Canthook

They've been advertising Select Comfort Sleep Number^TM beds a lot lately. I've been paying some attention, because we bought a 10-year-guarantee mattress at Sears 11 years ago. Within 3 years, it was lumpy and misshapen, but they declined to honor the warranty.

It seems they wanted a sales receipt; we had figured that paying for it with Sears card meant we wouldn't have to bother with that, because they could look up our card records, but they decided it wasn't worth their while to do that. We cut up our Sears card that day, and when Sears went bankrupt a few years later, we went out for a steak dinner to celebrate.

But after 8 more years on that terrible mattress, it's no longer in the "lumpy and misshapen" category. It's more in the "you could lose a subcompact in some of those holes" category. Or, if not a subcompact, a wife. Blondie has decided she'd rather sleep on the sofa.

Sometimes, my redheaded girlfriend, Marie, will share the bed with me, but not always. Marie is a pedigreed long-haired German Shepard. She's big enough to avoid the smaller holes, and she has a nice fur coat, so the broken springs don't poke her too bad, but she's not always willing to put up with the discomfort. Frequently, she prefers to sleep at the bottom of the stairs, just by the front door.

That's a strategic location. I can't go down to the refrigerator without her knowing it, Blondie can't go upstairs to the bathroom without her realizing it, and there's no way anyone could possibly open the front door unless she moves. It would be a tragedy if someone were to leave, and she didn't get to go for a ride.

I remember well the era between my first wife and my second one. I didn't sleep well at all. In fact, I haven't slept well since I was a kid.

Mom told me that she'd come into my room at night, and I would sit up in bed and talk to her, making lucid conversation. Come morning, I had no idea she was ever there. I'm told that kids who experience trauma, that is, develop PTSD, become hypervigilant, which affects their sleep patterns.

I was ritually, sexually, abused about a month before my fifth birthday. You could say it was strangers that did it, except that it was a small town, where nobody is a stranger. From that time on, I had recurring nightmares, and it wasn't until I was about 40 that I figured out that it wasn't a fantasy at all, but a memory. How did I reach that conclusion? Well, for one thing, I had physical scars that matched those nightmares, and no other explanation for how I got them. I can identify 3 of my attackers - a deputy sheriff, a leading member of the bar, a merchant who was president of the Lions club - but they were just spectators. I couldn't see the pudgy woman holding me on her lap, and I averted my eye from the active attacker(s).

Ever since I moved away from home in my 20s, I've slept very light. I used to wake up in Janesville, Wisconsin, every morning at 3:17. Turns out a factory whistle was blowing, about three miles away. I would wake up in Cincinnati to what sounded like fog horns. Turns out that's exactly what it was. I was seven miles from the river, but there's more traffic on the Ohio River past Cincinnati than passes through the Panama Canal. When I was first married to my first wife, she worked nights, and I'd wake up at 5:30, although Em didn't get home until two hours later. Turns out that the lights in the chickenhouse automatically came on at 5:30.

I don't have that recurring nightmare very often any more, but I still sleep lightly - unless I'm not alone. Supposedly nobody sleeps well when they're not in their own bed - except that I did. I found that I rested well when I slept with someone I was dating, even if I didn't know them very well. I initially thought it had something to do with sex, until I found I slept well even when there wasn't any sex involved. (Yeah, I did some kinky things when I was dating, like sleeping together without having sex.)

Eventually, I realized that I even slept better when my baby son was in the house. Yes, sometimes he slept in bed with me while Em was at work - but I want to keep him sleep in his own bed, so it wouldn't be a problem that Em and I wanted to exclude him from our bed on weekends.

Em laughed about our "dancing cheek-to-cheek", her term for body contact during sleep while facing opposite directions. I laughed, too, but that intimate contact brought us closer together than our sex life - and we had a very good sex life.

It's obvious that I'm hardly the only one who attaches great importance to sleeping together. There are many articles, many web pages, about people trying to deal with snoring or restless leg syndrome disturbing their partner's sleep. Bed manufacturers are bouncing bowling balls, showing that a glass of champagne doesn't spill, or creating mattresses that allow partners to select different firmness levels, or they're making mattresses out of special foams instead of springs.

In the last episode of House, one of the best-written series on the air, Wilson has a bad back; he and Amber decide it's due to Amber's mattress. They shop; he wants a pillow-top mattress and she wants a firm mattress. Pick whichever one you want, she proclaims, and disappears. He decides to get the mattress she wants - and it turns out to make Amber mad when he does. In his previous relationships, she proclaims, he's acted like a wimp, and that destroyed those relationships. When she said to get the mattress he wants, she wanted him to get the mattress he wants.

Women. Can't live mumble-mumble. Wilson takes her at her word - and realizes that he has always wanted to float off to sleep literally. He buys a waterbed. In the middle of the night, she wakes up alone, and finds him sleeping on the living room floor. I hate it, he says. Suppose they will take it back? She assures him that they will.

