There are few things more annoying than suffering from perma-insomnia when the person who shares your bed can fall asleep a mere nanosecond after pillow contact. I’m not pointing the finger (Keith), I’m not accusing anyone (Keith), I’m not naming names (Keith). I’m just sayin’ …
I don’t remember a stretch of time when it was easy for me to fall asleep. Jan will happily tell you what a “poor” sleeper I was as a baby. I couldn’t sleep when I was a Brownie. I couldn’t sleep when I had mono. I couldn’t sleep under the influence of Ambien or Xanax. The one disease I don’t worry about? African Sleeping Sickness.
What’s that? The tsetse fly, you say? Oh. I actually have worried about that. Sorry.
Every now and then, I’ll go through a rare and brief “sleep easy” week or two, but sooner or later, the insomnia returns with a vengeance. I’ve always just blamed it on the unfortunate combination of anxiety, sensory overload, genetics, and a touch of fatal familial insomnia. But lately, another, more sinister possibility has occurred to me.
What if it is not anxiety, sensory overload, genetics or FFI at all but rather …wait for it … the very piece of furniture meant to provide hours of quality respite and restorative slumber ? What if it’s really … [insert menacing thunder and organ music] THE BED ITSELF?
When I met Keith, he had just bought a Tempur-Pedic. Admittedly, I don’t know a lot about beds or mattresses, so I’m about as qualified to assess them as Peter Griffin is to judge fine wines. In my entire life, I have personally selected my own just once – right before I moved to New York, at a big A&S sale in Paramus. And at the time, the options were much simpler: hard, medium or soft. There were no –pedics and no –foams. If it was a fancy Nancy bed you desired, you ordered the Craftmatic by toll-free phone call after seeing its commercial on TV in the wee hours of the night. So in 2008, what I did know was that I liked my beds not too soft and not too hard; that the Heavenly Westin bed was indeed heavenly; that a freakish number of mattress brand names started with the letter “S”; and that the Tempur-Pedic was the alleged be-all/end-all of sleep-related wares. It changed people’s lives. It brought the gift of good rest.
I just didn’t get it. The Tempur-Pedic felt really firm and really high and refused to mold to my body. But since I’ve been a “poor sleeper” all my life, it never really occurred to me that the bed had anything to do with my inability to slumber. And pretty soon, I stopped thinking about it. I had too many other things to obsess over.
But for the past few months, my insomnia has been worse than usual. You could argue that this has to do with general malaise and getting married and stress at work and fear of the future. But I’ve become hyper-aware of the bed as I lie awake. And let me tell you: that freakin’ bed isn’t blameless in this scenario.
But what’s the answer? Keith thinks the Tempur-Pedic is the greatest invention since the Barca Lounger. He spent a lot of money on it, not that long ago. It’s not the kind of thing you just replace every few months. Plus, he’s so flexible about home furnishings; I could never ask him to sacrifice the one thing in the apartment he really does care about. And really, who knows what, if any, difference the mattress is making?
I’m at a loss. It’s unlikely that I’ll “accidentally” misplace a queen mattress. It’s also not the kind of thing I can really I throw out “by mistake.” (Not that I ever did such things of course…) So I started researching stop-gap measures. There’s the classic egg crate, of course, as well as something called a “convoluted” mattress pad (available on myfoam.com); a “baffle box;” a Cuddleewe; and a “SuperSnooze,” among others. For some reason, the names of these products make me chuckle heartily but just don’t scream out “EIGHT UNINTERRUPTED HOURS OF BLISSFUL Z’s.”
So I ask you, loyal and random readers, what in THE hell am I supposed to do?
The Letter T 