Sleepless night

Ever have one of those sleepless nights. You know the ones that you keep staring at the clock to see what time it is, then tell yourself if I fall asleep now I’ll at least get this many hours a sleep. Then more time goes by you check the clock again and you subtract another hour of sleep you don’t get. You do this horrible routine until your alarm goes off and you end up hitting the snooze button like twenty times. I had such an experience the other night. Now I’ll admit a lot of it was due to the fact that I had chocolate cake and root beer while watching TV that night, so I have no one to blame but myself. I kind of fell off the diet wagon this weekend.

When you can’t sleep at night a few things happen. One, you hear all the strange noises that happen at night. Maybe the sounds of the bugs and animals outside your window, the little creaks the house makes, and the sound of the toilet running because you forgot to wiggle the handle before going to bed. Another thing that may happen when you can’t sleep is your mind starts to wander. You think about your day at work, maybe the bills that need to be paid, or the fact that you are wide awake and your spouse next to you is sound asleep without a care in the world. That’s not fair, if you’re awake why should anyone get any sleep. So maybe you begin to sigh really loud or toss and turn really hard. Or my personal favorite, you just nudge the person really hard and say “Hey, I can’t sleep.”

Which brings me to my point, one of my hardest adjustments to being married was sharing a bed with somebody. Sure there is the obvious benefit of the marital bed. But it is still a hard adjustment. Growing up, I only had a twin bed until I was like 18 or 20. So it got to a point where I was a little big for the bed and if I rolled over too much I would fall out. So I had to create what I call the “Hop Turn.” It’s where you take your body while laying flat, do a small hop, and then turn over to the other side. It has become a habit for me in my sleep; a talent my wife has not come to appreciate. For the first two to three months I was too worried to wake my wife up, so I would lie as still as I could. Also, I wanted to make sure she had plenty of room, so I would curl up in a small ball at the very edge on my side of the bed. Now it’s a race to see who can get to the bed first and claim as much mattress real estate as possible. As far as lying still at night, it is every man and women for themselves. My poor wife has gotten slapped and kicked a few times because of my long arms and legs flopping around when I am sleeping, a few times I am not really sleeping though. So after nearly two years of marriage, I am getting used to sharing the bed. In fact I would miss her and couldn’t sleep if she wasn’t lying next to me. Now I just need to ignore that smacking sound the cat makes at night when he is cleaning himself and remember to shake the handle on the toilet before I go to bed. They don’t show that in the romance movies.