I consider my marriage to be pretty successful. My wife and I have been sleeping together, pretty darn regularly, for close to 35 years.
In the early days, we shared an old mattress her parents bought when they were newlyweds. It was so worn-out that there was a depression in the middle, toward which we rolled as the night went on. It was like slumbering in a really big catcher’s mitt.
I look back fondly on those days. Over the years, our mattress quality has improved greatly, but our sleep quality has not. My wife, like many of the females in her family, does not sleep. Trent women seem to spend half the night pacing in the dark. I think they may be part vampire. She says she has too much on her mind. Her insomnia started when we had kids and the collective weight of all that responsibility kept her from drifting off. And it’s gotten worse.
Or maybe it’s all women. Years ago, I visited my parents and was up very late watching a movie when my mother trudged out of her bedroom and sat on the couch. I asked her what was the problem, and she said she had insomnia. I asked her how long this had been going on.
“Since 1960,” she said.
I also have trouble sleeping, but I blame it on my wife’s restlessness. She turns over so vehemently that it shakes the whole mattress, and when she flips her pillow, she punches it so hard that my head, all the way on the other side, pops up. It’s like sleeping next to a one-person cage match where nobody wins.
In recent years, we’ve added snoring to the mix. When it started, I woke up in a sweat, thinking I was in danger. It was not the type of noise you would expect to come out of such a small woman, unless, maybe, an exorcism was taking place.
My wife says I’m no picnic either. Evidently I make an odd clicking noise in my throat, as if I’d been eating pretzels and something went down the wrong way. Once it starts, she says, she can’t get back to sleep. I pointed out that she wasn’t sleeping anyway, so it doesn’t seem like much of a hardship. Also, a “clicking noise” is not exactly a snore. Clocks tick all night, and people find that comforting.
My wife and I start every night together. But now that the kids are all either on their own or off at college, we have plenty of empty beds. Half the time one of us ends up sneaking off to another bed.
So last week my wife told me she’d found an app for her phone called “Sleep Cycle” that was supposed to monitor sleep habits. It turns your phone into a bedside companion, listening to your breathing, making a note every time you flip over. She found that, in between all that waking and pillow punching, she’d been getting more deep sleep than she realized. The very fact that she was getting sleep made it easier to go to sleep. She admitted, though, that the app also turned on a recorder whenever you snore, and reported that she’d snored for 2 minutes, She’d listened, and it sounded horrible. She apologized, retroactively, for all my sleepless nights.
The next night, while I was away from home for work, I downloaded the app and turned it on. Maybe I could record my clicking noise, and I could prove how much she was exaggerating.
The next morning, I rolled over in bed and grabbed my phone. I’d gotten 7½ hours of sleep, it said, all laid out in a chart showing the ups and downs of my REM cycles. Also, it said, I’d snored … for 39 minutes. Surely the app’s settings needed adjustment. I pressed the little “listen” tab.
The sound that came out of my phone was deep, dark and frightening. It sounded like something you’d hear in a Stephen King movie, the sound something makes right before it pulls you into a sewer. And right in the middle of each snore, I heard a clicking noise, like someone just choked on a pretzel. I closed the app with a shudder.
The next night at home, I told my wife that she didn’t need to apologize for her snoring. I could be a big man and put up with it, I said, if she was willing to cut me a break when, occasionally, here or there, I made just a little clicking noise.
Peter McKay is a longtime Ben Avon resident and syndicated columnist. He can be reached at his website, www.peter-mckay.com.
First Published: November 10, 2017, 3:15 p.m.
