humor – goodstateofmind.com

August 5, 2025August 5, 2025

Bunch Of Baloney

Many of you know I love to cook. I have 14 types of salt in my house and a liquor cabinet’s worth of different flavored vinegars and honey. I’m constantly researching and trying new concepts just to learn about different dishes, ingredients and techniques. I hate recipes, and my friends will tell you, I also hate crockpots. Recipes and crockpots stifle all the creativity out of me.

I like to make complicated, layered, time-consuming dishes that you have to plan out and “tend to” for an entire day. I work to plate the food beautifully, at just the right angle, drizzling imported oils and fancy finishing salts, placing edible flowers and herbs over it with forceps, pretentiously. Then I take it one step further and take pictures of it all, but let’s qualify that most artists don’t get their creations eaten immediately after completing them. I take photos to remember my masterpieces.

I know. I hear you…

Food Snob.

My friends roll their eyes, but they’re also afraid to make too much fun of me because I might stop inviting them to dinner. And lets be honest here, who benefits the most from my epicurean adventures? They’re not idiots.

Sometimes I spend an entire day in the kitchen, creating. I like the challenge. It’s soothing, it’s comforting, and it’s therapeutic. Chopping is like playing an instrument for me, completely calming. After a few hours, I’ll burst into my husband’s office cradling a spoonful of something and shove it in his mouth and watch him chew, nodding in anticipation. “It’s so good isn’t it?” and off I go back to the kitchen. The man doesn’t even like food. He tolerates me.

I rarely get invited to dinner at other people’s homes. People are honest, “I’d love to have you over but I’m too scared to cook for you.” Which makes me sad because I don’t expect anyone to look at food as seriously as I do. It’s my craft, my outlet, and I don’t sit at someone’s table as a NY Times food critic. I think people would be surprised at how good I find food tastes when someone else cooks it for me.

All food snobbery aside– true confession here–some of my favorite things are the simplest, most unimaginative foods. Yes, my palate and my approach to food might be refined, but if I’m sick or I’ve had surgery my mom will sometimes bring me a meatloaf and it’s sublime (that’s a big word with us food snobs). At that moment there is no better meal.

In the summer, a good tomato will bring a tear to my eye, and I grow them just to have that 3 minutes of joy dripping over the sink. I love McDonald’s, and I’ll run you a foot race for one of their little cheeseburgers or a Filet-o-Fish, and another true confession here: I drink it with a Hi-C Orange, like a four-year-old. My favorite snack in the world is Fritos and a Slurpee. The guys at my old job brought me KFC for lunch on my birthday once because they knew I loved it. I might be accused of being snobby about food, but I can eat down and dirty with the best of them.

I wasn’t born into food snobbery. I grew up on biscuits, cornbread, dried beans, sweet tea, Shake-n-Bake chicken, and fried pork chops and gravy. The only herbs I ever saw were dried. I thought cherries only came in Shirley Temple’s and asparagus came out of the can. We ate Vienna sausages (pronounced vi-eena) and our spaghetti with saltine crackers. There was no beef demi-glace or red wine reductions. We ate ketchup on our pot roast. We were not fancy people.

One of my favorite guilty pleasures, and I say guilty because society labels it that, I honestly don’t feel guilt associated with food at all–is a good baloney sandwich. Not bologna, I don’t know what that is.

About once every year or two I will have a yearning for a big baloney sandwich. And yes, on white “trash” bread, which is written in the baloney handbook somewhere as a requirement. I want a thick piece of baloney—thick as a spiral notebook– a slice of one of my tomatoes, some lettuce, mustard and copious amounts of mayonnaise and if feeling really indulgent a slice of “disadvantaged” cheese unwrapped from it’s plastic film. You know the one.

There is nothing fancy or food snobbish about a baloney sandwich. It’s basic. It’s overly processed bits and pieces of parts we don’t want to know about, all overly salted and that first bite probably causes a cholesterol flash flood in our arteries, but I don’t care.

