go to sleep already

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Five for Friday

Perhaps you are wondering, what the hell am I doing?! Well, apparently I am participating in NaBloPoMo, although not here; I’m writing a post every day in November over on my book blog. And apparently I am also still posting in this space too (though not every day!), because I am… on the other extreme of the posting pendulum?? out of my gourd??? an asshole???? I don’t know. I don’t expect you to read any of it and I’m sorry. I have a problem.  

A warning. I made these amazing and delicious sugar-free, gluten-free – and yet legit delicious! I swear! although Carla and my husband disagree! – brownies again for Halloween. When I made them the first time, I bought a package of super expensive Medjool dates at my grocery store (the sweetness of the brownies comes from dates, spoiler alert) (I don’t even LIKE dates, but these brownies are good) and my only complaint about the brownies was that it is a pain in the rear to pit all the dates. But! THIS TIME I spotted a bag of Dole pitted dates that was, like, HALF the price of the fancy dates, so I bought that to save both money and time, am a genius. To make the brownies, you pulse chocolate and baking soda in a food processor, add dates, then add eggs and vanilla and pour everything into a pan and bake. Easy peasy, delicious. Halfway through making the brownies, my food processor started smoking and kind of stopped working. This is called foreshadowing. I have clearly not watched enough horror movies, so I just thought it was my food processor’s time. I’ve had that thing since 2008, and it’s lived a long and productive life. Time for a new one. I scraped the date mixture into my blender, which had no trouble turning everything into a nice uniform-but-very-sticky goo, poured the batter into the pan, and baked. The brownies were delicious and soft and I frosted them by pouring some chocolate chips on top while they were still warm, and then spreading the melty chips all over the top. My husband gamely agreed to try one, and bit into it… and right into a DATE PIT. So. This very elaborate and somewhat boring story is in service of warning you to still inspect all of the dates, even if they are supposedly PITTED. I suppose this is the baking equivalent of “never trust a blinker.” Never trust a pitted fruit claim, folks, you heard it here first.

My orchid is reblooming! I got this orchid as a gift way back in 2017. It has rebloomed a few times since then but for the first time in my memory, it has THREE blooms instead of one. I think it’s very happy in its new spot on my mantel. 

My kid attended her first b’nai mitzvah of the season last week. When I first posted that she has six to attend this year, a couple of people had questions. Suz wanted to know, “Does that mean six different dresses and six different gifts?” and Eli wondered, “I want to know what one wears to a b’nai Mitzvah! And what kind of gifts is one supposed to give?” Well, first of all, I am a Mean Mom and I only allowed Carla to get two dresses. (And please understand that “only” is in giant scare quotes because that is PLENTY OF DRESSES, she is very spoiled.) (And also, it’s really FOUR dresses, because I bought her two appropriate-for-synagogue dresses as well, that she can wear to the ceremonies.) What girls wear to the party portion of b’nai mitzvah in our area are short fancy dresses and sneakers. Yes. Together. It is my understanding that the dresses are of the same style as those girls are wearing to homecoming. They are very short, sometimes very form fitting. They do not, in my opinion, seem at all appropriate for a middle schooler. And yet they are The Trend. All of us seventh grade moms have been fretting together about the dresses and how uncomfortable they make us, and reassuring ourselves and one another that it’s The Trend and it’s Just A Dress etc. Much as moms have done for time immemorial, I’m sure. For gifts, we are doing cold, hard cash. It is apparently standard to give money in multiples of 18, which is a significant number in some Jewish traditions. 

I made aloo gobi last week, and it was delicious. (It was not, my husband pointed out, much like aloo gobi one would get in a restaurant, but it was still flavorful and tasty and warming.) In the comments, Jenny asked: “That Aloo Gobi looks good- but I looked at the recipe and it has some unusual ingredients- mango powder? Coriander leaves? Do you have those things or are you making a substitution?” I did not, in fact, have mango powder on hand. But I do NOW; I went to the South Asian grocery store and they had multiple varieties of mango powder so I bought some. I also got some Kashmiri red chili powder. I did not, however, get fenugreek leaves, mistakenly believing (and failing to look up until later) that the leaves are the same thing in my container of ground fenugreek. Oh no. The ground fenugreek is fenugreek seeds, and has a totally different flavor from the leaves. Oh well. Next time. The rest of the ingredients – including coriander leaves (cilantro) – I had on hand, and now I can make aloo gobi any old time I want. 

