Daddy, I Had a Bad Dream

It's 5am and I'm sleeping like a champion, and this little 7-year-old Boni who claims to be my daughter is standing by my bed, and I sense her whimpering so I half open my eyes, and she's like, "Daddy, I had a bad dream."

And I'm like, "I don't care. I really don't care. You're alive, right? And nothing actually happened, right? Did you piss your bed? Are you physically injured? No? Then get your ass back to bed cuz the odds of you having another bad dream at this point are low and even if you did have another bad one right now, you'd still be fine cuz dreams aren't real and, more importantly, why do you need to wake me up to tell me you had a bad dream? I don't need to know you had a bad dream and I sure as hell don't need to be woken up to be informed that you had a bad dream cuz there is absolutely nothing I can do for you right now except offer you completely disingenuous sympathy, and you know it's disingenuous so I'm not sure why you even came to me in the first place. Don't see your mother right there??"

So she goes back to bed and falls asleep in two seconds and now I'm stuck in bed, wide awake, trying desperately to fall back asleep before my alarm goes off, and I realize that she may have just had a bad dream, but I just had a nightmare about my entire fucking life.

I had a nightmare that Putin is about to invade Ukraine, and that there is nothing the world will do about it.

I had a nightmare that January in Chicago was fucking freezing. It dropped below 10 degrees for two weeks straight, it snowed non-stop, I shoveled seven times in three days, and my neighbors complained about dog-unfriendly salt on the sidewalks. 

I had a nightmare that, in the middle of this Arctic freeze, my wife abandoned her husband and children. She flew off to Florida for five days, drank beer, ate fish tacos, and sunbathed on the beach while my screaming kids and I played 37 rounds of B.S. and feasted on left-over pizza and soggy broccoli.

I had a nightmare that that same wife is trying to move her entire family to the suburbs and making me look at houses I don't care about and talking to me about updated kitchens where maybe I could gas myself and deeply upsetting her middle daughter, OG, who never wants to eat or shower or leave the house, let alone move to a new one. As you already know, OG spends 36 hours straight on the couch in a XXL light-blue unicorn onesie and, upon the mere mention of the suburbs, starts yelling at her mommy and roars her terrible roar and gnashes her terrible teeth and rolls her terrible eyes and shows her terrible claws because she will never, ever move to Where the White People Live.

I had a nightmare that I still don't know what 80% of my students look like cuz COVID will. not. go. away. Don't get me wrong; I'm not anti-mask. I'm just anti these anti-vax fuckfaces who continue giving hope to the virus and are entirely responsible for the fact that we can't get back to normal.

I had a nightmare that one child on Boni's swim team tested positive for COVID and everything was cancelled for two weeks. Doesn't matter that most kids on the team are vaxxed. Doesn't matter that they're in a pool. Doesn't matter that CDC guidelines say five-day quarantine for someone who tests positive and zero-day quarantine for close contacts. 40 kids couldn't swim for two weeks cuz one kid got sick and we officially live in an idiocracy.

I had a nightmare that I am no longer an educator. I am, instead, a validator. I validate your need for a mental health day. I validate you needing to turn in your essay late because you missed a day of school. I validate your need for a trigger warning because anything could be triggering to anyone at any time, so I will of course make sure I provide you with a trigger warning for everything all the time because I validate any and everything you need.

I had a nightmare that I was coaching the worst group of 13-year-old girls who have ever stepped foot on a basketball court. They run with the ball cuz they don't know the rules or how to dribble. Their shots go over the backboard cuz they are uncoordinated spazzes. They applaud when someone makes a lay-up. Panini is the best player on the team only cuz everyone else is absolutely wretched.

Speaking of Panini, I had a nightmare that she got her first boyfriend whose name rhymes with Silly. Well, to be precise, I had a nightmare that Panini told her mother and me that she and Silly Billy were "talking." The scariest part of the nightmare, however, is that Panini has neither spoken to nor met Stranger Danger Billy. They've texted. They've Snap'd. They've even sent voice messages. But they have literally never engaged in one of those things called a "conversation," ya know, when one person says something and then the other person says something and then the first person says something else, and so on and so forth. And certainly they've never actually sat in the same room and looked each other in the eye while engaging in aforementioned "conversation." They had plans to go to a movie so they could sit in the dark, thereby continuing their no talking and no looking at each other romance, but Butthead Billy got in trouble and got his phone taken away from him, so the movie never happened. In sum, Panini is "talking" to a boy with whom she has never spoken and whom she has never met and who is a big enough fuck-up that he got the most precious object in his life taken away from him.

I had a nightmare that that same Panini, my smart, sweet teenage girl whom I love more than life itself, is truly the dumbest person in the world. A bunch of times now, she has woken up at 1am, taken a shower, and gotten dressed, only to realize that it is, in fact, the middle of the night. She babysits for a family that lives directly on the other side of the alley, but the other day she had to walk around the block rather than go through the alley, and she called me cuz she got lost. 

I had a nightmare that clear instructions were provided to my youngest children that, regardless of when they wake up, they should stay in bed and read until 8am, at which point they should go downstairs, turn on the TV, watch an episode on Netflix, come back upstairs, and crawl into bed quietly with mommy and daddy. Despite these instructions, Broosevelt came into my room at 7am to tell me he couldn't sleep, again at 7:20 to tell me he still couldn't sleep and ask if he could rest in my bed, again at 7:40 to ask if he could start watching an episode, and then again (with his sister this time) at 8:00 to inform me that the TV wasn't working. 

I also had a nightmare that Lil' Broosevelt, whom I once loved dearly, keeps asking me questions such as, "Daddy, will you brush my teeth?," "Daddy, will you wipe me?," and "Daddy, what does cock mean?"

Update: Panini FaceTimed with Billy.