Nightmare

What is a twelve year old boy’s nightmare?

Last night Peace stood huffing by my bed after 4:00 am, “Mom, wake up. I need you.”

My abruptly woken thoughts raced, “Who’s hurt? What‘s wrong?”

“No, it’s not that.” Peace reassured.

My mind turned another direction. Must be the cats. Our felines have learned to push open doors to the garage which are not always tightly closed. Often, Patches brings in a mouse with which to “play” and madly chase through the house, and Peace wakes up in distress. It used to be that Peace’s gerbil escaped and was being terrorized by Janet, but a new and improved lid on his cage solved that problem fairly well. I don’t even think Peace has to put the gigantic family Bible on top of the rodent’s cage to keep the cats from lifting the lid.

Peace snapped me back to the reality of the present with “Mom, I was having a nightmare, and I can’t get it out of my head.”

“Oh, so you need me to pray for you?”

“Yes, and tell me again how to stop thinking about the bad stuff.”

“What is it exactly we need to chase from your dreams?”

Peace’s voice breaks a little, “Mom, it’s terrible. In my dream, I get addicted to cigarettes and I can’t stop smoking. Now I can‘t stop thinking about it.”

Whoa. I know the child does not smoke, but I wonder if something silly I said last week triggered the dream. On the way to Wise One’s soccer game Saturday, I joked, “Peace, looks like all the Lenoir City kids your age are hanging out at the basketball goal, smoking, cussing, flirting. Don’t you want to join them? Maybe they’ll give you a cigarette or teach you some new curse words.”

He stopped dead in his tracks, “Mom are you crazy? Why in the world would I want to do that?”

I continued, “I know how much you like to smoke, and since your parents don’t smoke, I know how tough it must be for a kid your age to get cigarettes.”

Peace scoffed, “Yeah, right, Mom. You are nuts.”

We made our way to the fields, unfolded our chairs and cheered Wise One on as he played. Silly words forgotten.

Until last night.

So, smoking is a nightmare to him.

It had been to me as a child as well. My family moved when I was in the fifth grade, and the first friend I made, Kelly, snuck me into the rafters of an outbuilding by her house and she lit up. I was terrified and stunned. How is it that a sixth grader smoked, and why the heck did I, Goody Two Shoes, find a hood for a friend? I kid you not when I tell you she called for her little brother, took down her pants and peed from the rafters on top of the boy. Gaarrrossss! What kind of juvenile delinquent town had I moved into? I made some excuse to leave and never played with Kelly again though I watched her carefully from the corner of my eye on the bus to see if she held any interest in beating me up. I cried for days after the trauma out of fear that I’d never find a nice friend who wanted to play Barbies. Fortunately, I met Asenath at school, and she did like Barbies and jacks, and most importantly, she did not smoke. In fact, her big and kind family were my introduction to the word “Holy Rollers”. And I really liked them and the safety of all their rules.

Last night Peace experienced something I imagine was a warning dream. Makes me wonder if there is more to the story, or if it was simply my teasing Saturday provoked the nightmare. Could he have been offered something at Scouts, Co-op, church youth group, or somewhere else? It’s possible and worth talking over with him.

I prayed with Peace last night to dispel the leftovers of the dream, and then we discussed a strategy to help him “take captive his every thought.” He agreed each time the nightmare was remembered, he’d shift his thoughts to a precious song he was making up about our family and cats.

My thoughts turn just now to the youth on that basketball court, and the question of “Where are the parents, and do they know what their children are doing? Do they care?” The only young girl on the court made plenty of physical contact with as many of the ten boys in the basketball game in wrestling for the ball and cigarettes. All I can think about is, “How soon till she is pregnant. Or worse, raped?” Real life nightmares.

I consider the naivety of my son compared to these people. While I see sparks of manhood, he’s still allowed to be a twelve year old boy- losing school assignments, playing cards, chess, backgammon, kicking soccer balls, building forts and contraptions, playing with our menagerie of animals, eating junk food, needing redirection of sarcasm, all that.

It wasn’t too long ago that I blogged about not being able to find Peace’s heart. His trust in me to solve his nightmare proves otherwise. For now.