In which I rock.

I’ve rocked myself to sleep for most of my life. It’s a rather violent, whole-body rock, and if I don’t braid my hair it ends up incredibly tangled and snarled and takes twenty minutes to brush out. I’ve always preferred to sleep on mattresses on the floor, in order to avoid having to hear the sound of springs creaking.

I’ve rocked for so long that I can’t remember not doing it. My parents say I started when I was tiny. My father once commented that it was a rather autistic behavior.

When I was a kid, I worried I’d do it in my sleep at slumber parties and be teased for it. When I started sleeping with guys, I worried they’d see me doing it and think I was a weirdo. I’ve always been vaguely embarassed by it because one can’t necessarily control what one does in one’s sleep, but I’ve known a lot of people over the years and my rocking, in the grand scheme of things, really ain’t no thang comparatively.

Everyone I’ve ever slept with for more than a few nights has witnessed me rocking in my sleep. Most ask about it, I explain I’ve always done it, they say it annoys them to have the whole bed sway like that, and that’s that. I could usually manage to not do it for a few nights here and there, but I always did it when sleeping alone.

The first time I lived with someone I was sharing a bed with, I made an effort not to rock at all. I still did it sometimes in my sleep, especially when stressed or sick, but with some discomfort I managed to learn to fall asleep without rocking. It took about six months for me to learn to be able to lie down and just fall asleep while holding perfectly still.

When my first live-in relationship ended, I went back to rocking. I stopped every time I had a live-in boyfriend, and started again when I had my bed back to myself.

I stopped when Bread and I got together, and I didn’t do it for about five years – again, except in my sleep, when stressed or sick. I think he thought it was a strange but insignificant aberration.

But I started doing it again over a year ago because I was incredibly stressed by my panic disorder symptoms. It’s comforting to me to rock. It’s enough movement that I was unable to focus on my symtoms, which means I was unable to freak myself into a panic attack while drifting off. Not to mention that I’ve been doing it for thirty years and I like to rock. I especially like to listen to music while rocking myself to sleep; it’s a habit I started when I was about nine years old with my very first solid-state portable cassette player.

Bread hates it when I rock because he can’t stand to have the bed move. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been awakened suddenly because he’s smacked me in the back in the middle of the night. During the worst of my panic problems, I slept on the daybed in my office a lot.

He hated it, that I was sleeping apart from him, but at the time I not only couldn’t get to sleep lying still and silent with nothing to think about but my heartbeat, I couldn’t stay asleep either because he snores and farts and rolls over on me and steals the blankets and is a total combat sleeper. I was practically insomniac so I slept maybe a week’s worth of nights per month in the other room. I figured it was like going to a movie with someone; sleeping isn’t really an interactive activity – you are, after all, asleep. If you hang out the rest of the day, does it matter if you sleep seperately on occasion?

These days, the panic is pretty much under control. I haven’t had an attack since September. But I’m back into the habit of rocking and he won’t let me rock next to him – and I don’t blame him, I’m a total spas and I don’t think anyone would want to try to sleep next to it. So I still sleep a week’s worth of nights per month in the other room. I figure, it’s my house, I’m a grown-up, I can sleep wherever the hell I want, right? Plus, nowhere in the marriage contract does it state that I’m required to let him wake me up at five in the morning by poking me with his… you know. I figure I deserve some time off from that shit. It’s not like I’m doing something weird, I’m just sleeping in the daybed about thirty feet away, and both doors are open! I can still hear him snore and fart and thrash around. And I get to rock myself to sleep, and sleep all night without waking up several times because he’s done something obnoxious, and all without being prodded before the sun comes up for sex he knows I don’t want to have. (He knows I don’t wake up amorous, but he insists on trying anyway. He seems to think it’s funny to piss me off. It’s not. Trust me, it’s not. I hate five o’clock in the morning with a vengeance. I hate it when he wakes me up two hours before my alarm goes off, because I either don’t get back to sleep at all or I oversleep, or I don’t get enough sleep and feel groggy all day.)

