The dream started out normal enough but, like its cousin “Real Life,” it soon got away from me. See, there was a hospital and then there were lots of corridors, and then a maze of corridors, and then some steam and some mold and flickering lights, and suddenly I was in a certified nightmare. Around the time Beings of Questionable Origin began poking their malformed faces out of holes, and moving said malformed countenances in such a way as to invoke the editing techniques of The Ring, I screamed.

I screamed not only in my dream, but also aloud. As in “I screamed in Real Life,” also known as “screaming in the middle of the night in a perfectly silent and content house and waking everyone else up.” Thing One awoke and then ran down the hallway, asking if I was alright. Thing Two (who regularly sleeps on the floor beside my bed), sat straight up, wide eyed, hair all midnight ruffianed, and asked what was happening.

“I had a nightmare,” I said. “A really bad one.”

Thing Three had been asleep in my bed, as per usual, and I looked at her, hoping she hadn’t been frightened. Her eyes were open in an expression of fright, thumb still in mouth, and for a second I worried she might be traumatized. You know, Mom screaming in the middle of the night, it’s not a normal evening activity. And then the girl sat up, removed her thumb, and in a perfect imitation screamed “Aieeeeeee!”

***

Perhaps the worst, most egregious example of Thing Three’s ability to embarrass me occurred a scant few weeks ago and requires a little back story to get the narrative meat. When I was early pregnant with Thing Three, we got in a very minor car accident.

A few hours after the car accident, however, I started bleeding and then cramping. What followed was three weeks of stop-start bleeding, replete with official freaking out and general worry over the babe. I ended up going to the emergency room a few times (I had home birth midwives who didn’t have an ultrasound machine), where I showed up, demanding all kinds of attention and hand-holding.

The third time, though--the time when I bled pretty badly and it felt like a jackhammer was making its way out of my uterus--that last time I was convinced it was over. No baby. I decided to drive myself to the best hospital in the area, the one 30 minutes away, in the hope that, if things weren’t going to end well then at least I’d be in capable hands.

What the radiologist told me, several hours later, was that Thing Three was just fine. In fact, she was so fine, at 10 weeks, that the good doctor had a hard time getting an accurate heart rate for the Thing In Utero, even with her advanced, super-powered, premier-hospital ultrasound machine. She did notice that there was some other material in my uterus, quite possibly a second sac, which was empty. The radiologist speculated that I likely was bleeding because the car accident triggered my body to slough off this extra sac. “It could be that you were pregnant with twins, it might not be. But you probably won’t miscarry this one,” she said, pointing at Thing Three, who was whirling around and generally treating my uterus like a carnival fun house.

I was so relieved that Thing Three was okay, and so happy to know that the likelihood of miscarriage was now remote, that I didn’t then feel terrible about the possibility that I lost a twin. I felt, and still feel, a small kind of guilt that I don’t known if there was a twin. Sometimes I feel a small sadness, anemic and thin, because there was nothing to tether my feelings to the real world. No proof, no evidence, nothing to make the event more or less than it was. Instead of a story about grand heartache or exquisite relief, it’s in some middle ground. And that, at least as a writer, makes it uncomfortable for me. I can’t transform it. I can’t make it mean anything besides itself.

Thing One came to overhear me relaying this story to a friend and so she asked about it. She asked about it in front of her siblings, and because of me and my honesty pact, I told them the story. I gave them the details. I added that we weren’t sure what happened but that I was glad Thing Three had been fine. The Things Three absorbed this story the same way they do most of my stories: engaged, curious, full of questions and comments. And for a few months, this was the last of it.

Until the dinner guests arrived that is. Best Text Message Friend Forever* and her daughter came to dinner one evening. BTMFF** brought beef stroganoff (and a meatless version), I made salad, there was a glass of wine for us adults, lots of children yelling and running. That sort of thing. BTMFF and I set the table, funneled the kids to their chairs, and began passing around plates, doling out food.

Everything was fine, fine, until halfway through the meal. That’s when Thing Three hit me with her “Inspired By Actual Events Story.”

“I was a twin,” she said, looking directly at BTMFF. “In my mom’s belly.”

”Oh really?” said BTMFF. She looked at me quizzically.

“Well,” I started, “it’s possible, but… there was this car accident…”

“Yep. And I was playing Go Fish in my mom’s stomach with my twin! And I won so I got to live!”

Do you know what’s impossible to top? A story in which a six-year old relays her womb-experiences and compares them to a high stakes card game in Vegas. That’s pretty hard to beat.

Some might say that this is simply a parenting issue, a problem that perhaps would not have plagued me had I, how shall we say, not overly-instructed the Things in the value of sarcasm or making a punch line at any cost. But I say, fellow parents and non-parents alike, it’s really a problem with narrative, and Thing Three’s use of narrative, specifically. She uses it not to entertain, not to persuade, and not to garner sympathy from people who might give her toys and/or candy. All of these, it should go without saying, would be acceptable uses in the Terrible Mother Household. For God’s sakes, I get through bad classroom days on witty banter and a three-shot Americano. I say, to her who can wield the words go the spoils. And Thing Three knows how to own the narrative. And worse, she knows how to use it so I look like a rube.

Like that morning, not so long ago. Kids gather around the bed, quilts and sheets tossed aside, the mother having just bolted up with her night terror, woken everyone with her scream. And all eyes on one child, the youngest, who screams again, perfect pitch. Screams “Aieeeeee! I’m having a niiiightmaaare! Aieeeeee!” until everyone calms and begins to laugh.

*tm

*So named because 90% of our relationship is conducted via text message. What would we, two single, professional mothers, have done without this 21st century technology?

**Am I the only one that sees this and immediately starts thinking it’s some weird fetish I’ve yet to hear of? Anyone?