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I\u2019ve never understood people who like to stay up late at night.<\/p>\n
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\u2019m 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\u2019s not only these, I think I love sleeping so much, because it involves something I\u2019m really good at\u2026lying down<\/i>.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cmy transition period.\u201d He\u2019d refer to it as \u201cWhat the hell are you doing? You JUST got up!\u201d but it would cost him significant luxuries around here\u2013like a house\u2013with a wife in it\u2013so he has learned to find this quirky thing I do rather endearing (and because I told him it was).<\/p>\n
To a regular person\u2014and by regular, I mean \u201cemployed\u201d\u2013 I might look like I don\u2019t have a lot of responsibilities around here. Sure, I write a lot, but I\u2019m well aware that unless you are bringing in a paycheck with your writing people call you \u201ca writer\u201d and give you an eye roll. When I manage to find a paycheck from this gig then I\u2019ll be \u201ca writer\u201d and people will give me a cocktail\u2013that last part I\u2019m not really sure of, but I\u2019m banking on it.<\/p>\n
As Betty Draper\u2019s father said to her in an episode of Mad Men <\/i>once, \u201cYou\u2019re like a house cat. You\u2019re important, but you don\u2019t really do anything.\u201d I have a house cat. And she is important, but Betty\u2019s father was right. She doesn\u2019t really do anything\u2014but sleep. Sometimes that analogy forces me to examine my own love of sleep more than I should probably admit.<\/p>\n
Now I have gone without sleep before\u2013after all, I did have three babies. Through the toddler years I\u2019m 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 \u201cNo wonder they find babies in trash dumpsters,<\/i>\u201d and saying things to my husband as I plopped a baby on his chest at 4 a.m. like, \u201cHere. Take her. I mean it. I don\u2019t want to see her again until<\/i> she\u2019s in the 5<\/i>th<\/i><\/sup> grade!<\/i>\u201d 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, \u201cWhy would any sane person do this to themselves?\u201d But as all parents do, we survive the sleep deprived \u201cI never knew I could have this much rage\u201d years and eventually find ourselves in the teenage years with an entirely different type of rage.<\/p>\n My mother has a similar fondness for the art of lying down. Let me clarify here, my mother likes to sleep\u2014at night<\/i>\u2014 but she does not approve of \u201clying<\/i> down during the day<\/i>,\u201d as she puts it. In fact that\u2019s a proclamation that she makes proudly and often.<\/p>\n I think she must view napping as lazy or shameful.<\/p>\n Not me.<\/p>\n 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\u2019d 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\u2019t come with a ton of perks, but sneaking a good solid nap in is definitely one of them.<\/p>\n 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, \u201cOh I like to sleep in a cold room too\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n No. You don\u2019t know what I mean. People sleeping in my parents\u2019 house might actually die<\/i>.<\/p>\n We hold debriefings with guests before they go to bed at my parents\u2019 house in which emergency procedures and extra precautions are reviewed and liability waivers are signed. It\u2019s sort of like the kind of cross-check you might get before you climb Mt. Everest.<\/p>\n So not only does my mother\u2019s room have to be cold, but her bedroom must be dark.<\/p>\n Very dark\u2014like the inside of a cow\u2019s 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, \u201cotherwise your mama will go blind.\u201d<\/p>\n I can relate to some of my mother\u2019s 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\u2014how 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.<\/p>\n And clean sheet day? Well it\u2019s right up there with my birthday in terms of joy.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2014I don\u2019t really know the ending, because I passed out somewhere between \u201cthe mat\u201d and \u201cthe rat.\u201d Forget that scene in Poltergeist<\/i> with the scary clown in the bedroom\u2014tell 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\u2019m the one who\u2019s still just trying to get that one piece of First World grit out of her bed\u2026<\/p>\n 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\u2026I mean too wired<\/i> to turn off.<\/p>\n I lie there thinking of something I need to write about\u2014like this blog post about sleeping<\/i>, or how I need to get my life in order\u2014something that never seems to bother me at 2 o\u2019clock in the afternoon (probably because I\u2019m 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,<\/p>\n \u201cWell what are you gonna do if you get addicted to it?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cUh, K-e-e-e-p taking it.\u201d My smart-ass-self answered. I have no shame, and I value sleep that much.<\/p>\n If I forget and run out of my sleep aid, I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n The mattress store. All those beds..<\/i>.<\/p>\n I almost teared up from delight just thinking of the sleep that was soon to come my way.<\/p>\n I lied down on everything in that store except the sales guy\u2013Firm, plush, extra plush, pillow top. I was so thorough. I would have made Goldilocks proud. I\u2019m pretty sure I didn\u2019t 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\u2019t have a fondness for numbers, and I\u2019m not getting tricked into doing math in bed.<\/p>\n I finally found a bed I loved and shot my husband that \u201cI don\u2019t care how much it costs<\/i>\u201d look. You know that look. Women use it all the time. But I can honestly say I\u2019ve only seen the \u201cI don\u2019t care<\/i> how much it costs<\/i>\u201d look on my husband\u2019s face one time in 30 years of marriage\u2014when 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 \u201cpay toilet.\u201d But I\u2019ll save \u201cMissy and Paul\u2019s amazingly luxurious vacation\u201d for a blog post at another time..<\/p>\n I lied on that bed while Paul paid and scheduled the delivery. I lied there so long I heard the sales guy, \u201cSir, you can\u2019t leave her here,\u201d and looked up to see my husband coming back in the exit door mumbling, \u201cOh yeah, her.\u201d<\/p>\n Funny thing is\u2013 I didn\u2019t 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\u2019s ransom. I lie about how much they cost, but you can look them up online\u2014just type in \u201chighway robbery.\u201d 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\u2019ll most definitely suffer a spinal cord injury. All the new bed did was encourage my love of sleep even more. It\u2019s my big, soft, cushy, seducing, pillow-topped enabler.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s a saying, \u201cwhen we\u2019re asleep in this<\/i> world, we\u2019re awake in another<\/i>.\u201d If that\u2019s the case, then I must be some real kick-ass overachiever somewhere.<\/p>\n 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\u2014we just show up every night, and we don\u2019t 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\u2019t have to drive a golf cart, and an important house cat like me shouldn\u2019t have to sleep in a box under the stairs, because well, what can I say? I\u2019m just too good in bed<\/i>.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve 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\u2019m climbing in between my ridiculously high-priced sheets and … <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/goodstateofmind.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/IMG_3603-e1521060557876-300x271.png\")
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