For that next fifteen minutes I don’t care as much as I should that my tummy feels a little bit like a cat bed, because I’m transported to a moment in my school lunchroom or my childhood kitchen eating on the yellow daisy plate accompanied by an enormous can of Charles Chips, and in 1973 I was probably washing it down with Hi-C Orange.

My daddy loved baloney too and when it was in the house we both relished the delicacy much to my mama’s chagrin. She was not a fan of baloney. Or sandwiches. Or anything you ate with your hands. And she still isn’t, just invite her over for tacos and watch. It’s a traumatic event for her and she’ll have to lie down afterwards.

She’d succumb to frying a piece of baloney for Daddy once in a while when she was feeling generous, but mostly she just wanted the package to be eaten so she could stop smelling it. I always liked mine just the classic way, cold on white bread.

Granted we’ve learned a lot about nutrition now that we shouldn’t ignore, especially those of us with little cat bed tummies, and I still enjoy my “frustrated connoisseur” approach to food so I won’t be eating a baloney sandwich every day, even every year. But every once in a while this self-proclaimed food snob is happy to put down her kitchen forceps and just go back in time where the nostalgia is more flavorful than any edible flower ever hoped to be even with a sprinkling of fleur de sel de Camargue.

July 18, 2025August 5, 2025

Glow Up People

A couple of years ago, in a moment of shocking self-awareness, I realized I had a habit of always over-explaining myself. It makes sense because I’m a world class people pleaser and overthinker, and why wouldn’t an overthinker be an over-explainer, right? I’m so good that I even overthink about overthinking. If they handed out metals for overthinking my chest would look like an Army General’s.

My best hours of overthinking are between 2- 5am when my “thunker” is in full overdrive. Sometimes I’m surprised my night time brain doesn’t just explode, burst into flames, leaving smoke to come out my ears. If it did, it would probably be a relief until I started overthinking about my brain exploding from overthinking.

People pleasers (raise your hands here), after we’ve overthought something to death then we like to over-explain it until its dismembered. Our decisions for our decisions, our long detailed reasons behind every nuance of our thought process, the pros and cons, the front and the back of the issue, our every possible consideration for an outcome and YOUR consideration for an outcome are all part of the process. Its really important to us people-pleasing-over-thinkers that we explain ourselves so as not to leave you with any reason to doubt us or to think we aren’t likable. We have it in our mental pantry of ideas that if we express our needs, and you don’t like them, you won’t like us. Somewhere in our life we learned we were responsible for the emotions of others and that having everyone around us comfortable meant we were safe and lovable.

And guess what? It doesn’t. And we aren’t.

People either love you or they don’t. They either value your place in their life or they don’t, but overthinking and over-explaining yourself isn’t a consideration.

In fact, I would dare to say that over-explaining makes people value you less, because it shows them that you care more about their feelings and needs than you do your own and if you aren’t going to care about your needs, why should they?

It took six decades of life for me to figure this out.

Six decades of me saying “that’s fine,” and “no worries” to realize that they never cared if I thought it was fine to begin with. They were counting on me not having the self-worth required to acknowledge my needs, because lets face it, a person with no expressed needs or boundaries is an easy person to keep around.

One time I shared with someone that I needed a little time and space, temporarily, to sort some things out in my life and their response was “that’s bullshit.”

Normally that would make me go into a tail spin of over-explaining, trying to make them feel better and apologizing for my needs inconveniencing them but instead I realized what they were telling me: My needs had become meaningless to them and our relationship was over. I had been aware of it for a long time, but didn’t want to admit it to myself. It had been a slow drip of feeling insignificant and efforts not being returned along with feeling my emotional balance disturbed constantly. That person was no longer safe for me.

Years before that happened I wouldn’t have even told this person that I needed space. I wouldn’t have wanted to bother them with my struggles of cancer and divorce in my family life and how I was overwhelmed with it all and needed some short term retreat, but I felt brave enough to be vulnerable.

“Vulnerability is the most accurate measure of courage,” says author Brene Brown.

Why? Because it’s hard and uncomfortable and someone you show yours to could call it bullshit. Showing vulnerability is like petting a strange dog. You either get a tail wag and a warm lick or a bite on the hand.

