Vicarious Anxiety

Remember those dreams you had when you were in school? The dreams where you realize at the end of the semester that you never went to one of your classes? Or that you forgot to read the book for the final? I hadn't had one of those anxiety dreams in a long time. (It's been 20 years since I faced a first day back to school.) But in my family, Mark started high school yesterday and Claire started middle school. They had their own fears, spoken and unspoken. And so I dreamed that I came to realize that I had registered Mark and Claire for some summer class on Mondays and Wednesdays. In the dream, I realized I had never taken them to the class the entire summer. I woke up in a panic. My panic, my anxiety was theirs.