I need my umbrella

I'm not really sure what's going on with me. Perhaps now that my brain is freed up from trying not to throw up all the time, it's trying to sort out a few other things. I'm sleeping harder and deeper than I have in months and my dream cycles are playing havoc with my waking life.

Terrible things happen at night. Like dating Val Kilmer and seeing him smash some random woman in the face with a mirror when he follows me into the restroom at some restaurant. And for dessert, he throws my son and my cat off a cliff and I can't stop him. It was kind of like being married to my first husband again.

Or frustrating things. Like living in my parents' old house before the flippers got a hold of it and it had somehow deteriorated so badly that the tiles are popping out (not that we actually had tiles anywhere except the bathrooms and these were somewhere else entirely). I, of course, was charged with getting the house in perfect order before the open house and find myself kneeling on the broken tiles and sobbing.

Add to that a son who seems to have caught a rude bug with symptoms like talking back, sulking, ignoring me, and making the "mad face" whenever I talk to him.

I snapped this morning.

After asking him four times to put on his shoes while I was racing around putting together a lunch for him and getting myself ready for work (because I overslept due to all the tiling work), he sat on his ass watching "I was a Teenage Robot" with glazed over eyes. I finally got it all together and told him to go get in the car - which he did, but he didn't bother to pick up his backpack with all the necessary stuff for camp in it.

Lugging my own burdens out to the car, I told him to go back and get his stuff. He huffed out of the car, retrieved his backpack from next to the front door, clambered back in, slammed the door and grumbled, "There, I did it. Can we go already?"

Something expoded in my brain. In a feat of amazing deterity, my arm snaked its way to the back seat and my hand grabbed the hair on the top of his head. Hard. My mouth moved and angry words came spewing out about ungrateful little shits, lazy asses and how he was going to spend the rest of his life in his room unless I let Val Kilmer throw him off the cliff. Heck, I'd stand there and cheer.

The sane half of me sat there with its mouth hanging open, wondering who this other person was. Because I LOVE my son. I hate being angry with him and try to control my reactions when he's just being a brat. The crazy part of me just wanted to pound out all my frustration on him, but the sane part kept it to yelling and holding onto his hair. And kept me in the front seat. And started crying.

ZBoy didn't notice this, as I was wearing dark glasses and he was busy rubbing the top of his head and crying too. We both cried, in our own separate little worlds. Mine in the sleep-deprived and catching up with too much subconscious angst world and his in the sullen little boy trying to grow up and be his own person world.

Worlds collide.

He got to camp only a little late. As we arrived, I apologized to him. He apologized to me. We got out of the car and hugged fiercely, wiped our eyes, collected his bag and walked through the gates of normalcy. I was me, he was he and all was right between our worlds again.

I still feel off-kilter. Tears well up with no warning. I can't concentrate. I'm at work but getting very little done.

Ironic, isn't it, that when I got in the car after dropping ZBoy off at camp, THIS song came on the radio????