My CPAP machine comes with an app and gives me a daily score. This is very effective for me, because I like to get an A. Right now, I have a B, which is apparently due to the number of times I got up at night and removed my mask. As Allison noted, “I still don’t really understand them giving you a CPAP when I thought your problem was more insomnia-based, but I hope it helps!” I also still don’t really understand it either, Allison. And now I’m getting a B on my CPAP score because I get up too many times in the night and remove my mask. Am I not supposed to pee, CPAP App???? Or what if my cat is scratching the bench at the end of the bed? Am I supposed to just let him shred the upholstery???? And if my legs are twitching uncontrollably, am I just supposed to lie there and NOT SLEEP? Doubtful; you’d probably dock me points for being awake, too. Oh yes, look: hours of sleep do in fact earn points, and I got a score of 58 out of 70 for wearing my mask “only” 5.7 hours. FUN FUN FUN. 

    Okay, that’s all I have today. If you prefer to go check out today’s nonsense over at the book blog, I will see you there. (This is probably Way Too Much Suzanne, and I get that.) 

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    Weigh-In Wednesday: Sleeping + Waking Incompatibility

    Why are the “-able” and “-ible” words so difficult to remember how to spell?

    My husband and I have a significant Bedtime Incompatibility. Periodically, it drives me nuts as it is today. It takes the obvious form: each of us has a Preferred Bedtime, and they are different from one another.

    I guess you would style me as a Morning Person. I like to wake up early-ish and start my day. To make rising early enjoyable, I like to go to bed at a reasonable time around ten o’clock. Probably, if I didn’t have a child or husband, I would go to bed around nine or nine-thirty. But I DO have a child, whose bedtime (around seven-thirty) combined with my husband’s arrival home from work (around seven) means that I often don’t eat dinner until eight-thirty or nine let alone get into bed at that time. But if left to my own devices, I would go to sleep around ten. And often – yawning and feeling all twitchy in the leg region, which happens when I’m tired – I do part from my husband around ten or ten-thirty, even though he would rather watch another episode of whatever show we’re watching.

    My husband is a Night Owl, and would stay up until two or three in the morning if he didn’t have to get up for work. On the weekends, he sometimes DOES stay up that late. Part of it is that he is at work from sixish to sevenish most days, and so he feels that going to bed early means he gets no time to do the things he enjoys (make music, play video games, exercise, watch TV, do puzzles, read). So he has to carve that him-time out of the dark of night. Part of it is that he seems naturally inclined toward night-owlishness. I do think that most people are one or the other, and cannot change without great effort and even discomfort. 

    For a long time, I hated this difference in our go-to-sleep habits. I felt like it was important for our marriage to be able to fall asleep together. I missed having his warm body in bed with me. I missed the quiet chats that occur when two people are in the dark, trying to fall asleep. 

    But over the years, I’ve come to accept it, if not outright enjoy it. I often have trouble falling asleep, and even more trouble getting back to sleep if I wake up in the night. And on the nights when we do go to bed together, I find that I am more irritated by him than anything. He keeps MOVING the SHEETS and TICKLING my LEGS. Or he will keep his light on even if he is just looking at his phone (which itself is LIT) and the light bothers me. Or he will turn off his light, out of (grudging) deference to me, but then his phone light will bother me. Or he will fall asleep first and then he will BREATHE and it will keep me awake. Do you see how it is better for me to be deeply asleep before he enters the bedroom?

    It is a delight to be my spouse. 

    All this is to say that I have come around to the fact that we have separate bedtimes. It’s fine.

    My husband and I have lived together for nearly twenty years at this point, and we have always had this significant incompatibility. But it’s become more pronounced now that we have child.  

    What’s bugging me currently is the mornings. My natural wake-up time – if it’s not 4:00 am – tends to be 7:00 am. That’s when I wake up without an alarm. On the weekends, I usually lie in bed until a) I’m hungry or b) I can hear Carla downstairs, and realize I need to go feed her (i.e. prevent her from eating junk instead of a Healthful Breakfast; I fail most days as she is quite stealthy). My husband has more teenagery sleep habits, and would probably languish in bed until noon if he could. 