I knew what I could say, what I wanted to say, or I could just let them think it was bullshit. Me knowing my truth that nothing about me was bullshit, had to be enough. Me knowing that my needs did matter, and that wanting space to be quiet in my head for a bit without any additional emotional demands was acceptable, it was self-honoring really. I had done nothing wrong, I just wasn’t significant to this person anymore.

Dang, vulnerability really sucks sometimes.

But I was proud of the new me. I’d experienced a glow-up. No over-explaining or trying to make it better or apologizing just to keep the peace when I had done nothing wrong to begin with. The old me would have done all that plus rolled over belly up in a show of submission just to hold onto this person who was mad because I was no longer compliant in the way I had been.

People pleasers don’t like to give up on people. It’s one of our greatest and worst attributes. We will often stay in unhealthy relationships much longer that we should. We’re big on giving people multiple chances—years and years of wasting time giving chances in some instances.

“They didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”

“They’re really a nice person.”

“They’re just stressed”…tired, hungry, unhappy or any emotion we can excuse them with.

“But I love them.”

Those are all lyrics to the hit tune “Benefit Of The Doubt,” us people pleasers like to sing in our heads.

People pleasers often blame our own behavior patterns as the problem. We walk around thinking that if we love them more, chase them—they will choose us back. If we are overly generous they will be so grateful as to love us just for our kindness. We over-explain to feel seen and understood. We stay because we want to believe in them, and we don’t want to hurt them. We shrink ourselves to keep the peace and call it love. And then when none of that works, when we’re exhausted from it all and we have nothing left, it can feel like we failed.

The truth is our softness is not the problem.

Asking for what we want and deserve will always offend someone who never intended to honor us in the first place. They want us to feel guilty because it keeps us in our place of insignificance and them from having to put forth any effort. People pleasers are easier kept on the sidelines because we are always ready to overplay our parts in other people’s lives when we’re called on, and in the meantime we’ll just keep eating the breadcrumbs tossed to us.

We are afraid of the unknown, of what people will think of us, but we have to let people misunderstand us if we’re ever going to be whole. We have to let them have their own narratives, opinions and tell the stories that are self-serving and go on their way without us if we are ever to feel peace. Let them paint us any shade they want while knowing that as big hearted people pleasers we were loving and full of grace toward them.

No amount of bullshit can change that.

May 16, 2025May 20, 2025

Put A Little Jelly On it

Years ago I was fortunate enough to share an office with one of my best friends. Heidi actually told me about the job with that as one of the perks, and honestly she could have said “we have this opening at work. It’s for a part-time puppy killer, but you’d get to share an office with me,” and I would have raised a fist to a resounding YES!

It was almost too good to be true. We shared silly little grievances and laughs all day. We vented to each other about hateful customers and made up secret names for them. After repeated abrasive interactions with the guys at “Safety and Boot Center,” we renamed it “Safety and Butt Center.” Several of the guys behaved like asses. They earned it. I don’t know anyone who has ever worked in sales or customer service that hasn’t had a secret mental underground of disdain for a few difficult customers.

The other passion Heidi and I enjoyed at work was food. We cooked and brought food in to share with each other. We’d often pick up breakfast for each other on our way into the office and always eat our lunch together. One thing I loved about our friendship was that we had entirely different upbringings, but somehow we still possessed such similarities in our childhood memories, especially around food.

Her mom made oyster stew, aka “hot, fishy milk,” for Christmas Eve dinner every year just like my family had. I could do an entire blog entry on the repulsiveness of that meal. Heidi and I would relive it, laughing and gagging as if we were two 7-year-olds under a blanket fort. I never met anyone else who ate oyster stew growing up so we bonded over that immediately. For her having grown up in Ohio, and me having grown up in the deep South, we had very similar tastes.

And then one day I saw her put jelly on a sausage biscuit.

Surprised, “Wait. You’re putting jelly on that? On your biscuit?” it was foreign to me. I grew up in a house where biscuits were eaten frequently, and there was always grape jelly on the table (never any other kind), and I’d seen people eat honey or sorghum molasses on a biscuit. I had just never seen anyone eat it in combination with a salty piece of sausage and scrambled egg tucked inside.

