Grilled PB&J

Make a peanut butter and jelly sandwhich. Spread butter on the top and bottom, and grill like grilled cheese. Pour a tall glass of milk to go with it and apple slices. My favorite combo is natural peanut butter, homemade grape jelly, and whole wheat bread, grilled on the Forman Grill. It makes the sandwhich corrogated, which for some odd reason I like.

It is 3 am....again. This is the third night in a row I have awoken at 3am with panicky dreams about being late. This time I was in a train station trying to get two children, my son Nick and his old friend Cassie, at age three, to get all their things together to catch the train. They dawdle while I am frantically picking up the clothes and shoes. We get everything except a lone white sock with black stripes which I glimpse draped over a chair as we run out of the station with armfuls of belongings. We run along the platform as the train sets with doors open. I see a little boy toddling too close to the train so stop and guide him away. His grandparents want to stop and chat, I am trying not to be rude but still move towards the open doors. As we finally get next to an open door, I see the driver look right at me and start up the train . For a moment I think I can still jump on, but then realize I can never get the two kids on as well. I stand and watch the train leave the station without me, the open door banging painfully into my shoulder as it goes past.

I started my second semester of college on Monday, which always sends me into these nightly panics. I guess failing out of college twice as well as a years of public education (as well as a long life) spent always forgetting and being late mean this will never leave me. Sometimes I dream I have forgotten to go to classes for weeks. Sometimes I am at class so long I come home and my pet rats are just bones. Usually I am trying to leave to get somewhere and I have so many things to do, and each thing is so hard and takes so long that I just never leave.

My closest friend finds me a calming influence, and this always mildly suprises me, because in my head I am anything but serene. I feel like there is the outside of me, calm for the most part, then the inside of my head, a little me, holding my head and screaming, running about trying to get nowhere and everywhere at once. I have felt this way my whole life, spent a few years of respite, then it started up again when I began school. My in-laws call it going a little frainy. I am learning to call it normal.

So the question remains, do I need to adjust to this pressure of being out in the world; going to college then afterwards getting a job outside the home, both of which excite and scare me? Or is there an alternative?