway through the dial, and I get the next regular character in my dreams: The operator.
Then there’s what I’m wearing. I rarely have a wedding dress ready. Once I dreamed that I had a beautiful white satin gown, but had forgotten to buy shoes, so I was wearing size 11 men’s tennis shoes.
And my favorite wedding dream: I’m ready to walk down the aisle and it’s flanked by big rusty metal pointy things that I have to squeeze through without getting tetanus. The best man was in a wheelchair. What did I eat before going to bed that night?
If you’ve made it through this far, you’re a better listener than my husband, who claims he misses me, but is secretly celebrating not having to turn over in bed in the morning and hear the words, “Oh man, you wouldn’t believe . . . ”