Sleepy

Oooh I'm just so frustrated. If it wasn't enough that I'm damn sure Rob's been reading this blog, I have even more proof. Since I've stopped writing, I've pretty much had one visitor a day to this site....except for the days he was out of town and didn't have access to the internet. Again, Rob, 'fess up. It just pisses me off even more when you can't admit to reading this.

I just couldn't stay away for the last irritation. I had to write to get it out of my system. I have a sleeping problem. I do not fall asleep easily. I can lay there for hours on end. When it was really bad, when I had a lot of stress in my life, I simply didn't sleep at night at all. I would go until I literally was so exhausted I couldn't function anymore and then I would crash. Since this crash would usually come in the afternoon, I would wake up at odd hours and then the next night not be able to go to sleep at a good time because I had slept at a weird time the day before. I've been trying to avoid this cycle but it's hard.

Lately I've been between jobs. This means I don't have a schedule to follow so my immediate reaction is to sleep when I want to sleep and be awake when I want to be awake. Since I'm really a night person, I'm usually up until at least 2 AM and then I sleep until close to noon. My bedtime kept getting later and later, since I didn't really have anything I needed to achieve that couldn't be done in the afternoon and evening.

Finally the cycle caught up with me and I ended up going to bed very early, around 8 PM, and then waking up early around 5 AM. This settled into going to bed around 9-10 and getting up around 5-6. Being a morning person was a new experience for me but I was beginning to enjoy it for the same reasons I liked being a night owl. Very early in the morning our neighborhood is peaceful and there aren't many people or noises around- just like very late at night. I thought this was a good change because I was able to do a lot of things in the morning or the middle of the day.

Rob always disliked my schedule of going to bed late and getting up very late. He had a point- on the weekends he would end up going to bed much earlier than me and then do a whole bunch of stuff while I was still snoozing the morning away. It wasn't fair to him because it wasted the time we had together, plus when we HAD to get up earlier I would be cranky all day from sleep deprivation.

I thought he would like the new early-to-bed schedule better, since it meant I was up and cheery early in the morning, even on weekends. Nope, he doesn't like that either. In fact, he bitched about it to me the other day. It turns out that what he really wants is for me to have the same sleep schedule as HIM.

Now to me, that is incredibly selfish. We'd already established quite early in our marriage that I cannot have the same sleep patterns as he does. Rob has the odd ability to fall asleep very quickly once he goes to bed, almost no matter what. I've never had this. Even as a kid I would lay there for a long time before going to sleep. Plus, he functions quite well with being in the bed for eight hours. If I'm in bed for eight hours, it means I got less than six hours of sleep and I cannot function on that. I get sick, with a sore throat developing into a cold, if I don't get enough sleep more than a couple of night in a row.

Also, if we go to bed at the same time he wants to talk. I get myself all settled into a comfortable boneless position, and then he wants to have a discussion about something. It could be something that happened to him during the day, something he wants to tell me, but usually it's a topic that either irritates me or completely wakes me up. This causes me to have even more difficulty in falling asleep. The only solution is to just not go to bed at the same time as him. It isn't that I don't try hard enough to fall asleep or are making some kind of choice- I just simply cannot do it.

To sum it up, my husband wants to be so selfish as to whine about my sleep habits, no matter what they are, until I maintain the same sleep schedule as he does despite my needs.