Recurring dream

It’s always the same: I haven’t done my homework and I can’t find the classroom. This time, my work colleagues were the teachers, the ones I would go to for help, or the pupils: unhappy with me because I hadn’t completed my part of a project. My recurring dream isn’t hard to unpick. I left work on Friday with work undone because I had tummy ache, but it’s symptom of a wider malaise: I never not do my homework. My diligence has always been my saving grace in a sea of uncertainty. Leaving work undone is the ultimate sign of rebellion.

The day my dad drove me up to my mothers, mid GCSEs, mid term, never to return to my childhood home has stayed with me in my dreams: the idea that I am lost and failing.

The school I eventually went to, taken by my mother in a panic as the weekdays ticked by,  didn’t help – a Victorian maze set on two sites, where bright and breezy middle classes and mixed up goths mixed with the displaced old farming community of the semi rural market  town – and never the twain would get along. I struggled to tell the difference, society’s unspoken rules being a mystery to me even still, and learned to smoke to hide my shyness that engulfed me every time I stepped over an invisible line. Doing my homework was the one thing the that kept me steady, pinned me to a timetable that I never once failed to fulfil.

I didn’t fail, despite my concerns, and the situation – of changing courses half way through, in which I found myself. But I didn’t make any friends either, and that’s the situation I find myself in today. My anxieties about social interaction and my inability to miss a deadline mean that I can be hard to like. The ones who do give me the time of day, I pin myself to, scared they too will leave. It has made me myopic and needy. It’s not hard to unpick. But it’s a tough act to warm to. But how to exit? Can I ? Or will I always be, in my dreams, up on stage with my trousers down – it’s not like I’m not used to that in real life too.

My husband is my saviour, scraping me up as he did out of a strip club at 23, and he is more father to me than lover. I always let him drive.  He won’t let me down, though he needs outlets of his own now I’ve battened down the hatches on our relationship.

These days I calm myself with well appointed, tidy rooms. I fight my anxiety when my children take their things out of carefully labelled boxes and scatter them all over the new carpet. Floors are a particular bugbear. I hate the feeling of bits under my feet, and so I clean and sweep religiously, although I annoy myself with my neuroses.

I still smoke. I try not to in front of the kids, but now I am an addict, and I carry my e-lite around me like an inhaler, sucking it back at the first signs of stress. It makes me look an idiot, but I am past caring.

The kids, well, they are used to me, and take me for what I am. I try not to embarrass them in public, but sometimes I shout. I doubt I can help it.

Three days off work and the grief is pouring out of me. I’m scared to go back because I didn’t do my homework, and being  difficult and hard to like, I’ve hardly had any fun on my days off, preferring to spend it cleaning up. But it can be hard to be the life and soul when you’re holidaying with just the kids to spread out the school holiday childcare.

Yet I took them swimming and had friends for tea. I even had a whole day doing nothing but watching telly and eating bad stuff, and that’s not like me, not at all. I never did that as a teenager. Perhaps I should have…

It’s not been so bad. I need to stop dwelling on the negative, as those who love me tell me time and time again.

Today, Tom has taken time off, so we get one day together to do something nice as a family and both timetable and cleaning will be thrown to the wind. Yet in my dreams I am still lost and failing, which makes it hard to have fun, however much it’s only just a dream.