I kinda wanted to call the police. Or my mother.

My first inclination was to think that it was a northern thing, as in “she just doesn’t know how to eat a biscuit” because us Southerners think that we are an exclusive club that you have to be born into, and you can live here but that doesn’t mean you’re anything close to southern or that you know what you’re doing. And we will cut you no slack.

“Well, they’re Yankees,” followed by an eye roll and a deep sigh of disgust, was how we dismissed every misstep by anyone growing up. It was pretty much the ultimate insult when I was a kid which tickles me now as I can think of some real doozies I’ve since used as an adult. Sorry Kevin.

But Heidi did it. She smeared that buttery sausage and egg biscuit with a big blob of strawberry preserves and enjoyed every bite.

Now I am a firm believer in enjoying your food the way you like it. It should be in our Constitution, but it kinda felt like she put ketchup on a prime rib or put her house shoes on with an evening gown and of course I thought, “well, she’s a Yankee, but I love her anyway.”

Recently I was reading a little article about “things that your mother used to say.” I was giggling reading some of the sayings people were sharing from their mothers and grandmothers through the generations.

One person told a story of how her mother used to say “put a little jelly on it” frequently as a remedy to anything they didn’t like served at the dinner table. Her mother made homemade jams and jellies and there was always a surplus of them in the house that needed to be eaten so her mother had become a sort of jelly pusher. As the children in that house grew up over the years, “put a little jelly on it” went from a little dismissive phrase to a euphemism for how to make any bad situation better in life.

The sisters started throwing it out to cheer each other up or to lighten the mood in the middle of any crisis big or small, and in their adult years signing cards to each other “remember, if you don’t know what to do, just put a little jelly on it,” as a tribute to their mother’s suggestion on how to sweeten things up in life.

I found it to be such a touching story how this mom left her daughters and granddaughters with a little mantra to grab onto in moments when they felt challenged. A sort of “chin up” to check themselves with, and if they could hear it being whispered in their ear by their mom’s voice, even better. It was such a “sweet” legacy for them to draw strength from and maybe help them find the bright side of things when at all possible.

I immediately thought about Heidi always putting that jelly on her sausage biscuit. What if that was delicious, and I was missing out? After all, I had never really tried jelly on a sausage biscuit.

So during Mother’s Day breakfast I unwrapped mine, looked at it and thought I’d give it a whirl.

I dug through the fridge looking for the grape jelly guessing that it would be the flavor I would want to sample.

Found some grape, tried it. Nope.

Then I thought maybe I just tried the wrong flavor, so I dug out the raspberry jelly and tried it. Nope.

Now even as a card-carrying, anxiety-ridden pessimist, with a pretty mean side-eye, I do love the idea of going through life while looking for ways to sugarcoat its occasional bitterness. I understand the concept. I’m just not very good at it.

Lord knows, life can certainly dish out some inconveniences that we can get hung up on at times. It’s easy to get stuck right where those inconveniences happen and marinate in the heaviness. Some are mere inconveniences, some are life’s complete cruelties. But as humans, we get to chose how we look at them, think of them, and how we handle them. We have the power of perspective for any experience that we can slide as a scale when we chose, if we chose.

If we want to we can stay inconvenienced, angry, miserable and sad or we can…

put a little jelly on it.

I love it, and I think this theory holds true for everything but a sausage

biscuit.

And my southern heart I will die on that hill.

*Someone please send Kevin at Safety and Butt a jar of jelly. He could use it.

January 15, 2020February 21, 2024

If We Aren’t Tripping Over Our Egos, Life Shoves Us

When I’m writing I try to focus on life’s ordinary happenings, and in doing so find some extraordinary or curious point of consideration in which to view them. Some jump out at me, and I can’t get home fast enough to write them down, and some require my brain to marinate in them a bit in order to attach any words. It’s humbling either way to sit down and do what feels quite arrogant—put my words down for anyone to read but–luckily life likes to humble me, or us, whenever it can. It’s so quick to put us in our place precisely just when we are deep into a lofty thought or selfish reflection.