    But it makes me so irritated!!! See those three exclamation points? I wanted to add ten or twenty, just to illustrate my level of irritation. 

    Part of it is that my husband unloads the dishwasher on the weekends; even though it takes literally five minutes out of my day, I do it Every. Other. Day. plus on weekends when he is on call, and having to unload the dishwasher on the weekends as well makes me want to scream. He unloads the dishwasher, and, unsurprisingly, he does so when he feels like doing it, which is NOT on my schedule. I want the dishwasher unloaded FIRST THING so that I can fill it with breakfast dishes and glasses from the night before etc. I try to recognize that this is a Me Thing, and I have never gone so far as to demand that he do this task on my schedule… but it still bugs me. 

    Part of it is that I get a break from unloading the dishwasher on weekends, but I don’t get a break from feeding Carla. It would be so nice to just NOT have to make her breakfast. (I suppose I could extend a little autonomy in her direction, but so far it hasn’t worked out that way. I think she just wouldn’t eat, if it were her responsibility.) And “making breakfast” is not as simple as it sounds. It requires in-depth questioning and listing of options and cajoling and reminding about things like “eating meals is important” and “it’s good to eat things that have nutritional value in addition to things that have none.” It is A Process, is what I’m saying.

    Part of it is that I feel like my husband gets this long, luxurious rest – and all its associated freedom from breakfast-making and tidying and chiding the child about picking up toys/turning off the TV/cleaning up her dishes. Not that I would choose to sleep longer, if I could! I guess I’m just envious. It does, in some ways, feel like he gets the weekends off from his job while I do not. But… my housewife “job” is so minimal! And fairly easy! While his work is neither of those things! So why do I begrudge him a little extra break?

    The other part of it, though, is that we can never DO anything as a family until late. This past Sunday, we planned on a family bike ride. I wanted to leave early, before the heat descended. But we settled on 9:30. And then… my husband slept in until nearly 9:00 and it was ELEVEN O’CLOCK before we got out the door, and I hadn’t eaten any breakfast (because I am a Late Breakfaster, and I figured we would be home from our 9:30 bike ride before I got hungry) and it was hot and I was cranky. Why should I have to wait around doing NOTHING just because I have the audacity to wake up early?! And now half the day has been eaten up by Nothing. Not just Nothing, but resentful, pouty Nothing.

    Oh! Here’s a point on my husband’s side of things: We will watch a TV show or two after dinner (or, more likely, while he and I scarf down dinner after we put Carla to bed). I am usually struggling to keep my eyes open by the end of the show, and I feel like I express Very Clearly that I am ready for bed. When the show is over, I will say something along the lines of, “Okay, I’m ready for bed! I’m going to head up now!” and then I go into the kitchen and wash the dishes and clean the counters while my husband flips around the channels, checking on sports scores and catching up on news and weather. 

    Then he will finally come into the kitchen – usually right as I am finished – and express surprise that I have done all the dishwashing/cleaning up. He still needs to prep his coffee and get his lunch together for the next day, and sometimes if I am feeling charitable, I will stay in the kitchen with him and chat. But often I am Done with a capital D and I say, “Good night!” At which point he is miffed! Why am I in such a hurry to go to bed? What did he say to me last night – something like, “Well, you didn’t waste any time.” Excuse me? I just did all the dishes! 

    Hmm. I am clearly casting this in a Me light rather than a Him light. Try to see it his way. 

    I am very curious as to YOUR bedtime/wake-up habits. And if you live with someone, what THEIR habits are, and whether they are compatible with yours (and whether it matters).

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    In Desperate Need of Coffee; Don’t Drink Coffee

    This was one of those mornings in which I woke up promptly at 5:00 am and then couldn’t fall back to sleep, even if I had Zero Reason to be awake at that time; it’s the last week of summer for sleep’s sake! I should be enjoying every second of sleeping until 7:00 while I can. 

