Sifting through Dreams

I am seriously sluggish this morning, so I'll tell you upfront . . . I'm offering no guarantees on the quality or even the coherence of this post. I hit the alarm for half an hour this morning -- something I rarely do because I am generally so eager to get up and write. When I did finally get up, I sat in the rocking chair with my coffee between my hands for another fifteen minutes, trying to shake off the remnants of several disturbing dreams.

I only remember snatches of a couple of them. I cannot go into detail here about those, except to say that they have to do with a friendship that I screwed up several months ago, that has finally begun to mend -- and my fears that I will do something stupid and send it all crashing down again. Have you ever had a friend that you just connected with, from a place deep within yourself? Well, that's what this friendship is like. I've spent so much of my life wandering alone in a crowd, and then I bumped into her and realized . . . this woman gets me! But the thing is . . . I'm not so great with friendships. Elementary school friendships are one thing. You play with the people you're thrown together with. And then in junior high and high school, Dad and Mom were the Hot Shots at our mission field church, so some of their "glory" rubbed off on us. We were "cool" within our own subculture (although no one ever would have called it that). And then college . . . and reality hit. I did make friends, several of them in fact. I have many good memories of times spent with these friends. I also have memories of being a total . . . shall I say, moron? I didn't mean to. I never meant to hurt people. It's just that I say stupid things.

Take, for instance, the size conversation my roommates and I had sophomore year. It must have been four or five years later -- we had graduated and I had Kaitlyn -- and we got together at a restaurant one day. My former roommate Tammy brought up a conversation I had nearly forgotten about. I guess I'd made some comment about how she and Kristine were both larger than me. Well, they were! It wasn't meant to be a slam against them. It was a statement of fact. And then to find out years later that I'd hurt them, that they still remembered that and had been carrying it around all that time . . . It was awful.

After college, I pretty much stuck to my sisters. They love me regardless of what kind of horrendous gaffs I make and I know that they know my heart, that I will not lose them out of something stupid that I say or do. They are safe. They are the only people who have felt safe in my life all these years -- until this particular friend came along. I spent months saying (periodically), "I'm so afraid that I'm going to offend you, that I'm going to hurt you." And she spent months saying, "Relax! You're fine. Don't worry about hurting me." And then . . . I did. And sure enough, I lost her.

Oh, dear. I need to wrap this up and get the boys up. We're meeting Joellen at the Fred Meyers in Newberg, then continuing up to Multnomah Falls, stopping along the way at OHSU for a chat with Mark's specialists about his hardening kidneys and his wacky blood count. It should be fun, once we get going. (The falls part, not the doctor's visit part). But right now I'm SO tired, it just sounds like a lot of driving and keeping track of kids and worrying about one's spouse who probably shouldn't be hiking but who (understandably) couldn't bear to be left at home.

But, briefly, back to what I was saying about this friend . . . I have developed several new friendships during the last two years, and they all mean a great deal to me. It's been a huge stretch for me to make myself vulnerable, to reach beyond my sisters (who I will forever hold closest to my heart) and make other friends. It's just . . . scary, because I'm so bad at it, because I can mess things up so horrendously without even realizing what I'm doing.

My other dream? It was about a car, an old fashioned car, and I was riding in it with my mom and my sisters. I wanted to drive, so they let me, and then I realized that the steering wheel was teeny tiny and that none of the gears or brakes were where I expected them to be. I kept lurching around, running into things, looking like an idiot . . . until the whole vehicle actually fell apart beneath us.

But who's insecure about their ability to develop and maintain relationships? Not me!!! Hah! And if you believe that one, I have a lovely stretch of coastal property in Montana I'd like to sell ya . . .