I actually like it when life “keeps it real.”

For instance, the other day I had just finished getting dressed. Makeup done. Hair done. A glance in the mirror and I quickly assessed that it was going to be a good hair day. Good hair days are something that curly-haired girls never take for granted. On this particular day, not only did I have shampoo ad hair, but I also noticed that it was a “cute” day all around. You know what I’m talking about? Some days we just look better than others. Maybe we got more sleep or we lost a couple of pounds recently and our jeans are showing it—it was that kinda day. Before I put my shoes on I remembered that I wanted to trim my toenails—being that it’s winter, pedicures are not in full season. I lift my leg up over the bathroom sink and begin, “clip, clip, clip…,” With about the third “clip” a toenail shot up into my face. I looked up on the mirror and around on the vanity wondering where it went, and then I saw it.

Just hanging there, stuck in my freshly glossed, “Pink and Proper,” bottom lip–was my damn toenail.

Now I’m not fond of toenails. My friends and family know that toenails, even feet in general, can trigger my gag reflex. When I was pregnant, just hearing the squeak of my husband’s toenail clippers in the other room made me sick.

I have a group of girlfriends who, one year for the Christmas season, decided we would all go together and do some volunteer work…one suggested we go to one of the Catholic churches on a certain day when they “wash feet.” My reply back to her was immediate and emphatic, “I’m out.” Everyone has to know their limits and that was mine.

There’s always that pause when something humbles me like that. I like to soak up the moment and gain introspection from what the universe is telling me. On this day it was probably something like, “Oh just get over yourself, Miss Priss.”

I sighed. Ingloriously plucked the toenail off my bottom lip. And just like that my ego was back down to earth…in fact the universe had stuffed my ego into a plastic bag and tied a knot in it, choking off any air to it at all. Lord knows the universe wouldn’t want a girl to feel good about herself for no darn good reason on any ordinary Tuesday. What’s the point in that? The universe saves most of that for proms, weddings, when you’re in a coffin–important stuff.

That’s when it hit me. What if I had left the house with a toenail stuck to my lip? What if I had answered the door to the cute, flirty UPS deliver guy or I had shown up for an important job interview with a little, pointy, half-moon of globular protein hanging from my lip? What if I had met a friend for lunch and proceeded to take a bite of a sandwich and my friend had to stop me saying, “Hold on. I think you have a piece of toenail on your lip…” ???

I’d have to move to a new town.

Life just likes to remind you who is charge from time to time. It’ll throw you down with a glass of wine in hand onto at stone walkway, throwing wine and crystal everywhere (me). It’ll let you have a TP tail coming out from your smock as you come out of the ladies’ room at the fancy hair salon (me). You’ll have your top on inside outward but won’t realize it until you are at the end of the day, and you recall all the places you were that day with people probably thinking you were drunk (me, and no I was not).

You’ll be sitting in your dermatologist exam room with your legs hanging off the table, and you’ll look down and realize you have on two different shoes (me, again, not drunk, I swear).

You’ll be at a fancy work function trying to maintain some semblance of professionalism, swing your purse around, start an avalanche of beer bottles tumbling to the floor and if that’s not bad enough you’ll accidentally press up against the light switch at the same time so just in case someone in the room of 200 people couldn’t quite see who was making the ruckus–you spotlight yourself like it’s last call at a dive bar (actually not me, for once).

Or you’ll be in such a hurry trying to make everyone else’s life happen on time that, after paying, instead of replacing the nozzle back on the pump you’ll just jump back into your car to pull away…taking the nozzle and half of the gas pump with you (nope, not me either).

Or you are skinny dipping with a bunch of your girlfriends, and the cops show up to see who’s making noise at the pool after midnight And all your girlfriends grab their towels and run as screaming ninny’s into the bathroom leaving you to talk to the police officer with only a terry cloth drawstring bag that either covers one “part” or another, but not all “parts.” Take it from me, your ego leaves the building–actually it leaves you and goes to find a building. It’s hard to look cool while you’re standing naked in a drippy puddle in front of a uniformed stranger with a gun.

