It’s 5 a.m.

Nights like this are the worst.  I can’t sleep.  I’m left alone in my bed with a head full of memories–well, not entirely alone: I smashed a spider that had crept in from god-knows-where.  Usually I would take NyQuil or Benadryl or something to get some shut-eye, but tonight I have nothing on hand.  When did this start?  I think around the time my father sat me down with my sister–not sure how old I was, but definitely still in elementary school–and told us that our mom was thinking about leaving.

This is an experience that I haven’t spoken to anyone in my family–in fact, hardly anyone at all–about since it happened, which has led me to partly believe (or want to believe) that it was all a dream.  Unfortunately, however, I’m reasonably certain it wasn’t.  I’ve wanted to talk about it.  I hate keeping it bottled up inside.  But how do you bring up something like that, after something like 15 years of silence?  ”Hey Mom, remember that time you had an affair and were gonna leave Dad?”

I actually have no clue how far my mom’s affair went.  Far enough, apparently, that she contemplated separation from Dad.  I do know who it was with, though, and this is the worst part: it was with the father of my best friend at the time, Matt.  I won’t go into more detail than that, but as you can imagine, my friendship with Matt was totally fucked after I found that out.  Either the same night Dad sat us down for that ‘talk’ or the night after, I had a play-date with Matt, and the moment he and his father arrived at our house to pick me up, I burst into tears and refused to go, and it was never the same after that.

My earliest memories of sleep troubles are from that time.  Another night, soon after the abandoned play-date, I was in my room, lying in bed, when I heard the doorbell ring.  My mom answered it and I could hear Matt’s mother at the door, threatening my mom to sever all ties with her husband.  And my mom received this in silence, only managing to utter a weak “okay” at the end of it all.  Young boys shouldn’t hear things like that.  I never blamed or resented my mother for anything that happened, far from it.  And to hear her being spoken to in that manner and for her to just take it the way she did… it was a shocking moment.

My parents worked shit out and remain together, happily (as far as I can tell), to this day, but the burden that was placed on me by these events…  my best friend’s dad… I don’t think I ever blamed myself, but, well, you can see how a boy could lose sleep over it.  Over the years I got over the trauma, or rather, I completely forgot about it.  Whether that forgetting was a product of voluntary repression or of no one mentioning it again, I can’t say.  The sleep problems, however, remained.  The problems, in fact, got worse as I moved on into middle school and most of high school and encountered a whole new kind of unhappiness (more on that some other time).  The past few years I’ve been extremely happy, despite being over-stressed at some times and totally lost at others, and the ‘insomnia’ is less frequent, but I still have nights like tonight, when I’m left alone with my thoughts.

I know my parents know about this blog, but I don’t think they ever read it.  If they were to read this, I have no idea what their reaction would be.  Either way, it feels good to write this down, which is, again, what I’m going for here.  It still doesn’t seem entirely real because of the complete disregard shown towards the subject by my family.  Maybe that’s a good thing.  Doesn’t exactly seem healthy to me, though.