Nothing to See Here…

I’m one of those horribly ambivalent agnostics who generally hedges where the subject of God is concerned. I like to be able to hold him to task when something goes wrong, but I don’t hesitate to take the credit myself when things go right.

When it comes to design issues, I often try to figure out what he was thinking, get inside his mind, analyze his intent.

I’ve done just that on a particular topic and have narrowed it down to one of two possible conclusions: either The Big Guy has a wicked bad sense of humor and is fucking with us for his own amusement or else he was simply just sleeping on the job and plain screwed up the design of it all.

Sleep. It’s sleep I’m talking about.

Do you know anyone who is pleased and content with their sleep situation? Let’s look at a few examples from my life personally.

I’ve had five babies. All of them were born needing vast amounts of sleep - they say about 20 hours a day for a newborn. The big joke here is that while a baby NEEDS a lot of sleep and has the opportunity to GET a lot of sleep, a baby simply doesn’t WANT a lot of sleep and spends all his time fighting against it.

On the other end of the spectrum was my grandmother, rest her crabby old soul. Now, Grandma needed about 2 hours sleep in a 24 hour period. She simply didn’t require much sleep to keep her going. And yet she had pretty much exhausted all manners of filling up the other 22 hours of wakeful time. Grandma would have LOVED to have the infant schedule of 20 hours a sleep per day. That would have left her 4 hours to watch The Golden Girls in reruns and drink several glasses of wine from one of those big ol’ Boxes o’ Wine that she liked to buy so much in those final years.

There are many other examples of sleep anomalies in my family. Take my father-in-law (take him, please!) for example. He suffers from insomnia. This is a condition I have no understanding of. I can’t imagine wanting to sleep and having the opportunity to sleep and not being able to sleep. Me? If my head hits the pillow, I’m out like a light. I have no concept of what it must be like to have issues falling asleep. But my father-in-law has major issues. During the day, he is sluggish and listless and sits on the couch watching The History Channel all day. He snoozes sitting straight up and is jolted awake by the sound of his own snoring. It’s really quite entertaining. But at night? Sleepless in St. Louis. Since he lives with us, this condition drives me cuckoo. If I come downstairs in the wee hours, likely with a distraught child or maybe once every decade to grab a can of Reddiwip to take back up to our little love nest, I’ll find him sitting on the sofa in the dark, wide awake. It’s a little freaky (enough to turn a can of Reddiwip back into nothing more than a whipped topping for a slice of pie when moments before its potential was oh-so-much-more!)

Then there is me. As I’ve stated, I can fall asleep at the drop of a hat. My husband and I retire to bed together every night. We’re like Mike and Carol Brady in there reviewing the day, coordinating for tomorrow, discussing the kids, the jobs, the never ending list of what we have to do. There are times I simply drop off to sleep mid-conversation. I’ve fallen asleep DURING sex before. I can literally close my eyes and be asleep in less than a minute.

Let me assure you, this is NOT conducive to satisfying The Horniest Man in the Universe. He rather likes his partners awake, I should think. So for years, it’s been me fighting my need to sleep in order to have some semblance of a sex life with my oh-so-deserving husband. This is my life.

EXCEPT - oh, here’s the exception… when I am traveling on business, everything is different. Reasonably, this should be my chance to catch up on the sleep I am always chasing. I should be able to get a solid 8 hours, no, maybe 10 hours! Yes, it’s perfect. And satisfying this sleep deficit, I should be able to go home to my husband and become the wild, kinky (and AWAKE) love goddess he likes to imagine I can be.

But noooooooo… that would be too easy. THAT wouldn’t give endless hours of entertainment to The Big Guy who decides instead to fuck with me. “Hey, I know.” He thinks. “What if I make it so that when she’s HOME with her husband she can’t stay awake but when she’s in a different city hundreds of miles away, she can’t go to sleep? Gosh, how funny is that? Yeah, I do believe that will create some interesting watching for me.” (God, I suppose, is the original creator of the ULTIMATE version of Reality TV, huh? Some days I feel I’m on his version of Survivor, The Biggest Loser, and Nanny 9-1-1 all rolled up into one).

With time, I know my body will not only get MORE sleep(as the children grow) but will also need LESS sleep. I try to remain optimistic. I think ahead to my own days of drinking wine from a box and watching reruns of Rose, Blanche, Dorothy, and Sophia on The Golden Girls. The two of us, just my husband and I; no children anywhere to be seen. No more business travel. Just me in my support-hose (thigh-highs? lace top?) with my full can of Reddiwip. Let’s just hope I have what it takes to lure him away from his History Channel snooze-fest.

We’ll see who gets the last laugh, right, God???