Another dream of my mom

This past Friday would have been my mom's 90th birthday. She had really been looking forward to it. She fell short by six months and a few days.

I had another dream with my mom in it. I wanted to capture if before it fades.

I was in graduate school. Graduate school for me was a truly miserable experience - I have described it as feeling like being mugged while drowning. This version was not much better. I was doing horribly, and so was everyone else around me.

On a whim, inadvisably, I chose to take a weekend off. I spent it with some friends in the Poconos, doing the things we did back then: drinking, hanging out, watching movies, screwing around. Outside of the dream, it was fun remembering those carefree days.

But then it was back to work - or in this case, school. The professor declared that we had all been doing terribly on tests and he wanted to get to the root of the problem. So he gave us another test, but this time he wanted us to write out our reasoning for each answer.

This was graduate school for physics, but the test focused exclusively on advanced mathematics. For every question I was completely stumped: not only did I not see a path to a solution, but I didn't even understand what question was being asked. I scrawled that on the test, noting that I was a physics major, not a mathematics major. I tossed the test aside and felt like a miserable failure.

I heard a ruckus outside. My mother was there, confronting a school administrator. She was young, not much older than I am now, about the age she was when I was in graduate school. She was smartly dressed all in gray, with a gray scarf and gray topcoat. She looked like she had just left work and driven straight to where I was going to grad school - in real life, a nearly three hour drive.

I left the room to speak to her, and she immediately began berating me: Why hadn't I called? Why had I just vanished this past weekend? Why didn't I let her know what was going on?

This made me furious. How dare she embarrass me like this! Why wouldn't she just let me be my own person? I would call her when I damned well felt like it! 

I stormed off back to the classroom, telling her not to call and not to come and visit unannounced. I would call her at some point, maybe.

And that's where the dream ended.

My mom visiting me in Delaware in 1990, after I had dropped out of grad school.
She had come to pick up Josie, a cat who was being given up by her
owners because they had to move and couldn't take her.
She was 56 or 57 in this photo. I'm currently 55.