I haven’t gotten a regular decent night sleep in ten years. The reason? We sleep in a waterbed. Which is the second name the waterbed marketing team came up with, after Turbulant Vomitolounger was deemed too negative.
When Esteban and I moved in together, he insisted that we use his king sized water bed and put my birds-eye maple antique queen sleigh bed in storage. And because I am an eager-to-please kind of girl, I agreed. Because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Little did I know that I was signing on for ten years of back aches and dreams spent cast away on the open seas as my cohabitant tossed and turned, actually breaching his body up off the mattress during his nightly interpretational dance and collapsing down into the depths, sending me sometimes two feet ( I am NOT making that up) into the air and back down.
Esteban is a mover. He actually is rarely still. He needs to play with something at all times, be it a television remote, a screwdriver, a sharp throwing device, whatever. And at night, when most bodies are snug in their beds, having wonderful REM sleep and rebuilding those energy stores, it is more of the same. He fidgets for no less than half an hour. His feet are itchy. He must scratch them. One foot scratches the other. For a half hour. Like some overanxious cricket with a broken chirp. Then it is rehearsal time at the Bolshoi. The man is a human metronome. Right side, on the back, left side, on the back, right side, on the back, left side, on the back. Every. Fifteen. Minutes. Thus, all of my dreams while sleeping married sleep are only fifteen minutes long and have the average creative content of your standard episode of TRL. I have learned to cling to the side rail of the bed, pressed against it for stability, like the victim of a shipwreck clinging to a buoy in a storm. Like Chrissie Watkins right before she’s attacked by the shark in the opening minutes of Jaws. Except that Chrissie Watkins got to rest in piece (or pieces) after she was thrashed around. She didn’t have to go for another ride every damn night for ten years straight. One can only wonder what would have happened if he had not married a curvy round kind of girl who brought her own ballast to the bed. What if he were attracted to waifs? The poor little thing would have been bandied about like a rag doll and perhaps been catapulted from the bed. Goodness knows, he might at this very minute be incarcerated for involuntary manslaughter through improper use of a sleeping device.
When Esteban is not there, I sleep wonderfully. I am out. I wake rested and excited to begin the day. Likewise, the few times that we’ve been in hotels with decent beds, I’ve had magnificent sleep. My back doesn’t hurt. I don’t feel sore. I don’t feel as though I need a nap in the middle of the day. Life is good.
When we purchased the house six years ago, I had been adamant that we get a real bed. I was tired of’ well, being tired. Esteban’s mother decided that the answer to this would be to buy a ‘better’ mattress so as a housewarming gift, she purchased us a rather expensive waterbed mattress that supposedly was ‘waveless’.
Needless to say, the manufacturers of the ‘waveless’ mattress and I suffer a rather large difference of opinion. What is more, without going into enormous detail as it is not my nature to discuss this in the diary, but it has been discovered that there are certain marital acts that are not advisable on a bed that can be influenced by the ebbs and flux of the tide.
I’m talking about filing a joint tax return, of course.
And then there’s the fact that the waterbed is possibly making me fat.
You see, have you ever looked at exercise/calorie charts and been like “wow, if running for an hour expends 100 calories and I eat like 2000 calories a day and just sit around my cubicle all day and then watch Must See TV all night, why hasn’t my ass blocked out the sun yet?” Well, boys and girls, most of our calories are expended while we sleep, keeping us WARM. Which also explains why you are starving when you’ve been outside in the cold for any extended amount of time. And what do I sleep directly on top of? That would be a flat heater that burns my ass if the water level in the bed is too low. A heater that keeps the bed at a nice toasty 90 degrees or so. So instead of working against a thirty-degree temperature difference, your metabolism only needs to warm itself 8 degrees.
And I’m not even going to get started on the damn air bubbles in the bed. And burping the bed. Gah.
So a few weeks ago, I was changing the sheets on the bed and when I went to tuck Esteban’s corner in, I noticed that it was wet.
I promptly forgot about it, under the assumption that whatever was the matter, it was very possible that the mattress could feasibly heal ITSELF. And sometimes, if you forget about things, they go away.
This was not one of those times.
This time, I promptly put my foot down and said ‘No, no, no, I will NOT continue to sleep in this prop from 1978 pornos! We’re getting a real bed.’ We went mattress shopping and found that mattresses were considerably much more than we though they should cost, which was roughly 50 cents’ probably something like a dollar for the king sized variety. But after much deliberation, we made our very first furniture purchase as adults’ or, actually, I declared we were buying the one I wanted and then I went by myself to make the final decision and set everything up. Which is how things usually work around Casa Bix anyway.
Esteban then had all sorts of angst. Our bed was his bed before it was OUR bed. His parents purchased it for him after a growth spurt when he was 11 resulted in his feet hanging clear off the end of his former bed.
‘I lost my virginity in that bed!’ He moaned.
Note to my male readers: perhaps the 20 year service of a bed (13 of those spent romping with wife) should not be eulogized by waxing nostalgic over ONE sexual act that did not involve said wife. Sound like a good idea? Hrrrmmmm?
Tonight? Last night in the leaking Cherry Popping bed. Tomorrow night? I’m going to sleep for something like twelve days.
Note to self: find a way to distract Esteban from noticing that my wedding ring is behind the bed and has been back there for two years. Things to try: Star Trek, freshly baked cookies, dark imported beer, flashing my breasts.
