Before falling asleep Ned and I talked more about Nat. Ned is resisting my basement apartment idea and also the idea of him living at his school. I found myself thinking, “Ned’s not ready to get to this next phase.” I kept checking in with my heart, searching for the pain, like you do with your tongue in your mouth when you have sore there. Yup, it was there. But mostly there was this dullness, this vague uncomfortable feeling which I now think was fear. If I let him go, will it be a mistake?<\/p>\n
I fell asleep, and dreamed that I was at a vacation resort somewhere. My mother was there, too, but she was very small, and also disturbed, it turned out. As I entered the room, she shot at me. Reverberating through my head were the following words, from a (helpful) comment from yesterday’s blog post, “Your third grader deserves his place in the sun, after all Nat had his turn, right?” I woke up screaming. <\/p>\n
I got up and walked around to clear that horror away. It came to me that in the dream I may have been Nat, and my mother was me. I kept hearing those words, but then imagining the fear of the gun on me. As I’ve said before, I don’t feel old enough to be a mother, let alone a mother with such issues to wrestle with. I know in my head one thing, but in my heart I fear abandoning him. I fear (probably irrationally) that giving him over to the care of others will feel like abandonment to him. I cannot bear that. Neither can Ned, I know it. We are one in this. We are not ready for that kind of change. We want things to get better here, that’s all. Even though I have seen what a marvelous job most of his teachers have done, over the years, that fear remains, a black mildewed presence at the bottom of my heart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Before falling asleep Ned and I talked more about Nat. Ned is resisting my basement apartment idea and also the idea of him living at his school. I found myself thinking, “Ned’s not ready to get to this next phase.” I kept checking in with my heart, searching for the pain, like you do with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pSTth-d6","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}