    As usual, I kept pretending that reading things on my phone would lull me back to sleep (what? it works sometimes, often enough to convince me, lab-rat style, that it WILL work again), instead of using those two extra hours as the precious resource they were. They never SEEM precious, when I’m not planning to wake up early. Especially when I stayed up past eleven the night before watching Bachelor in Paradise. 

    I only fell asleep again once my husband’s alarm went off. You know. To taunt him. 

    He hit the snooze button and I snuggled into his warm body and sank immediately into a horrible nightmare: I was at a party, which my supervisor from my prior job was attending, and he told me gravely that someone from my prior job was making terrible accusations of sexual impropriety about me. Not harassment, I don’t think. Just, like, hooking up with this colleague who was not in my chain of command. In the dream, my supervisor never outlined what these accusations were, or how they would affect me besides making me out to be an adulterer, but I was alarmed and outraged and got very yelly and sailor mouthed (apologies to sailors) and indignant because it seemed like my supervisor didn’t believe me, even though he claimed he did. I couldn’t even remember meeting the person who was accusing me – his name was Noah Centineo, which is apparently the name of a real live actor person, a fact I discovered when I googled the familiar-sounding moniker after waking up – and I was shaky and angry and wanted more details so I could call my mom and sue the husk out of Noah for slander. (My mother is a retired lawyer and I don’t know if slander applies in this case, or really what the issue was; I think I was afraid that I would lose the only recommendation from the only job I ever had, even though that is NOT the only job I’ve ever had.) While I was waiting for my supervisor to go get details, I was angrily chewing an enormous piece of purple gum and it got very sticky and I tried to spit it out and it got stuck to my teeth, and I had to pry it out of my mouth long stringy strand by long stringy strand and it got spiderwebbed all over my hands and face and hair. 

    The only reason I woke up from this awful dream was because I got a text message. It was from a person with whom Carla and I are having a playdate I am dreading. The mother has many good qualities but she is also an Extreme Extrovert and I am even more of an Introvert since the pandemic began than I was to begin with. (This mother had, at one point, suggested TWO playdates this week but fortunately stopped pressing when I told her one playdate was stressful enough that I couldn’t even FATHOM two playdates without breaking out in hives.) (I am not yet at the comfort level of leaving Carla alone at someone’s house for a playdate.) It wasn’t the best text message to wake up to, is what I’m telling you. Out of the gum-web and into the fire of forced interaction.

    The nightmare clung to me, much as the dream-gum was clinging to my teeth and hands, but I managed to awaken Carla and strip the bed. (Let’s blame the sheets for my sleeplessness. I mean, clean sheets can’t hurt.) I did not manage to put the detergent in the right place; there is a little drawer with specific compartments for detergent and fabric softener and bleach, and instead I threw a cup full of detergent directly onto the sheets in the drum of the washer, which is surely some sort of terrible laundry faux pas, and I am fully expecting a tsunami of bubbles to erupt from the washer and onto the floor at any moment. 

    Carla had requested sour toast and ants on a log for breakfast, but first the dirt (??? what is the role of peanut butter in this concoction???) wouldn’t stick to the log; the halves of the banana seemed wet somehow, though it was a nice fresh banana, and the peanut butter wouldn’t spread properly, and I had to kind of drape it in unappealing plops across the banana, which continued to glisten wetly. I eat neither bananas nor peanut butter, so I don’t know if any of this is acceptable or not. Carla didn’t comment, so we’ll assume it is fine.

    Worse, though: I couldn’t find any ants. In this case, chocolate chips. I dug around in the pantry for a while before giving up and offering dried cranberries (pass) and fresh blueberries (keep) as insect alternatives. Then I discovered that I had been carrying around an unopened bag of tortilla chips, on my hip like it was a baby. 

    That was when I decided I needed to sit down and allow the fog to clear a bit before I attempted anything else. Which is why you are getting sentences like the first one of this post, in which the phrase “in which” sounds completely hatpin crazy to me, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to rephrase the sentence. Hmm. I suppose I could just take it out and make it into two sentences, but I will leave it as an illustration of the state of my mind.

    This is one of those rare occasions where I find myself wishing I drank coffee. I love my morning cup of tea, but it doesn’t provide that jolt of clarity that supposedly comes from a cup of hot black coffee. Perhaps I will have to chug a Mountain Dew instead.