Me in the sleep lab. Sorry, fellas, I’m taken!
This all started last spring, when I started waking in the morning to an empty bed. And contrary to my first guess, Joe hadn’t gotten up early to work. Instead, I found him wrapped up in a blanket on the living room couch, asleep.
“I’d gotten up to use the bathroom at about 4 in the morning,” he’d told me, “and I just couldn’t get back to sleep because you were snoring so loudly.”
Whaaaaaa? Me, snoring?
I’d never been a snorer before. That was what we’d made fun of my dad for, when we were kids crammed in a hotel room, or when he snoozed on the couch after dinner. That wasn’t ME.
“Really?” I winced, initially resisting this adjustment in my sense of self. “Huh. That’s weird.”
Joe’s pre-dawn exodus quickly became an established pattern, though, rather than a seemingly flukey occurrence. I felt guilty and embarrassed and humiliated and helpless about it, often starting to cry while apologizing. (I’m not particularly girly, yet there’s still something profoundly un-feminine and boorish and ugly about snoring your partner right out of your bedroom each night.)
Why was this suddenly happening, on top of my layoff? I asked myself. Considering the stress-induced root canal I just had, was this yet another way that my body manifested my job-loss?
Because this one particular piece of the puzzle has always been clear. I carry loads of tension around in my body, especially in my shoulders and neck, and weekly yoga classes over the past decade or so have done little to change that; in addition, I’ve been grinding my teeth while sleeping (a/k/a bruxism) since I was a kid. So while I may succeed in presenting a low-key face to the world much of the time, behind that facade is a panicked woman in a compressed air booth, desperately clawing at to-do list items and family calendar entries.
Also, when I occasionally cash in a gift certificate or just treat myself to a professional massage, the masseuse, upon first touching my upper back, always says, “Oh” or “Wow,” in a tone that reads, “I don’t know if I can work all these kinks out in the time we have.”
So as miserable as I was about the snoring, I thought, Well, give yourself a break. Maybe after you push through this rough patch in your life and come out the other side, it will leave as suddenly as it came.
Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Continue reading
Jenn McKee's An Adequate Mom Blog 