“Where’d you hide the pot,” he shouted out in his sleep. My eyes popped wide open from a deep slumber, and I sat straight up in bed, wondering whether I was having another one of my crazy dreams again or not. When I realized that my son and I had fallen asleep watching a movie in bed when Wade was out of town it quickly sunk in that this was my 15 year old talking in his sleep. “Wake up Brevitt! You’re grounded,” I roared into his 13-year-old sleeping face. That was the moment we both knew that the innocence of our mother/son relationship as we knew it was over. It was also when Brevitt vowed silently to never crawl into his mom’s bed again when Wade was out of town.

He’d always been like that, our Brevitt, a restless cyclone of a sleeper, yelling out his dreams while sticking a foot in your face. We worried he might have some sort of REM behavior disorder like Mike Birbiglia in the movie, “Sleepwalk with Me.” Although a total chick magnet, he might prove to be an impossible bedmate for all of his beautiful girlfriends.

I used to do that too, when reading to the boys in an exhaustive state I would drift off and instead of reading the book would begin to start telling the boys the story that I was dreaming about and they would laugh and tell me that I was doing it again.

I often wonder what has brought me to this life I am living now. A life filled with boys, chaos and an empty bank account. Has this always been my destiny, or my creation? Am I living somebody else’s dream and they just haven’t woken up yet? Does this all even truly exist?