Bed Is For Rest Time

I wrote this when I was just about to go to bed.  Bed is supposed to be a place of rest and recuperation but it wasn’t like that for the Hub last night: I turned over in my sleep and slapped him in the face.  They say we do the things in our dreams that we would like to do in real life but don’t have the courage to attempt….

Before you start feeling sorry for him, let me tell you that I am not the only violent sleeper in this marriage: more than once he has dreamed he’s in a fight and has punched the wall.  Sometimes he wakes up with a bruised hand and wonders why; sometimes I wake him up by yelling at him that he nearly got me that time.  Then he mutters, ‘Curses!  Foiled again.’  Maybe we should think about separate beds; or arguing less.  No: when I suggested it we argued more.  B could also be for ‘Arguments’. 

We are great squabblers over stupid things: the door’s not quite shut; whichever one of  us closed the curtains left a gap; the pillows are the wrong way round on the bed; one of us ate all the cheese & onion crisps and left crumbs in the sheets.

It used to bother me but now I think it works like a whistling kettle: a little tension is released each day so we avoid burning up and exploding. I have known the break up of couples who never argue; by annoying each other each day we are actually saving our marriage. That’s what I’ll tell him next time he moans that I didn’t take my empty cup into the kitchen. Right before I throw it at him.

I wonder if it’s the squabbles that make me punish the Hub in the night, when we are both asleep? Apparently, I often yank his pillow out from under him so that his head crashes to the mattress. It wouldn’t hurt when awake but he tells me it’s a shocker when you’re dreaming that Demi Moore has at last seen the light, begged you to dump the missus, and you suddenly find yourself flat on your back with a humped-back woman hogging the bed. The humped-back woman is me cuddling his pillow and imitating a 3D chevron.

Then there is the matter of the duvet: the poor love is under the impression that, because he sleeps in the same bed, he’s entitled to a share in it; he has delusions of equality. Men think the funniest things, don’t they? He’ll be wanting more than a quarter of the mattress next.