Everybody has a gimmick. Maybe it's not your bed that's causing your bad back, maybe you just need some chiropractic care. Last week, when walking through Costco, a chiropractor had a table set up. I'm not sure if it was a lottery to win a free back massage or if it was a free back massage with an intake examination. Either way, a great back massage sounds wonderful - except that therapeutic back massages always seem rough and painful. I've had great massages from girlfriends, but in my experience, experts seem to do more harm than good with back massages. Obviously, since I don't know exactly how they were giving away free back massages, I didn't bite on their offer.

Until several months ago, I found myself often "working" at night. I was keeping five servers running, and I found it much easier to do that when I babied the machines in the middle of the night; after all, that's when there is less traffic online.

That often left me playing with puters while Blondie slept, and sleeping - or trying to - while Blondie was engaged in her career. She didn't like it, and neither did my body. My blood pressure was going wild, my digestion was crazy, my blood sugar was wildly out of control, and I wondered how much longer I would be alive. I got someone else to take over the servers, and since then, my blood pressure has dropped, my digestion is a little less crazy, my blood sugar is mildly out of control, and I wonder how much long I will be alive. But I'm sleeping upstairs while Blondie is sleeping downstairs, and if I supplement that with sleeping half the day, I may be able to survive another month or three.

So I really need to buy a new mattress.

I keep thinking about that "thera" foam. It looks like it would trap a lot of heat and moisture. When blood sugars are running high, one's body tries to get rid of the sugar, not just by frequent urination, but by night sweats. Sounds like a bad idea.

Our current mattress has a pillow on top, and none underneath, which means we can't plop it over every few months. We didn't realize that when we bought the mattress. It's pretty expensive to buy a mattress with pillow top and pillow bottom, and I'm thinking, well, you can't launder the pillow anyway. Maybe it'd be smart to buy a mattress with NO pillow at all, and use a separate waffle under the sheet. You can buy 20 waffles for the price of a mattress, meaning that it could be replaced every six to twelve months.

Or there's that sleep number mattress. I went to their website, and plugged in all sorts of information that I didn't really know the answers to. It seems to think that I should have a 95 sleep number and Blondie should have an 85 number. But if my number is higher than hers, wouldn't that mean I would keep rolling over onto her side of the bed all the time?

When I was young, living on the farm, we raised longrace hogs. That's the most common pigs you think of, with a really long body, all white. Longrace is one of the more profitable breeds to raise, because they tend to be fairly lean, and they get better prices at auction. Longrace also have big litters, and that's the key to profitability. If you get litters of five or six, it's hard to break even. If you get litters of ten or twelve, it's pretty easy to pay the mortgage.

The thing is, though, sows tend to roll over and suffocate their baby piglets without realizing it. Because of that, farmers put mother sows in farrowing crates, which keep the piglets from getting squooshed. I always thought it couldn't be comfortable for mama sows, and I'd talk to the mama sows, telling them that they could be much more comfortable if they'd just be more careful of the little ones, but mama sows don't pay much attention to little boys. Unless they walk between mama and her piglets. You don't get between a sow and her piglets. Ever. That can be a lethal mistake.

I've had a few other rules I've tried to enforce in the households I've lived in. One is that anyone who wakes someone unnecessarily is automatically in the wrong. If the house is on fire, or there's a tornado bearing down on the house, it's OK to wake someone up. If you cook something that has an extremely enticing odor, and it wakes someone up, that's not considered waking someone up unnecessarily. If they can roll over and go back to sleep, they needed the sleep, and if they have to get up and eat, it certainly wasn't unnecessary.

And if your bedpartner is extremely horny, she can lie in spoon formation with her arm around you, and that is also permissible. There's a difference between encouraging your partner to awaken and forcing your partner to wake up.

In an old episode of "Welcome Back, Kotter", Gabe Kaplan is telling the story of finding himself in a cabin at night. I seem to recall that he's chaperoning something, and due to an emergency, everyone else has gone; there's just Kotter in one cot, and a female high school student in the other one. She's complaining that the cot is unfamiliar and lumpy, and she's right underneath the open window, and she's very cold.

Kotter asks her, would you like to pretend like you're Mrs. Kotter, just for the night? She thinks, well, we're all alone, it sounds interesting, nobody will ever know. She says, well, sure, she'd like that. Kotter says, in that case, get up and shut the window yourself.

Marital geometry seems to be a problem for everyone, and there are more people trying to build a better mattress than trying to build a better mousetrap. What's your Sleep Number^TM? For me, and for most people, it seems to be TWO.

Other Bloggers On These Subjects:
bedpartner - chaperone - chicken house - chiropractor - body hunger - farm - farrowing - marital geometry - hypervigilance - Gabe Kaplan - Longrace - massage - mattress - piglets - PTSD - Sears - Long-haired German Shepard - night sweats