Meeting Persephone

Lately I'm sleeping in two hour stretches. Sleep for two hours and awake for 20+ hours and sometimes as much as 30-40 hours. I'm tired, cranky, irritable, pissy and generally worn out. This kind of fatigue goes bone deep and literally causes physical pain. Yesterday I'd had enough. I was on the phone with my friend and was rudely dozing off during her conversation (I didn't even have the energy to participate) and finally told her I had to go. Mini Me begged me to sleep and finally I could stay awake no longer. At about 4 o'clock yesterday afternoon my body shut down and I slept. It was wonderful. I showed no signs of life for several hours and was thoroughly comfortable and enjoying the long elusive rest. Slumber wonderful slumber. I likely could have gone on like that for at least 10 hours and finally felt some sort of renewal surge through my body - enough so that I could at least function on a semi-human level. Alas, it was not to be...

I'm married to a sleeper. On any given night, within minutes of going horizontal, he's off in dreamland. In the 17 years that we've been together he's had exactly one episode of "insomnia" that amounted to him not falling asleep until about two hours after he'd wanted to fall asleep. He may not always get a wonderful night's sleep but he can still sleep. At least on the weekends, when the alarm clock doesn't beckon him at 5 a.m., he can achieve that refreshing renewing rest. It's a marvel to behold when you cannot harness the same for yourself. It's also infuriating especially when you understand that he has little patience for my inability to sleep though I don't normally try to do anything to bother him while he's resting. He ranges from irritation with me to pity for me.

And did I mention that he snores? Not those sweet soft sounds of nasal breath that one hears from a brand new baby but a long loud buzz saw of explosiveness that goes on and on and on for hours and hours each night. (Why do men snore when they sleep on their backs? Because their balls fall over their assholes and they vapor lock... HA - if it only happened when he slept on his back we might be on to something there.) So on nights that I might have been able to nod off and catch some Zs I'm trying to do so next to the not-so-comforting sounds of a poorly tuned diesel motor wired up to an amplifier. He also has the audacity to claim that he doesn't snore and often denies that he was even sleeping though his own snoring has woken him up.

So when I was finally able to fall asleep yesterday afternoon for what I had assumed would be the rest I'd long been waiting for, I never would have assumed that my husband would be the thing to interfere. I'd probably been asleep for about 3 1/2 hours when he got home from work and began stroking my face and talking to me. After approximately a half hour of this persistent behavior I could ignore it no longer and begrudgingly left my rest on my pillow and woke up. He had nothing to say once I woke up and in fact spent the next hour watching "Wipe Out" the absolutely most idiotic show on television right now. Shortly after the show ended he fell asleep and I was of course awake for the next 6 hours. I was pissed to say the least.

I love sleep. I really do. I'll take sleep over anything else - eating, drinking, sex, television, even shopping. And so when my own husband knows that some weeks I get as little as six total hours of sleep (TOTAL in an entire effing week) and still chooses to wake me up - I GET PISSY! So this morning when he called me from work I tore into him. I let him have it with both barrels and then went back with a sword!

I will tolerate his lack of interest in the things that interest me. I am understanding when he goes into the college football season and can rattle of names and stats of every player on the team and will do so for months on end but forgets names of Mini Me's friends. I forgive when he doesn't get things finished that he started a year before. I accept that he sometimes takes leftovers for lunch that Mini Me and I could have eaten and then doesn't eat them himself because he and the guys decide to go out for BBQ instead. Being married means that you compromise and accept but I'll be damned if I'm going to accept his complaining about my insomnia and then his absolute disregard for the same by waking me up for no reason what so ever!

The Trash Heap has spoken.