Sharing

I've decided that posting on random tangents isn't really working for me, so I'm going to have monthy themes. Seeing as I've already vented about wedding gifts, this month's theme is marriage.

I've never been a fan of sharing a bed. During my childhood I was lucky enough to be the sole occupier of my twin bed. However, during family vacations I was usually called upon to share a bed with one of my siblings. My siblings were notoriously awful bed-mates. They kicked. They stole all the covers. They snored. They talked in their sleep. It was never a delightful experience. Sharing a bed with friends while on school trips was less annoying, but definitely just as uncomfortable. There was this weird anxiety of bumping into each other during the night, so both parties stayed as close to their own edge of the bed as physically possible.

Then marriage came along. I was expecting to have a much better experience than I'd had with my siblings or friends. I mean, how hard could it be to share a bed with your one true love? It turned out to be much harder than I'd expected. Much like my siblings, my husband snores, talks in his sleep, and hogs the covers.

I'm not saying that I'm the perfect bed-mate. One night I had a dream I was being robbed, and in my dream I went to punch this robber. I woke up right as I half-heartedly punched my husband in the arm. He thought I was crazy. There have also been multiple times when I've started talking to him in my sleep and realized in the middle that I was asleep and not making sense.

The first month or so of being married every little sound or movement from him woke me up just because I wasn't used to it. Thus, I'd wake up several times during the night. I'd always be a little disoriented, and when I couldn't figure out why I was awake, I would assume I needed to go to the bathroom. Some nights I got up to go to the bathroom two or three times. Every time I got up he would wake up and ask if I was ok. Neither of us got too much sleep while this was going on. Thankfully, it only happens a couple times a week now and he's learned to sleep through it.

When I was single I would occasionally wake up in the middle of the night super disoriented, so I'd play games on my ipod until I was tired again, then I'd go back to sleep. It's happened a lot more since getting married, so the poor guy has to put up with my bright ipod screen glowing from beneath the covers once or twice a week.

Ok, I exaggerated a little about my husband's nighttime faults. He doesn't snore very often, and when he does, a little nudge will usually make him stop. Also, he never completely steals the covers, and the amount he does steal is actually pretty convenient. I get kind of hot in the early hours of the morning and he makes sticking one leg out of the covers a piece of cake.

Really, the only thing I have a hard time dealing with is the sleep walking and sleep talking (which only gets bad when he's stressed). It's creepy. He's only sleep walked once since we've been married (to my knowledge), and I slept through the whole thing. He told me the next day that he went outside and woke up when he realized it was raining. Ever since then, I get really nervous every time he gets out of bed in the middle of the night. I sit up with my ears strained, ready to jump out of bed in the event that I hear the front door open. One night he decided to go sleep out on the couch without telling me, and I laid there for about an hour terrified that he was sleep walking around the house before I got the nerve to go check on him.

Thankfully, my husband's sleep walking is nothing compared to my grandpa. I'm told that as newlyweds he and my grandma had an argument about how to arrange the furniture in their bedroom. In the end my grandma got her way. However, that night my grandpa got up and moved the furniture to how he wanted it--all in his sleep. I can just imagine my grandma waking up to her new husband moving the bed across the room.

Now, my husband's sleep talking gets kind of disturbing sometimes. It wouldn't be so bad if I was completely awake while it was happening, but that's usually not the case. One second I'm dead asleep, and the next I'm awake and trying to figure out what he's going off about.

One night he sat up in bed, and stared intently up at the ceiling fan. When I asked what was wrong, he eerily replied, "It's spinning faster." He immediately laid back down and went back to sleep. I stared at the ceiling fan for another five or ten minutes trying to figure out if it really was spinning faster.

Another night he sat up in bed and frantically pointed at the wall, "Can you see it?"
"See what?" I asked, trying to wake myself up.
"That!" He continued to point.
"What?" I continued to ask. "What? A bug? An animal?" It went on like this for a little while.
"You can't see the picture?!" he finally asked with desperate urgency.
"Yes, I see the picture. It's been there for months," I replied, puzzled.
"Good. I'm not crazy." He went back to sleep.
I sat there wide-eyed for the next ten minutes wondering if I'd married a legitimately crazy person.

I've gotten much better at playing along with his sleep talking. One night he asked, "Why do you keep doing that?"
"Doing what?"
"Checking your schedule all the time," he responded.
"I do?" I asked.
"Yeah. It says you're going sledding."
I chuckled—-it was September. “Oh, is it snowing?"
"No," he answered. "That's why it's so creepy."
"That is creepy," I said, then went back to sleep.

Every once in a while he compliments me in his sleep. He once told me, "You're like sleeping beauty because you're sleeping and you're pretty." Needless to say, I'm always ok with that kind of sleep talking.

Sharing a bed definitely isn't always fun. Sometimes it's annoying. Sometimes it's terrifying. Sometimes it's exhausting. But regardless of how rough the night was, every morning I wake up next to him, and somehow it doesn't really matter what he did that night--it doesn't matter if he talked in sleep, snored, or stole my covers. The only important thing is that we woke up together.

This concept has a lot of parallels with marriage in general. Sharing your life with another person has its annoying or hard moments--they really can't be avoided. But when it all boils down, it doesn't really matter if we don't agree on everything or if things don't go the way we wanted. We get to do eternity together, and that's an amazing thing.