“I’ve changed.”
“It’s not you, it’s me.”
“I’m not sure there’s anything we can do to fix this!”
My husband and I have been going back and forth, trying to come up with a solution to our problem, yet neither one of us will give in. It’s me. I’m the problem. I have changed. I’ve become…. someone who snores so goddamn loud the neighbors think we are felling trees in the backyard. The blinds in the living room sway and clank against the walls, pulled by a force of nature; the cyclone within the bed is nothing short of deafening. The problem seems to be my new retainer, the one I wear so I don’t grind my teeth down into infinitesimal nubs. So I got another retainer made, this time for the top teeth. Surely one of them would be ok? Alas, no. I still sound like a water buffalo trying to escape a tar pit. Occasionally I will not wear it, and my jaw will hurt the next day. But I will ask imploringly, in my sweetest voice… “Did you get some sleep last night?” because I know that being woken up repeatedly is basically pure torture.
It’s the reason I didn’t have any more kids.
“Um, no,” he will answer. I will have flipped onto my stomach, pushing my head off the pillow, which also makes me snore, in what he has dubbed “the snoring position”. And we used to leave the window open, to get a nice cool breeze in the room, something that also helped us sleep. But a Spotted Towee has moved into the front bush, and screams every morning at approximately 4:47 a.m. No one wins here.
There is a pull out couch in the basement, and when I really know he’s suffering I will go to it. Not without first checking for massive spiders, as they like to live down there and come out at night to skateboard in the bathroom sink and throw parties under the piano. We have told our son that he can move down there soon, have his own bathroom and access to the T.V., something I thought he would jump at. But he just looked at me and said,
“I’m not moving to the basement. That’s where the spiders are.”
Fair enough. If we ever sell our house it will be because no one wants to give up their room to cohabit with the arachnids. But I digress.
I know other people do it, they somehow come to still sleep in the same bed; they become immune to the noise, like people who live next to the airport. I blame my genes: this could be an inherited trait. My Grandmother snored so loudly that Grandpa had his own room at the other side of the house. If we slept over it was a constant, even with the doors closed, a long choppy drawing in of air followed by a growling exhale. We made jokes about lumberjacks, sawing logs, etc. Grandma just laughed and shrugged.
What could she do? If you snored, you snored.
I did have a bout of terrific snoring when I was pregnant, and tried those “breathe right” strips which make you look instantly like a linebacker. (I was one of those tank-type pregnant ladies, so the resemblance was close anyway). The strips helped a little bit, but mostly just gave me a red patch on the top of my nose. As my husband can’t sleep with earplugs in, we seem to be screwed. This is not an easy problem to have. Sure it’s not life threatening, or maybe it is, because one day I could go too far and push my better half right over the edge. He might have to strangle me just to get some sleep. He wouldn’t even go to jail, after pleading his case: that he’d been woken up repeatedly for 1,246 days in a row. Anyone would sympathize. I do feel bad about it; I know I am the problem. But I won’t give up my retainer now.
It helps me sleep…