TWNMM: One Heartbeat - But Two Blankets, Please.

One Heartbeat - But Two Blankets, Please. Submitted By: Andee Joyce
Created: November 2000

*names have been changed..

"She wanted me to sleep in the living room sitting up until she was ready to get up in the morning. She said my body heat was keeping her awake at night."

My friend Rick* is telling me about his first wife, Karen*, and why things weren't exactly, ahem, a bed of roses between them. In fact, Rick cited Karen's "extreme cruelty" as the reason for filing divorce papers on her five years ago. What's interesting is that Rick is now planning to marry Nicki* -- and due to the religious convictions of each, they've yet to share a bed in the two and a half years they've been an item. They're saving that for marriage.

Good luck.

Not to pooh-pooh anyone's religion or morality (unless, of course, they try to jam it halfway down my digestive tract) - but I truly believe you don't really know someone's potential as a life-partner until you've slept with them. And I'm not talking about sex, either. I mean literally slept with them, as in remained unconscious lying next to them for seven or more hours at a time. Of course, that wasn't always so. Goodness knows Ozzie and Harriet, Lucy and Ricky, Ward and June, and every other sitcom couple up to around 1967 or so, knew better than to go looking for that kind of trouble. One flat pillow, one itchy blanket, one minuscule little mattress and box spring for each. Not a whole lot of room for snuggling, but on the other hand, couples weren't expected to do that then, either, once they were married. Thank God for Network Standards and Practices!

But things are different now. Okay, my in-laws (both in their sixties) do have separate bedrooms. My husband was adopted and an only child, so he actually has no tangible evidence that his parents ever shared a Sealy. That's a sad legacy to overcome. And as for me.. well, you don't really need to hear that my dad spent considerable time when I was growing up in the beds of women who didn't give birth to me, now do you? Not any more than you need to hear that in real life, "Mike Brady" wouldn't have slept with "Carol" on a bet. Sorry. But anyway, we're trying, Chris and I are, to establish proper snoozetime protocol, while sharing the charming, distressed-pine queen-sized sleigh bed my mother and stepfather bought us for a wedding present. (That is not irony. That is just plain coincidence.)

My mother and stepfather are pretty much straight-down-the-middle, businesslike individuals. They do not, I am fairly certain, intertwine their blankets between their limbs and around their necks in a snakelike pattern better suited to escape-artistry than rapid eye movement. Or poke their feet out of the bottoms of their hospital corners so they can fling their legs over one another's pelvises in a nerve-squashing death grip. Or cram pillows between their legs, under their arms and beneath their chins, in addition to the three (at least) required to prop up their heads. They probably never even consider doing things like that. That would just be.. weird. Yeah. Don't I know.

It would be, oh, so nice to just snuggle up with Chris while we're both nodding off, and wake up in his arms in exactly the same position nine hours later. It would also be nice to be eight feet tall so I could see over everyone's head at parades, and wouldn't it also be swell if our cars could run on fuel produced by burning old newspapers and frozen-food boxes? But never mind my fantasy life. The fact of the matter is that Chris tosses and turns with such ferocity that if our mattress was any softer, I'd be snogging the overhead light fixture with every trampoline-like bounce. And once he starts snoring in my ear like a DC-9, I can pretty much forget about having any dreams that don't involve cutting diamonds and sawing Sheetrock. So we have a standing agreement that as soon as his breath starts trying desperately to enter or escape those ever-tinier gaps in his throat, he turns over on to his side, facing away from me. And I wear earplugs, these little foamy bits that take the decibel level from oh, 180 or so down to around 150. If Lenny Kravitz can use those things to protect his hearing against relentless sonic assault, so can I.

Not that I'm exactly the most low-maintenance mattress-mate in the world, either. If a Blanket Snatching Queen of the Universe award existed, I'd have to at least make the final four. I mean, when I sleep in hotels, I've been known to pull the bedspread on top of me, so bottomless is my craving for coverage. Chris tries to rival my blanket-snatching talents, but he's just not cold enough most of the time to really give it his all. Men usually aren't. Therefore, we have two comforters on our bed, both of them queen-sized. His is lightweight, pink, with goosedown; mine, heavy (but soft) dark blue denim, with fiberfill - perfect for that wrap-around body-pillow effect to which I've become hopelessly addicted. And God help Chris if he falls asleep on top of my "knee pillow" before I get to bed - whatever progress he's made by then toward stage IV sleep will be lost to a semi-conscious wrestling match with me for possession of the green-flannel-encased little darling.

So we're probably both nightmares to sleep with, and thus probably deserve each other. But it could be worse. At least neither of us has the dreaded Restless Leg Syndrome, which my friend Patti's* husband has. "Carlos* kicks me at least twenty times a night, right in the butt," Patti complains. "And he never remembers any of it. He also screams in my ear half the night about monsters chasing him and his mom yelling at him that he's grounded. He doesn't remember that, either." But the worst thing of all about sleeping with Carlos, Patti says, is that he.. breathes all over her. "I can't sleep with hot breath on me," she declares. "I make him turn over."

I guess that means most of us are lousy in bed - especially when we're trying to sleep. Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, where are you?

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