Or you’re in a costume shop hunting for something to wear to a big Halloween party. You see an “I Dream of Jeannie” costume. Loved her! You grab it and run into the dressing room. You shimmy it all on in a frenzy, including the cute, little pill box hat with the chin scarf. You turn around to gaze at yourself. No doubt Barbara Eden looked adorable in it, but you look like an organ-grinder monkey.

Get it off! Get it off!

Or you take a drink of your Mountain Dew while you are riding your bike and run straight into a parked car on the side of the road.

Or you are feeling pretty cute, again, because you have a first date with a new guy and just as he’s supposed to show up your old boyfriend rings your doorbell and “wants to talk”…as he’s telling you that he doesn’t think you should get back together your first date pulls up into your driveway…so you spend half of your first date apologizing to the new guy for the old guy. Life just likes to let you know it has a sense of humor, it’s in charge and when you’re getting too big for your britches.

Or you get your side zipper stuck on your dress pants and you work in an all-male office. And you’re wearing thong panties that day. Call it Murphy’s Law…I think even Murphy was trying to help me get my pants zipped up that day. At one point, I caught myself looking up asking, “Do you even work here?”

Or you’re in 5^th grade and as you reach into the cage with the class pet mouse, Pinky, she jumps up inside your blouse sleeve. Panic ensues. Teacher drags you off to the girls bathroom to retrieve the mouse who is elusive in the shirt sleeve. Discussion of Plan B-mouse retrieval, aka Plan Boobies, then occurs, and the teacher tells you you’re going to have to unbutton your shirt to get the mouse out–In front of your female classmates who came to the bathroom with you as a show of moral support–and you didn’t wear a bra to school that day (yeah, that one was me).

Towering Oaks Baptist School had not had such a nudity scandal since the janitor, Mr. Gene, was outside the girls bathroom talking to a teacher about who was smoking in the stalls (not me). I came out of the restroom one day, heard the discussion, and in my “name-taking, do-gooder” Barney Fife attitude said to them “Yeah, there’s a lot of butts in there…”

I heard it the minute it came out of my mouth. Life keeping me in my place again.

Or, one of my personal favorites–when I wrote a long, scathing comment to a company who misused the plural form of Notary Public. I wrote on and on about how it was “Notaries Public,” and I knew because I had worked for the National Notary Association (dork). The company responded to me thanking me for bringing their attention to the error, but also wanted to bring my attention to the fact that I had spelled Notary Public as Notary “Pubic.” That one still haunts me. The universe again saying, “get on with your bad self now.”

These are the moments that keep you in check with your inexperience and our powerlessness. They level the playing field for our egos and teach us humility and how to laugh at ourselves, and if not in that exact moment, years later. I appreciate that life likes to keep us real. Plus, lets face it, after you are over the discomposure and the painful awkwardness, they are what the good stories are made of.

Then there are the ones you can’t completely blame yourself for but you certainly feel the sting. Example: when your Kindergartener, after rushing to catch the bus with him on a hurried, crazy morning, hears you sigh, and as he takes one step on the bus turns around and announces to everyone at the bus stop and the church deacon bus driver, Brother Carl,

“Shew! MOM! Now you can go back in the house and have your Martini!”

I don’t know why he said that. He was mistaken.

We all know he meant “Margarita.”

Keeping it real.

March 15, 2018February 21, 2024

Good In Bed

I’ve never understood people who like to stay up late at night.

From the moment I get up, my entire day is basically just an exercise in getting me back into bed as soon as possible. My favorite part of the day is that moment when I’m climbing in between my ridiculously high-priced sheets and onto my highrise collection of mattress toppers that add up to a mortgage payment. But it’s not only these, I think I love sleeping so much, because it involves something I’m really good at…lying down.

In fact I love lying down so much that after I get up and get my coffee in the morning I go to the couch and lie down some more. My husband, Paul, generously refers to this as “my transition period.” He’d refer to it as “What the hell are you doing? You JUST got up!” but it would cost him significant luxuries around here–like a house–with a wife in it–so he has learned to find this quirky thing I do rather endearing (and because I told him it was).

