Zombie Attack!

Didn't need a random 3am feeding thrown into the mix this week. Mark helped, but I still had such a hard time falling back to sleep.

When I finally did, an hour later, I had a zombie apocalypse dream... (cue the dream sequence wavy lines)

I was staying with my extended family (the cast of Family Matters and some of my real life cousins/friends). The floors started to sink in as the Earth disintegrated. My family thought this was fun and kept trying to test the floor for weaknesses. My mom, a woman named Marla, Ellie, and I decided these people were not born to be survivors, so we left.

After about an hour on the road, Marla decided she wanted to stop at Dunkin' Donuts for a hot cup of post-apocalyptic coffee, but zombie customer service is slow as ****. My mom decided she and Ellie would just take a nap and wait. With zombies afoot...? I don't think so. I decided she'd finally lost her mind too, so I grabbed Ellie and ran for the door.

In the parking lot, the Dunkin' Donuts manager, Rick, his wife, and son (Lil Wayne) were heading out of town in their armored mini van. Finally, a family with some common sense!

They let me ride with them, and I let out my first real sigh of relief until, (in typical, zombie-movie fashion), Rick says, "We got Patches up front with us... Always been a good dog. He's been bitten." WTF!? I'm in an armored mini van, riding down 87, with the black Brady Bunch, and Kujo-zombie riding shotgun!?? Aww, hell nah...

I politely asked them to pull over. Luckily we had made it to my childhood home. My mom had arrived there earlier, and when I met her at the door, it seemed she had come to her senses. The house was in lockdown mode, though there was evidence she had been doing some gardening... Freshly planted flowers adorned the front step. The sun was shining. Something about your childhood home... You always remember it that way. Safe, bright, warm, happy.

My mom got me a glass of iced tea to sip on the side porch. I held Ellie close and snuggled her. I asked Mom how her day had been. She said, "Oh I'm just helping your sister with day care today..." A cute, little toddler awkwardly stumbled out the door onto the porch. Mom continued, "I needed a little extra help with the kids, so my neighbor, Trisha, offered to come over."

Trisha also awkwardly stumbled out the door onto the porch, because she was a ****ing zombie!! I jumped up and said, "Mom, what are you doing??" Mom said that Trisha wasn't fully transformed yet and still perfectly capable of carrying a tray of iced tea.

I ran upstairs with Ellie and tried to lock myself in my sister's old room. Unfortunately, Mother had switched the lock to the outside of the door, probably to keep Trisha *in* the room.

I closed the door tightly then realized the original doorknob lock was still in tact. I pushed it, and it sounded like the most insignificant click, as if this simple mechanism could keep the world out.

It couldn't even keep Steven Seagal out, which I realized quite quickly when he burst through the door with his two sidekicks, Ice-T and Cuba Gooding Jr.

(No more Lifetime movies, Law & Order, or Jerry MaGuire for me, thank you!)

My heroes!!? Nope. They assaulted me and left me for dead.

I heard Ellie crying and woke up to find her staring at me. The combination of feeling overwhelmingly in love with her, happy to be in my own pre-apocalyptic bed, and annoyed at being up at 5:30am made me nauseous.

I fed her, and she's been sleeping in my arms since 6:00 while I wrote out my silly dream and thought about how this is an exact representation of my anxiety, emotionally what I put myself through every single day.

The "zombies" must be my own thoughts and anxieties, and they're awful, flesh-eating, nasty things. And my one power against them (besides a beautiful crying baby to wake me up), is my optimism!

You know, I still believe Marla got her cup of coffee from the zombie barista, that she met some sweet old man with kind eyes and an extensive rifle collection, and the two of them rode off into the sunset together to survive the zombie apocalypse.