Catching my Breath

Here I am. It has been a couple, maybe three years since I last blogged. There is no particular reason for this -- well maybe there are 4: The Blitz, The Captain, Tinker -- and Teaching. Yet, here I am. The event which brought me back here was a dream. I have been having a LOT of dreams, also known as nightmares, recently. Last night's, however, was nuts!

I dreamed my hubby and I were walking up a road. In dreams, I know things, deep things, without any explanation at all, so I cannot explain any of the following:

This road was in the Ryan Family's personal complex and private ballpark in the Texas Hill Country called,  "Home Time." Let me pause to say that I do not personally know any member of the Ryan Family, I don't know much about them, and I'm pretty sure they do not own a complex (where they all apparently lived) in the Texas Hill Country. There is literally no reason I'd be on their private complex.

Here is the extent of my "knowledge" about the Ryans. 

• They own -- or did own -- a minor league ball team here in town called the Round Rock Express
• Nolan Ryan was a phenomenal ball player and once played for the Houston Astros, whom I loved
• 20 years ago, I heard a rumor that one of the Ryan kids and his children lived in my neighborhood

That's it. I haven't been to an Express game lately so I have NO IDEA why this complex was in my dream. There was even an sign that said, "Stop. No entrance. Private ballpark."  Weird, right?

So anyway, we are walking hand-in-hand up a fairly steep hill on this dirt (??) road on our way to some sort of store just outside the complex. At the store, we will meet up with my friend, J, her son and her foster child. 

Suddenly, I cannot walk up this hill. I can't breathe. I try to tell my husband, "I can't breathe," but I also can't really talk, so it comes out as gasps. And instead, I gasp,  "I am having an asthma attack. Go tell J that I need her son's inhaler."

[Okay. There are so many factual problems with this, not least of which that J's son doesn't have asthma. Mine does, by the way, but that's no help, is it, since he apparently isn't where we are. And I haven't had an asthma attack since the early aughts (2000's) when I began taking allergy shots for that very reason. I have sleep apnea (and the machine to go with it) and I don't have asthma any more. ]

My hubby takes off and I keep trying to struggle up this hill to get to J and her boys and trying, trying to breathe until suddenly, I am bent over with exhaustion, unable to take another step, pouring sweat and struggling in vain to breathe . . . 

And then I hear knocking on the door -- or the window -- and I wake up. I mean, I sit up, 100% awake as if it were noon.

No one knocked, by the way. I have an insane dog that has the world's LOUDEST bark and lets no good knock go un-celebrated. If she even hears a hand on the latch (from the inside even), she goes crazy. So . . . there was no knock. Just my brain, waking me up, because I probably wasn't breathing.

It's 1:40 AM and I am wide awake and I've just had a wild dream that doesn't really count as a nightmare and I can't go back to sleep. Again. 

It's pretty representative of my life for the last 3 weeks. There is a lot going on. Apparently, I need to revive my family blog again. I will but for now, suffice it to say that after 25 years of marriage and all that entails --  births, deaths, break ups, reunions -- this is the hardest challenge we have faced so far. 

So as I'm making Pumpkin Curry Soup and cleaning the kitchen, I think about the dream and wonder what this all means. 

I know a little about dream interpretation but I don't even go there. I realize the answer is pretty much written in clouds on the flip side of the "Home Time" sign, and maybe it will help you too:

"Just breathe."

Slow down, calm down, take a breath. Take another. 

Just

breathe.