The Roast is Rotten, and So Is the System

 

The Roast Is Rotten, and So Is the System

I had one of those dreams last night that sticks to your ribs like regret and cold mashed potatoes. The kind where everyone is dead in real life but alive in the dream. Everyone was crammed into my grandmother’s house—alive, well, and lounging in the living room like nothing had ever happened. Except me. I was stuck in the kitchen, naturally, trying to make a holiday meal out of fat, bone, and lies.

They’d all been promised a full roast dinner. I didn’t have a roast. I didn’t even have anything close. I was standing there with a big hunk of mystery meat, trying to pretend it was something it wasn’t, and I couldn’t help but think: Yep. Sounds about right.

Then my son busts in, acting like it's the best day of his life because Scott Stapp from Creed is here, just chilling in my grandmother’s chair like a rockstar Buddha. My son tries to do one of those dude handshakes, but instead slaps him upside the head. I don’t know what that means, but it felt about right, too.

Meanwhile, I find a stack of steaks in the fridge and think, maybe I can fake a roast. Maybe I can save this. And that’s when Brad Pitt—young, smug, and munching on an apple like he’s on a break from filming Legends of the Fall—walks in and tells me to check the dates. Sure enough, the steaks are from 2019. And he tells me, “You really need to get your smeller tested.”

Now that’s a low blow. Because in real life, I lost my sense of smell with my first round of COVID and it never came back. So thanks, dream Brad. Add it to the list of things I’ve lost without anyone taking it seriously.

In the next breath, my son is a toddler again—but with Rett syndrome. Not Abby. Him. And I had left him in overnight respite care just this once, trying to grab a scrap of rest. When I go to pick him up, the woman in charge (played by the sitcom mom from the George Lopez show, because dream logic is weird like that) says they didn’t feed him. “He didn’t say anything,” she shrugs.

Let me say that again for the people in the back:
They didn’t hook up the G-tube. They didn’t feed him. And because he was nonverbal, they assumed it was fine. No one could find the woman in charge. No one could reach my mom. And everyone around me just shrugged.
It’s not a big deal.
I shouldn’t be so upset.
I should understand.

Dreams aren’t subtle, but this one hit like a brick to the teeth. It spelled out the fear and fury that live under my skin every day:

- That I am expected to make miracles out of scraps.
- That no one else will take proper care of my child—not because they can’t, but because they don’t think it matters.
- That when I finally step away, no one answers the phone.
- That I’m serving expired meat and guilt while everyone else gets to sit in the living room and marvel at Creed.

This is what it’s like to be a caregiver, a mother, a woman trying to keep everything upright while the foundation crumbles. You’re expected to smile through it. To serve the meal. To accept that nobody fed your kid and say thank you anyway.

I woke up furious. But more than that, I woke up seen.

And that’s something, I guess.