(From the Unpublished Archive)
It’s almost 9:00 am and I’ve parallel parked illegally against a curb with my hazards flashing. I won’t be long, I tell myself, but I still can’t believe what I’m doing.
Jake’s dorm is only a couple years old and the mulch in the landscaping surrounding the brick building still looks brand new. The plants, chosen for their drought resistant attributes, look like they were recently picked up from the nursery, which is convenient for me because the immature plants are easier to step over and leave more room for me to amble.
The landscape architects were thoughtful in their design. There are abundant gathering places with colorful Adirondack chairs, including a raised patio, a small pond, plenty of grassy fields, and even a hammock suspended near the perimeter. But not one of the dorm’s 705 reported residents is outside. For a minute I think maybe it’s 7:00 am instead of 9—now 9:01, but it’s not. I guess my son isn’t the only freshman having a hard time getting out of bed in the morning.
Try not to judge me--he asked me to do this. “I’m so mad at myself Mom, I keep oversleeping. This time I actually got up at 9:00, but then I started thinking about something and now it’s noon!”
Unfortunately, it’s October and this isn’t the first time he’s been upset about oversleeping. It’s a vicious cycle, I get it. If you wake up late, you have to stay up late, and if you stay up late, you wake up late. For the first month I was all about his independence, even if that meant letting him be less independent, like letting him choose, for example, to come home for a shower instead of using the community showers. Even if it meant letting him figure out that a bicycle will be easier than a skateboard—the campus is hella hilly. Even if it meant that his grades had to suffer until he cut back hours at his job. Or letting him figure out that he’d need to allot a whole lot more time for assignments than he had planned. Or, as in this case, letting him work out his own solution to his oversleeping problem. If he’d ended up in California or Japan this year like we thought he was going to I wouldn’t be able to help him anyway.
But his sleeping issues have persisted. They are taking a toll on an education for which my husband and I are footing the bill. More importantly, they are taking a toll on his self-esteem.
“Your body just wants balance, Babe. If you fill yourself with stimulant drinks all day, your body’s gonna take the rest wherever it can get it. I’m not surprised you can’t wake up in the morning.”
“I know. I know,” he said, because he knows everything these days, except, of course, how to wake up.
“I’ll make you a deal, no more caffeine after noon, 11:00 am if you can do it, and I’ll drive over here for the next few mornings and bang on your window until you get out of bed. That should break the cycle.” I flash on an image: a mess of brunette hair, an unknown pair of eyes gazing at me through a window, and decide to add, “Which is your window again?” He has a ground floor single, so the only way I wake up the wrong person is if I bang on the wrong window.
“You’d do that? Come over in the mornings?”
“If you think it’ll work. But only to break the habit. You have to be able to get yourself up.”
“I know. I know,” he says again.
That morning, I take only a moment to scout the best path through the shrubs. If I plot any longer I’ll look like a loiterer or prowler, not that either of those is worse than what I actually am, a creepy mother sidling up to a dorm window to wake a slumbering freshman. I am so not this parent, except that I guess I am. My sweatpants and uggs, even my chin acne, aren’t near enough to make this 47 year old woman feel less awkward or out of place in the yucca and black-eyed susans of Williams Village East. What can I say, over thirteen years of waking him up for school is a hard habit to break. Maybe he’s not the only one who needs to focus on independence.
Then, there he is. I can see the crown of his head through the glass. The olive skin of his exposed shoulder and a sinewy arm flung over his pillow. I knock on the glass firmly. He twists his neck until his brown eyes meet mine and he smiles, probably because he knows just how weird it is that I’m standing outside his window. I give him a stern look and mouth “Out. Of. Bed.” He jumps right up. With his long legs, he looks like a man-sized grasshopper in black cotton briefs. The grasshopper makes me happy. I blow him a kiss and I’m on my way. It’s in my departure, in that moment of turning away from him, of facing my day and leaving him to face his, that I make peace with the weirdness of what I’ve done. The choices he makes today will be his own. I just made sure he was awake to make them.
I love this and I'm so glad you have this blog! I have loved your writing ever since I read Voice Lessons.
Love this! ❤️