To a regular person—and by regular, I mean “employed”– I might look like I don’t have a lot of responsibilities around here. Sure, I write a lot, but I’m well aware that unless you are bringing in a paycheck with your writing people call you “a writer” and give you an eye roll. When I manage to find a paycheck from this gig then I’ll be “a writer” and people will give me a cocktail–that last part I’m not really sure of, but I’m banking on it.

As Betty Draper’s father said to her in an episode of Mad Men once, “You’re like a house cat. You’re important, but you don’t really do anything.” I have a house cat. And she is important, but Betty’s father was right. She doesn’t really do anything—but sleep. Sometimes that analogy forces me to examine my own love of sleep more than I should probably admit.

Now I have gone without sleep before–after all, I did have three babies. Through the toddler years I’m pretty sure the only time my eyes closed was when I sneezed or was putting on eyeshadow. When I heard about other mothers having all those middle of the night maternal feelings as they got up to feed their precious newborns I felt a little guilty. I specifically remember having thoughts like “No wonder they find babies in trash dumpsters,” and saying things to my husband as I plopped a baby on his chest at 4 a.m. like, “Here. Take her. I mean it. I don’t want to see her again until she’s in the 5^th grade!” Sleep and I were estranged during those months, and I hated every second of it. I honestly asked my mother one morning after pulling a grueling screaming-baby-all-nighter, “Why would any sane person do this to themselves?” But as all parents do, we survive the sleep deprived “I never knew I could have this much rage” years and eventually find ourselves in the teenage years with an entirely different type of rage.

My mother has a similar fondness for the art of lying down. Let me clarify here, my mother likes to sleep—at night— but she does not approve of “lying down during the day,” as she puts it. In fact that’s a proclamation that she makes proudly and often.

I think she must view napping as lazy or shameful.

Not me.

Years ago my friend, Shelly, and I would meet every afternoon at the bus stop to get our kids, yawning, and proudly wearing the pillow creases indented into our cheeks as badges of honor. We’d greet each other as members of a secret drowsy society, like two friends seeing each other at a liquor store at 9 a.m. (not that that has ever happened). You just agree to keep the secret, never mentioning it. Being a stay-at-home mom doesn’t come with a ton of perks, but sneaking a good solid nap in is definitely one of them.

And although my mom never naps, she does have strict rules for her night time slumber. The bedroom must be cold. Now I know what some of you are thinking, “Oh I like to sleep in a cold room too…”

No. You don’t know what I mean. People sleeping in my parents’ house might actually die.

We hold debriefings with guests before they go to bed at my parents’ house in which emergency procedures and extra precautions are reviewed and liability waivers are signed. It’s sort of like the kind of cross-check you might get before you climb Mt. Everest.

So not only does my mother’s room have to be cold, but her bedroom must be dark.

Very dark—like the inside of a cow’s stomach dark. The tiny little lighted clock that used to be on the VCR in her bedroom was so bothersome to her that for years my daddy had to cover it with a shirt or a towel at bedtime, because as he put it, “otherwise your mama will go blind.”

I can relate to some of my mother’s sleep demands. I do like it cold and dark in the bedroom, but I also have been deemed a bed snob with respect to anything on the bed as well. I spend an embarrassing amount of money on sheets, mattress toppers, mattress pads, and pillows only to get in bed and right back out again when I feel one piece of grit under the covers—how does that even happen? The struggle with the princess and her elusive pea might have been hard, but try to find one little piece of grit in your bed, and it happens every night at my house.

And clean sheet day? Well it’s right up there with my birthday in terms of joy.

