Why can’t men stop stealing our sleep?
NONE of us can stay awake. On that much my friends and I, over a bottle of Chateau de Rare Night Out, were agreed.
In our twenties, sleeping was something you did in the odd moments when there was nothing more interesting going on. In our thirties, we started to see the wisdom in banking a good eight hours and even the odd early night from time to time.
Now? We sit down, we fall asleep. We have no say in the matter. Forget the books we are trying to read, the Netflix series we really, really want to watch, even the online browsing of John Lewis (or whatever your taste runs to – JL is my last surviving Happy Place) we’d like to do.
None of us can stay conscious for more than ten minutes. Husbands and partners have been taught to wake us up after set times because it won’t happen naturally. We’re not napping, we’re out for the count.
Why should this be so? Obviously, although none of us is officially even peri-menopausal yet, our narrowed eyes light on hormones as the main suspects. But it occurred to me later that the real culprits lie closer to home.
It occurred to me at midnight, in fact, two hours after I’d first gone to sleep and the culprit was very close indeed – just settling into bed next to me. He had crept with what I think he believes is feline grace up the stairs. I woke to the sound of thumping feet, laboured breathing and pictures being knocked askew on stairwell walls.
Then he came in, yanked his clothes off with more effortful huffing and puffing than I produced during labour, and climbed into bed while I shut my eyes tightly against the brightness of his phone torch sweeping like a prison searchlight across the room.
I waited while he got himself comfortable, expelled the various forms of wind he evidently saves up for my night time delectation, and eventually fell back to sleep. Four hours later, the snoring begins and from then till the alarm goes, I am woken every 40 minutes or so by the human fog horn next to me who must be pushed on to his side to buy me the next stretch of relative tranquillity.
I never hear of men losing sleep in this way. And there are many other examples. I don’t hear of men waking up shivering because someone has taken all the blankets. I don’t hear of men lying awake running through their successes and failures as a parent/employee/friend/ responsible citizen and resolving to do better next time before going on to compile tomorrow’s to-do list, complete the family’s weekend plans, and squeeze in a few minutes to worry about the state of the world more generally and maybe a little cry over accumulated woes, before their mental cacophony dies down enough to let them drop off.
WOMEN lose sleep in t he way t hey l ose lots of things – getting through a world that isn’t designed for them. We lie there and worry about our failures because we fulfil so many more roles than men in a day and know we are judged on all of them.
We do the planning because if we don’t, no one else will and life will descend into chaos and become even more stressful. And men barrel in, disturbing our rest – even if they are trying not to – because they move through life never properly being taught what it is to put yourself out in the service of another’s comfort or ease. It is exhausting, at every level.
I have much more to say – a detailed set of instructions for how to turn under the duvet without taking it with you (you’re two separate entities! It can be done!) for a start – but I am, of course, too worn out.