Sleeping With The Enemy

As all married men know, sharing a bed with your wife can be a harrowing ordeal. A nightly harrowing ordeal. Here is my story:

Unseen Obstacles: On most nights, my wife goes to bed much earlier than I do. However, before going to sleep, she likes to take a moment to craft an assortment of booby traps in the pathway between the bedroom door and my side of the bed. And when I come to bed, I must trek through her obstacle course in the dark. And naturally, just like an unsuspecting burglar in a Home Alone movie, I walk blindly into each household booby trap and suffer a nightly barrage of cartoonish blows to the groin and head before reaching the bed. Sometimes her traps are simple, like traversing through 14 pairs of shoes on the ground, all with the heels turned upwards. Other times, she may place an open suitcase in my path, positioned in a way for the lid to instantly clamp down on my leg like a grizzly trap when stepped on. And sometimes, she’ll put our lamps and nightstands in weird places and reconfigure the walls of our bedroom so that I crash into them. Of course, most nights I am usually stumbling to bed completely drunk, so that could be part of the problem as well.

Defensive Stance: My wife is a hard-nosed defender. When sleeping, she crowds my side of the bed and positions herself to not allow me any movement whatsoever. I am seriously stymied. In basketball terminology, we would refer to this as a defensive lockdown. And as the rules state, once a defender has established position, any contact made by the opposition is clearly an offensive foul. Consequently, because of her lockdown, I can’t rollover or move my arm without drawing contact. I think she hopes is that I’ll eventually foul-out and be ejected from the bed.

The Night Auditor: I have been awakened many times by my wife talking in her sleep, usually asking an accounting question like “Why doesn’t the general ledger match the data in the cost report?” Fantastic. She is conducting an audit in her sleep again. With a marriage of an actuary and an accountant, you can say that there is always a dull moment in our house.

The Alarm Clock: My wife ambitiously sets her alarm for very early in the morning. Unfortunately, she rarely has the same ambition needed to actually get out of bed when it goes off. Perhaps one day a month she’ll actually get up with her alarm. The other days she simply hits the “snooze” button, and I am treated to a completely unnecessary wake-up, an hour before I need to get out of bed. While being awakened prematurely is never enjoyable, I try to put the extra hour to constructive use. For instance, I can spend the hour endlessly rolling around, desperately trying to get back to sleep. In addition, I have an extra hour now to stew about how much I dread going to work everyday. Needless to say, both of these options are great ways to start the day.

Tall Tales: In the morning, I get a rundown of the agonizing events my wife had to endure the night before. Her tales of hardship center around things like getting up to console a crying baby, or having to cope with the theft of blankets by her husband. Of course, I can usually manage to sleep through the sounds of a crying baby so there is no way to know if her account is totally fabricated. We’ll just assume it is. As for the blankets, while I would love to point out her many annoying sleeping habits, I am usually too delirious from exhaustion to muster a defense for myself.

As you can imagine, I look forward to the day when it is socially acceptable for a married couple to sleep in bunk beds. And just in case that day does arrive, let me get this in print: I call bottom.