At my last job I worked with a young man whose parents lived in India and on his return from visiting them once he was telling me that every night it took his family about thirty minutes to prepare for bed. They each had to roll out their mat on the floor and then lower each person’s mosquito net which they kept anchored to the ceiling during the day. He went on to finish his story which involved something about being bitten by a rat that was running around them as they slept—I don’t really know the ending, because I passed out somewhere between “the mat” and “the rat.” Forget that scene in Poltergeist with the scary clown in the bedroom—tell me I have to sleep on the floor on a mat with something biting me during the night if you really want to horrify me. Remember? I’m the one who’s still just trying to get that one piece of First World grit out of her bed…

Although I do adore sleeping, and I welcome a good nap when it overcomes me, sadly I sometimes have to trick my body into actually sleeping at night. Sleep can, like some boyfriends of my past, play hard to get. My mind is just too weird…I mean too wired to turn off.

I lie there thinking of something I need to write about—like this blog post about sleeping, or how I need to get my life in order—something that never seems to bother me at 2 o’clock in the afternoon (probably because I’m napping). So several years ago I experimented with an over-the-counter sleep aid. Shortly after I discovered its wonders I mentioned it to my daddy who asked,

“Well what are you gonna do if you get addicted to it?”

“Uh, K-e-e-e-p taking it.” My smart-ass-self answered. I have no shame, and I value sleep that much.

If I forget and run out of my sleep aid, I’ve been known to frantically rummage through the bathroom drawers, old purses and suitcases in my closet at midnight looking for a stray pill like some kind of desperate crack whore. Again, I have no shame when it comes to sleep.

I’ll admit that my love of sleep has a lot to do with the bed I have. Years ago I was having some unexplained shoulder and neck pain that was interfering with my sleep and after having tried everything I could think of I began to blame our old mattress for my discomfort. I complained enough and finally wrestled my husband into a mattress store to purchase a new one.

The mattress store. All those beds...

I almost teared up from delight just thinking of the sleep that was soon to come my way.

I lied down on everything in that store except the sales guy–Firm, plush, extra plush, pillow top. I was so thorough. I would have made Goldilocks proud. I’m pretty sure I didn’t put that much thought into picking out my husband, but quite frankly, I spend more time with the bed than I do with him. I even tried the mattresses that come with a dial to set the bed for a certain firmness by picking a number, but I don’t have a fondness for numbers, and I’m not getting tricked into doing math in bed.

I finally found a bed I loved and shot my husband that “I don’t care how much it costs” look. You know that look. Women use it all the time. But I can honestly say I’ve only seen the “I don’t care how much it costs” look on my husband’s face one time in 30 years of marriage—when we were driving on a long stretch of lonely highway in the middle of the Mojave desert, and the only bathroom we could find anywhere was a “pay toilet.” But I’ll save “Missy and Paul’s amazingly luxurious vacation” for a blog post at another time..

I lied on that bed while Paul paid and scheduled the delivery. I lied there so long I heard the sales guy, “Sir, you can’t leave her here,” and looked up to see my husband coming back in the exit door mumbling, “Oh yeah, her.”

Funny thing is– I didn’t care. At that point the bed and I had fallen in love. I got my new love home and began adorning it with the array of aforementioned goose down mattress toppers, quilted mattress covers, pillows and the sheets worth a king’s ransom. I lie about how much they cost, but you can look them up online—just type in “highway robbery.” Afterwards, I had to have a foot stool made so I could actually get up on top of the bed, and if I ever fall out of it I’ll most definitely suffer a spinal cord injury. All the new bed did was encourage my love of sleep even more. It’s my big, soft, cushy, seducing, pillow-topped enabler.

But how can you not love to sleep? You actually spend a great portion of your life in bed, and I ask why do something halfway when you can excel at it? There’s a saying, “when we’re asleep in this world, we’re awake in another.” If that’s the case, then I must be some real kick-ass overachiever somewhere.

Sleep and I are made for each other. We like the same things. We enjoy our time together, and really look forward to seeing each other at the end of the day. The demands we make on each other are simple—we just show up every night, and we don’t let anyone get between us and that bed. It took a long time to finally hone my lying down skills to this feline level of proficiency, but I did it. A professional race car driver shouldn’t have to drive a golf cart, and an important house cat like me shouldn’t have to sleep in a box under the stairs, because well, what can I say? I’m just too good in bed.