3:30 AM

While it doesn’t happen every night, there are several nights each week where I wake up around 3:30am.  Most times, I drift back to sleep within a half hour, but then there are evenings when I stay awake until the bloody alarm goes  off at 6am. 

Last night was one of those.  I woke up, visited the toilet, then settled back into bed, petting my sweet Shasha, who was snuggled up next to me, before stroking my husband’s hand, which rested peacefully on his chest.  Then I…turned over, punched the pillow, coughed, sighed, punched the pillow, grabbed the other pillow and crushed it against my abdomen.  Then I sighed again and counted down from 100, losing track when I reached about 87, at which point I thought about work.

Sleepless.

I rolled over, flipped the pillows so my cheek would feel the cool side, and sank my head into the soft mound of downy comfort.  And I thought about work.

Aggravated by the randomly obsessive thinking going on in my weary brain, I flopped from one side (facing my husband) to the other side (facing the wall and the Bose alarm clock radio set to the wrong time) and softly groaned.  I glanced at the clock and wondered what the real time was.

I got up to check the real time, removing a DVD box which covered the clock face of our cable box in the bedroom so as not to disrupt my sleep from the digital golden glare of numbers.

It was 4:15.

And I thought about work some more…realizing I was really, really sleepless.

Plus, I was hungry. My throat was scratchy, too.  I took a Hall’s lozenge out of the drawer of my bedside table, eager to calm the tickle in my throat because if I started coughing I would definitely wake up.

Around 5:30am I took a break from thinking about work to worry instead about getting my daughter and the other kids in our carpool safely to school that morning because I would be so tired from being….

Sleepless.  Again.

Finally, at 6 am the alarm went off.  My husband glanced at the clock, flicked off the alarm and rolled over, grunting while he patted my hand.

“Can I ask you a question and you can say no?” I asked him, wide awake now.

“Ugh.”

“Will you take the carpool kids to school?”

Another grunt, offered with an alternative suggestion about how best to engage his services vis-à-vis school transportation issues, which sounded whiny to me, but he was still a little bit asleep after all.

Never mind, I thought to myself.  I’m awake now.  And it’s time to get up.