Sleeping with Mom

I used to sleep with my mother when my father went away on his almost three-month-long deer hunting binge.

My mother didn’t like to sleep alone, especially as Wisconsin got colder. “You don’t want your poor mother to freeze to death do you?”

I’d crawl in the old—every-time-you-move-squeak—bed beside her. Both in flannel pajamas, we’d prop pillows behind our heads reading for a while until we started to yawn, telling each other that it was lights out.

That is when it happened, when it always happened, like a rerun that played every night on the TV, she’d close her book, click off the bed-side lamp, and curl toward me and clamp her feet on mine. I’d scream, tell her to stop it, and she’d laugh as though she didn’t know her feet would be so cold like something out of this world, too cold to come from even Wisconsin.

It was a routine, expected. But yet every time the lights went out, I wondered if maybe that night was the night when her feet wouldn’t be cold, or she’d forget to roll over. I didn’t want to get too old for that game.

I liked to be close to my mother. She was an entirely different person when she slept—vulnerable, innocent, young as if she was not much older than my eight-year-old self. Her face appeared softer. Her breathing calm like she didn’t have to work a 12-hour factory shift at 4:00 a.m.. . . . And I thought, as long my mother could be eight in her thirties, I could be too.

I haven’t slept with her in years, but I can feel the scream that came from between her icy toes.