When your kids are younger, the words you most dread hearing in the middle of the night are “I had an accident.” (Come to think of it, those are the words you most dread hearing when they get older, too—the only difference being that when they’re younger those words are usually followed with “Can I sleep with you?” as opposed to “And the police want to talk to you.”)
Usually, though, for a brief period (in between bed-wetting and joy-riding) there will come a time when you can relax; when you know that the worst thing you will wake up to in the morning is “Mom, the cable’s out.” Well, maybe you can relax: me, I still lie in bed at night dreading those four little words, only in my case they’re not “I had an accident;” they’re “I had a dream.”
Look, don’t get me wrong: I love my son, Clyde. I love listening to him talk, and I love hearing about his day at school. But my god, if I have to hear one more play-by-play about what he dreamed last light I might end up hanging myself. I can’t help it. I’m a writer. That means I like my stories to have a narrative flow: a beginning, a middle, and an end. I like there to be character, conflict, and resolution. I like there to be a point to it all, and barring all of that, I like there to at least be a scene with a shirtless Rob Pattinson.
But Clyde’s dreams contain none of those things. (At least, they don’t contain the first few things—I can only assume there’s no naked Rob Pattinson running around, but maybe I’m just in denial). Instead, his dreams contain a lot of “And then this one guy—the guy I told you about—did I tell you about him? He’s a general. He drives a tank. And then he says to his tank—because his tank can talk, and it’s purple, and one time. . .”
Usually, at some point in Clyde’s dream monologue (somewhere around the second or third hour), he’ll turn to me in exasperation and say, “Are you listening?” and it’s all I can do not to scream out “No! I’m not, because what you’re saying is really, really boring.” But I don’t. (Usually.) Because I know that one day he’ll grow out of this stage, and that then I’ll miss these interminable recitations. (Probably.)
But here’s my fear: what if I don’t? What I mean is, what if I never get the chance to miss them, because they don’t go away? It’s possible: Clyde really likes theater—what if he eventually turns his three hour non-narrative dream rambling into some kind of off-off-off Broadway show?
I can see it now: An Evening With Clyde. And there’ll I’ll be, trapped in the front row as Clyde performs an interpretive dance explaining how he really feels about Modern Warfare 3. Or he’ll open up a box of spaghetti and slowly pull out each piece of pasta, snapping it in half as he describes one failed love affair after another. Or he’ll hand out mirrors and ask the audience to look at their tongues for three hours while he talks about what it means to “talk.” (Can you tell I have a problem with theater? You try growing up in a house with an older sister who’s also a theater major and we’ll see who emerges unscathed.)
Still, I know it’s not fair to Clyde for me to jump to conclusions; after all, he might not end up in theater at all. He might grow up to be a normal, boring adult—one who has really long, and really boring dreams. That he loves to talk about with other people. Especially, and unfortunately, me.