To Love or To Sleep
Could sleeping in each other’s arms ever be a possibility?
“Get married, already!!” My eighty-five-year-old mother.
When I turned sixty-five, I knew it was about time I got married. I’d waited decades for the right guy to find me while I sat around wishing, watching, wanting to give my mother a wedding to attend. Now it would take a bit more radical action on my part.
I never met guys in bars or bookstores because I never went to them, so friends suggested I go virtual. And I got lucky in my first week. I fell in like with the thumbnail face of Stan, in my locale and my age range. And full size, in real life, he turned out to be smart, funny, interesting and interested!
We began meeting for five-hour suppers and long and longer walks. Soon our time spent talking, hand-holding, hugging and kissing wasn’t enough. It was time to discuss taking the next step and sleeping together. Oh, not to have sex! We were far from ready for that… just sleeping together. We had “the talk.”
“I sleep in baggy cotton stuff,” I warned.
“So do I,” he exclaimed.
“I’m a pillow-holic,” I confessed.
“Me, too,” he cried. “I have six.”
“I like em soft”.
“I like em hard.”
“I’m a morning person.”
“I’m… a night guy.”
“I’m a light sleeper.”
“I snore.”
“I have ear plugs.”
“I have a sleep apnea machine!”
We pulled back. How could such daytime delight co-exist with such nighttime incompatibility? We had too much going for us to give up now. We were both insomnia-phobes. Spending the night together would be our Everest.
We embarked on the climb equipped with the coziest of T-shirts and shorts with 2000-thread-count pillow covers and sheets and crept onto his wall-to-wall, extra firm California king. We were too nervous to sleep those first nights, with lots of adjusting to do in the cuddle phase. Living alone for so long, I hadn’t realized how boney I’d become. My ribs could not tolerate his arm. My neck could not rest on his shoulder for more than a minute. My arm on his chest inhibited his rest, my leg over his made him claustra-phobic. We put pillows in the problem spots, and patience in the learning curve.
The third night, delirious from sleeplessness, I ear-plugged and blindfolded myself into sensory deprivation as he read in the prison floodlight sweeping his half of the acreage. Feeling safe with him keeping watch by my side, I could actually sleep deep — until he turned off the floodlight illuminating his side of the bed. Then his raspy breathing degenerated into vacuum cleaner snores, punctuated with snorts of near-suffocation that pierced right through my earplugs. But, oddly enough, it did not irk me. I felt like I had to keep watch so he wouldn’t die on me. I soon discovered that if I made little kissing sounds, I could interrupt his snores and get short stints of sleep. We awoke in the morning to debrief.
“Boy, do you snore!” I said.
“Well, you make these weird little sucking noises all night.”
Infatuation drowned out the need for rest. Living together was the next logical step. Within a year, he’d given up his sprawling king for the little old queen in my little old house.
Like new parents giving birth to our baby love, nursing its newness, we knew we might never sleep the night again. But, with no risk of pregnancy, nor critics of our middle-aged good fortune, sleep was our little dragon to slay, our romantic gauntlet to run.
At first, it got harder as he got more comfortable. The sweetest man by day, by night Stan was a sociopath. Gentle Dr. Jekyl would hide nocturnal Mr. Hyde until, drowsing into bed at two, he’d head butt me unconscious in his try for a goodnight kiss, clap my eardrums to bursting in his attempt to clasp my face to his, or kiss my eyeball, widened in panic, before it could flinch.
Sometimes he’d toss his six pillows aside, then pull mine out from under my head, and my head would thud onto my too firm mattress. He’d roll away from me in the covers, exposing me to frostbite, or onto me, pinning me down, afraid to move for fear of waking him. I learned to lie still like a mummy, gazing at him by the glare of his digital clock as it shouted out my sleepless seconds.
In his dreams tsunamis, cyclones, and zombies arise as he whimpers and fights big psychic battles in which I must intervene before he kills me with his restless elbow syndrome. Oh, it’s a rodeo some nights, as I’ll roll him bucking onto his side and pin down his legs and tie them off with a pillowcase. Then we’re in dreamland until he seeks his phone ringing somewhere in my covers or body cavities.
But there are many compensations. He tucks me in with a bonus back rub, so I sleep double deep til his shift starts.
And even unconscious, he is talented. His animal impersonations are astonishing — trumpeting elephants, growling tigers, hidden kittens. He can honk like a donkey, or a flock of geese. He can whistle for a New York cab with one nostril stuffed. His coughs could open in “La Boheme” at the Met.
I get up early so he gets hours to abuse the pillows, most of which end up on the floor several feet from the bed. We deploy herbs, medications, meditations, and it’s getting better all the time. Now that I slip him grains in place of glutens, goat dairy in place of cow, his labored breathing eases. And the Hannibal Lecter Machine’s in storage!
I love to touch his sleeping hand and have it clamp onto mine like a Venus flytrap until it’s nearly paralyzed and gangrenous from the pressure; the way he reaches for me each morning, making out with a pillow til he locates me amidst the covers.
Now that we are married, I awake amazed at the creature comfort of our lives. My free-floating anxiety sinks in his ocean of devotion. There’s nothing that can warm my feet like his, my hands like his, my heart like his. Ours is a love that makes it worth losing sleep…
