It's summer, so school is out and my sleep patterns are deranged. I haven't had to get up at 4:30 AM since May 18, and I'm rebelling. I feel like I deserve a loose sleep schedule since normally my sleep is so utterly restricted. Don't get me wrong; I never get to sleep late. If I don't wake up first, my seven-year-old baby girl crawls into bed with me around 6:30 AM and tells me it's time to get up. Therefore, naps are my way of gaining some well-deserved sleep.
I've been a napper for decades. In college, a two-hour break between classes was a perfect opportunity to head to the dormitory for a nice snooze. I actually wrote a letter of complaint to the Dean of Housing because maintenance was vacuumining the halls during the day. I said that the vacumming had to stop "because some people need to rest." I never received a response. Naps get no respect.
When my daughter was four, I was awakened from a nap on the couch at 11:00 AM. (Don't judge me; I had been awake since 6:00!) It was my mother-in-law. I jumped up, cleared my throat, and answered the phone with a "life-is-good-and-I'm-wide-awake" voice.
She asked, "Do you know where Taylor is?" I laughed and started looking around the living room. I opened the closet and the guest bathroom door. No child appeared.
"Oh, she's around here somewhere. Do you want to talk to her?" I asked, starting to feel a little panicked.
"Nooooo, she's right here. She walked over." Crap. My child left her no-good mother passed out on the couch and walked across the cornfield to her Nana's.
Nana drove Taylor back home to me, and I was grateful for Taylor's safety, of course, but a small part of me wanted to say, "Would it kill you to babysit her from time to time?" That was just the sleep talking.
Today I discovered that my husband's side job is keeping me from napping. He is a full-time concrete salesman and a part-time nap-blocker. During the day he slaves over orders and bids for concrete, sometimes loading and driving the truck when he has to. On the side, he works very hard to keep me awake when I start to nod off on the couch. It seems that every single time I fall asleep on the couch, he calls or he comes home for one reason or another. I love naps, and being awakened pisses me off.
Nobody will go right out and say it, but it seems that naps are socially unacceptable. I have a number of friends who don't nap, claiming they just can't sleep that much. My gandmother always said, "Six hours of sleep for a man, seven hours of sleep for a woman, and eight hours of sleep for a fool." Well, counting naps, I guess I am the biggest fool on the planet.
Naps are a necessary part of my life, and I don't know what to do to make myself stay awake all day long. I think I may have to try, though. My daughter just walked over and said, "Did you know that I jumped off the balcony yesterday while you were asleep?" I sure hope she was kidding.
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