Fear and frustration

 

I am sitting in the living room of the house on Douglas Street, a house I spent most of my growing up years in.

I am sitting in my mother's chair watching television, but I hear someone playing guitar on the sun porch. I also hear someone coming downstairs in the hall behind me. For some reason I am filled with fear.

My mother comes around the corner and she is furious. I tell her the guitar did not bother me. Then, thinking I needed a reason, said, "I think I got used to them when I was away at college."

We are hungry. My grandmother and aunts are here and we go into the kitchen to eat breakfast. Someone has set up those large brown folding church tables. Packed together into a huge square, they fill the kitchen so completely it is hard to sit around the edges to eat, but we try.

My mother is in the kitchen behind this kitchen, cooking. My niece, is eating on the floor under the table and my sister refuses to make her sit up on a chair to eat. I am furious. My grandmother sits at the corner of the table fake smiling and trying to make everyone else do the same. Keri keeps eating pancakes with her fingers, under the table.

I leave and go back where my mother is now cooking scrambled eggs and sausages like a short order cook. It makes me angry that she is not eating with us and I tell her that. We go back into the kitchen and all the tables, except one, have been removed. My mother sits down to eat now and my grandmother is still there. My sister is there too. 

I want to sit down but now I realize there isn't even any toast and I am, once again, furious. I get up and tell them I'm not eating without toast and I go to get the toaster, which is on the sun porch. As I walk out there, I know my mother is following me and I am filled with fear again. She is angry.

I step back to hide in the foyer and she passes me by still heading for the sun porch. I wonder what she will do when she gets there and I am not there. Then suddenly as she enters the door to the sun porch, her body is jerked back and falls on the floor. I am horrified to see her head land right in front of me! She has been beheaded and I immediately feel like it is my fault, but I know she walked into an electric cord so hard and with such force that it decapitated her. I wonder if I should call 911 for an ambulance since I know she is dead, but I don't know what else to do and decide that is the right thing to do. I dial the number and while waiting for someone to answer I feel like it is my fault my mother was beheaded. If only I had not dared to go get the toaster.

I keep waiting but no one answers the 911 number.

My cell phone rings and I wake up from this dream, maybe the worst one I've ever had. The feelings were real. They were the old feelings of frustration and fear and guilt, but the story is not a true one.