In my dream, a family member intentionally made me enter the
belief state that Graham was injured. It was an evil aunt who did it—I don't
have an evil aunt, but dreams inexplicably make the most outlandish things feel
real. The evil aunt of my dream wasn't a permanent fixture of my family—she was
like a witch who'd visit the family, do damage, cause panic and leave. She was
like a headache. You didn't know when to expect her. She was also like a
silverfish. She couldn't bite or sting you, but she could startle you into
jumping and stubbing your toe. And I think in the world of my dream it was totally normal to have an evil aunt; they were just a nasty fact of the world.
The evil aunt found a spot on Graham's head and opened the
skin there, and he bled heavily from the opening. It was a terrifying sight,
but his health wasn't in jeopardy. The blood was basically like paint. But the
evil aunt was counting on me to panic and rush him to the hospital, and she
expected that I could get clumsy and actually bump and injure his head in the
panicked process of rushing him to the hospital. It was a truly terrifying dream. Graham
sleeps in the bed between Aron and me, but after waking up from the scary dream, I felt like even when his back was curled against my stomach he still
wasn't close enough. So I made him sleep on top of me. He didn't mind. He's a very snuggly bunny.
I love that little tomato so much, and that's why the evil
aunt's evil deeds are so effective. I feel like the evil aunt is as real as
wind, because the dream is still haunting my thoughts today. But the truth is that I'm an incredibly anxious parent-person even on
days that follow nights of peaceful sleep.
It's not, incidentally, because I'm anxious that Graham
sleeps in the bed with us. I sleep much more soundly when he's in his crib, safely away from sheets and our massive bodies. But he'll sleep as eleven consecutive hours
in bed next to us and no more than two in his crib before waking up and needing
to be cuddled back to sleep. We sleep-share (to use the Sears' word for it) because it offers all of us the most hours of sleep. Graham sometimes sleeps the first five hours of the night in his crib. I think he will grow into an independent sleeper.
It's not just because of the Person-X conversation and my
nightmare that I'm thinking about violence—violence is on my mind also because
it's the Fourth of July, a holiday that makes me think of fireworks (which are
violent), war (which is violent), and, although it's less clear to me why, Legends of
the Fall, which was my favorite movie as a child because of Brad Pitt (to whom
I wrote love letters that very much resembled my love letters to Gavin
Rossdale). About two years ago I rewatched Legends of the Fall, and I was
disappointed, violently, in the movie. Violent disappointment—that's the connection.
There are plenty of smart people who aren't pacifists, and
that, along with a big pile of other facts, makes me think that my pacifist
inclinations reflect an inability to understand the complexities of
relations between nations. Would I kill the evil aunt of my nightmare if she
were realer than the wind? I wouldn't be able to call the
cops on her, because she's sly like a witch, sort of like Uganda. My internet homepage is the New York Times homepage, but I'm only allowed to read 10 free articles a month, and so I end up reading the ones that have to do with parenting, women's issues, or a book I like instead of the ones that relate to anything internationally significant. For 99 cents a week I could, for four weeks, get unlimited access to the New York Times online, but Graham only takes so many naps a day. Three. He takes three naps a day. That's close to three hours a day that I could use to learn why violence is necessary. I don't know that that's how I'd like to spend my "free" time.
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