Anyway, last night after surfing for guitar tab on the Internet, I plopped down on the daybed with my dogs for a cuddle. Bread was passed out downstairs on the couch, with the TV on at about a bazillion decibels. I fell asleep.

And was suddenly awakened because he was leaning over me, smacking my arm. It was 3:30 in the morning – he’d just woken up from the couch – and he was pissed that I was in the daybed and not in our bed. He told me I had to get rid of the daybed. I told him no. We had a fight while I stood up, walked into our bedroom, took my clothes off and laid down. His last words were, “I’m throwing that fucking bed out.”

I laid there, fuming. Thinking about all the times he’s said stupid shit like that and I’ve let him have the last word. All the times I do what he wants instead of what I want, just to keep the peace. All the times he just fucking railroads me and I let him, because hey, usually I don’t care as much as he does about whatever it is.

After a few minutes of silence he tried to hook his ankle over mine. I pulled my leg away. I knew I was being petty but I was just too pissed off to let him pretend it was fine for him to fucking wake me up in the middle of the night, pitch a fit, and then pretend it was no thing! Who the fuck wakes someone up on a work night at three-thirty in the morning to act like a fucking baby about something as stupid as where we pass our unconscious hours? Especially when he’d been sleeping on the fucking couch himself until three in the damn morning?!

He tried to hook his ankle over mine again, and I moved again. I was huddled up against the very edge of the bed, as always. It’s a hideous metaphor, but ‘as above, so below’: I feel like there’s never enough space for me. There I was, ramrod straight on a tiny sliver of the edge of my own bed, trying to avoid a touch I didn’t want to accept.

He fell right to sleep, snoring and blissfully hogging 85% of our king-sized bed, and I laid there and listened to him and got madder and madder. When he rolled over and took all my blankets with him that was it. I got up, pulled on some clothes, and went downstairs for awhile. I let the dogs out, I let the dogs back in, I petted the cat, I stoked the fire. I considered going back to the daybed because I was angry and didn’t want to sleep with him and fuck him if he didn’t like it, but I didn’t want to hear it in the morning. So I went back to our bed, thumped him on the shoulder a little harder than necessary until he moved the hell over, and I went to sleep.

He was trying to play footsie with me again when my alarm went off this morning, and I scootched away from him. I was still mad. I’m still mad now. (I think he knows it, too, because he called me and asked me out to lunch and he had his contrite, everything’s-alright-right? voice on.)

Since this forum is entirely mine, you only hear what I choose to tell you. There is, of course, a whole ‘nother side to this story and as a rational being I realize that. I just don’t care about it that much. I realize he could, perhaps, be feeling abandoned because I choose to sleep in another bed sometimes; I pretty much feel that I’ve explained all my reasoning for it and it’s simply about my comfort. If he insists on feeling abandoned, I can’t fix that. I’m uncomfortable when I can’t rock and when I can’t sleep an entire night through, and I’m going to take steps to correct it. Period. I don’t give a shit about his ego. I spend so much of the rest of my time thinking about his ego that I’m just not willing to budge on this one – it’s the middle of the night fer chrissakes. I tried for a long time to meet his needs before my own, and it made me crazy. I’m not anti-service, I’m not anti-sacrifice, but I am most definitely anti-crazy. I need to get my needs met to stay healthy, but unfortunately he seems to be interpreting these self-preserving behaviors on my part as withholding things from him. Maybe I am. Maybe I have to. I don’t know what’s going to happen but I’m not going to put up with any more nighttime fits from him; we’re gonna have to have a big talk tonight.

I kinda hate big talks, to be quite honest with you. For a woman and a supposed intuitive communicator, I guess I’m really not that good at them. I’m afraid of leaving a snapshot of myself, an image of the way I was at that particular moment, and being judged for it forever. So I play my cards closer to my chest than I should.

Anyway, I swear to you now: if when I get home he’s moved that daybed, you’ll be able to see the mushroom cloud from London.