Four a.m. Conversation

By Susan Esther Barnes

Readers of my blog may recall that sometimes my husband snores, which keeps me awake, so I end up sleeping on the coach downstairs. You can read about it here and here.

He feels guilty about it, and on more than one occasion he has suggested that instead of going downstairs myself, I should send him out to go sleep on the couch instead. Below is the dialogue that ensued this morning around 4 o'clock, the first time I decided to take his advice:

Him: Snore, snore.

I reach over and try to get him to roll over.

Him: Snore, snore.

Again I try to get him to roll over. He very gently slaps my hand away, and says, "Cut it out."

I say, "Roll over please, you're snoring."

He responds grumpily, "I am not. I'm not even sleeping any more."

I say, "You will be soon, and you're snoring. Why don't you go sleep on the couch downstairs?"

He responds, in a shocked voice, "That's mean!"

I remind him, "You told me I should tell you to do that."

He retorts, "That's stupid. Don't do things I tell you to do that are stupid." Immediately he falls back asleep and starts to snore again.

If our relationship were different than it is, I suppose I would feel angry or betrayed. Instead, I think it's hysterical, and as I head downstairs to the couch, I can't wait to find out later what, if anything, he remembers of the conversation. Which, of course, turns out to be almost nothing.

Still, we both had a good laugh about it. And you can bet that some time, when he least expects it, he's going to ask me to do something, and I'm going to say, "That's stupid. And you told me not to do things you say that are stupid." It's our newest "inside joke."

Alarm Clock

I had a bit of a head cold this week, but nothing like what my husband John had, with a runny nose and congestion despite the Sudafed. As faithful readers of this blog are aware, John has been known to snore from time to time, but when he's congested his snoring is louder and more persistent than usual. Which means I spent part of each night this week sleeping downstairs on the couch.

Yesterday morning I woke up about the time my alarm clock usually goes off. I was tired and grumpy and didn't want to get up, but I wanted to get upstairs and turn off my alarm clock before it woke John.

When I got to the top of the stairs, I noticed the bedroom door was closed, with Thomas kitty on the outside. Thus, I knew Thomas had woken up John, who had then kicked the cat out of the bedroom. So I opened the door, expecting John to be at least half awake, but there he was, passed out and snoring contentedly.

I hurried over to my alarm clock to turn it off, but found it was silently proclaiming the time to be seven minutes after the alarm was supposed to have gone off. I double-checked it, and all seemed to be in order. I couldn't figure out why it hadn't gone off, but I wasn't about to wake John to find out. Sick folks need their sleep, after all.

Last night after I got home from work, I asked John, "Did my alarm clock go off this morning?"

"Yes!" he replied accusingly, "and it took me forever to figure out how to turn off the darned thing!"

I looked at him a moment, then prompted, "So, why didn't you come wake me up?"

"What?" he said, in his best sickness-induced hoarse and confused voice.

"If my alarm went off, why didn't you come wake me up? You know, that's what the alarm is for."

"Oh," he said, "uh, I meant to. I thought about waking you up. But by the time I figured out how to shut it off...I don't know what happened..."

I suppose I should have been mad, but normally he's so smart, and he's just too cute when he's all sick and fuzzy and confused.

I think maybe I need to get an alarm clock for downstairs.

Two a.m. Conversation

My husband and I have some of our best conversations at two or three in the morning. This is not a story about one of those conversations.

It’s a story about snoring. My father snores. My father-in-law snores. Because of this, John’s father and mine each sleep in a different room from his respective wife. John does not want us to have separate bedrooms. One of the privileges of marriage which he wants to continue to enjoy is sleeping in the same bed with me. You can’t blame a guy for that.

Unfortunately, like our forefathers, sometimes John also snores. So we have reached an agreement. When he snores, I have his express permission to make him roll over so he’ll stop snoring, even if it means waking him up. On many nights, snoring isn’t an issue. On most nights when his snoring keeps me awake, I can fairly easily get him to roll over, and all is well.

Every once in a while, though, we experience something like what happened around 2am this morning:

Him : Snore, snore, snore
Me: Nudge
Him: Grunt, snore
Me: Nudge
Him: Snore
Me: Push
Him: “What?”
Me: “Roll over.”
Him: “What?”
Me: “Roll over.”
Him: “Why?”
Me: “You’re snoring.”
Him: “No, I’m not.”
Me: “Roll over.”
Him: “I did!”
Me: “Sigh.” (Because he most certainly did not roll over)
Him: Snore

This scene was only slightly less amusing than the time he insisted he knew he had not been snoring, because he had been awake, and had seen me reaching over to poke at him. It wasn’t until I said, “What, you were lying there in the dark staring at the ceiling?” that he realized he must have dreamed seeing me reaching for him.

So for the second half of the night I slept on the couch. At least we don’t have separate bedrooms.