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I love having my daughter home. Really I do. Not that I see her a lot. She sleeps late and goes out with friends until long after I’ve gone to bed. I’m either working or she’s occupied during the few hours we overlap awake and in the house together.
But the times that we do happen to be in the same room at the same time are wonderful and we’ve caught up on each other’s lives nicely.
There are some things I don’t like about her being back though. One is the slight worry I have when she’s out at night. When she’s at school we don’t know what she’s doing, and therefore don’t worry; but when she’s here we feel her absence when she’s out. Also I hear the door open when she gets home at 2 or later.
One night, soon after she came home, she called to say she’d be late getting home. I woke up sometime after 2 and eventually heard her come in. Knowing she was home safely, I fell asleep again.
I was rudely awakened by Dean, slamming doors and loudly exclaiming how upset he was that Clare had not come home. I got up and helped look for her, telling Dean I’d heard her come home. He was angry with her for blatantly disobeying her 2:00 curfew. We called her cell phone and I called her roommate’s cell phone. I was getting ready to call the mother of one of her friends — someone she’d been out with the night before, but didn’t want to call too early. I figured she’d come home and went out again for a good reason — maybe her roommate or friend needed someone to talk to.
I really was not worried until Dean noticed she had not taken her winter coat, wallet or shoes. He also thought he could hear her cell phone when he called it. I switched from calm to frantic, sure that someone had come in the house at night and taken her away. I walked to Dean who was in the laundry room and decided to call the mother of that friend — too early or not. I looked down as I walked past the catch-all closet in the basement and saw a fragment of my bathrobe — which she’d been wearing lately. I opened the door of the closet and found Clare asleep on the floor of the closet, covered in blankets and a Snugli and wearing my bathrobe.
She opened her eyes, looked at me and said, “I slept in the closet. I left you a note.”
We found the note a little later, words scribbled at the bottom of a pencil drawing in her sketchpad next to the basement couch.
Another house dream. This time I awoke in a strange bedroom — the four of us were sleeping in our bed, like the old days when we semi-practiced “the family bed”. I remember getting up and saying to the kids — “you’re too big for the family bed. You need to move into your own rooms” and walking them down the hall to their new bedrooms.
Andrew’s was right next to our bedroom and I pointed at the closed door and “said that’s your room”. Clare’s was harder to find, but then I remembered it was at the end of the hall. We walked in and noted it was small, but she’d be able to fit her furniture in it.
I walked back to Andrew’s room and saw that the previous owners left all the furniture, including a bed with sheets and blankets and a large console TV. Andrew was pleased with the TV and didn’t mind sleeping on someone else’s bed.
When we walked downstairs a house party was being thrown for us. My mom was in the kitchen cooking and supervising while friends and neighbors either helped out or enjoyed each others’ company. I can’t say I recognized anyone but my mom, but in the dream I seemed to know them.
Suddenly I realized we’d moved and I ran outside to take a photo of the new house to send to my mom (forgetting she was at the party). When I looked at the house I was disappointed. It was not as nice as our old house, and seemed smaller from the outside. It actually looked like a two story beach house — weathered shingles and all. Walking on the small lot, I noticed the grass was stiff and sparse and the soil was mostly sand. It could have been a house at the beach, except there was no real water anywhere — except for a run-off pond in a neighbor’s back yard. We had bought an ugly beach house in the middle of an ugly subdivision.
Walking back into the house I noted that the kitchen was bigger than ours and exclaimed, “Yay! Counter space.”
There were nooks and crannies in the house but not fun ones. One was a room that could have been on a Navy ship that held nothing but a painted metal staircase leading to the fuse box. It also was damp, with water dripping from the ceiling. We found some old science experiments near the fuse box. The floor was moist sand.
At one point I realized we’d bought the house from a woman who used to be married to a friend of Dean’s and I remembered having been in the house when she owned it and lived in it with her two children. I remembered having been in the kids’ rooms. I wondered why she’d left so much furniture in the house, but after knowing she’d owned it, I felt better about living there.
Clutch Cargo Lips 