Cradlesong

Public service announcement:

I will not marry someone who snores.
I will also not marry someone who tells me not to sleep on my stomach.

Public service announcement over. Rant begin.

The father snores. Sleep apnea. Or apnoea. Or apnoae. The medical condition or the spelling is not important really. What's important is that apparently he needs surgery to have a snoreless sleep. That's kind of scary. It's also quite disturbing. I hate his snoring. I sleep in a room that's directly below the parents' bedroom and at night I can hear him. The sound waves travel from his bedroom, out of his windows, down one storey and into my windows. And they're still loud. It's like someone is slowly drilling the walls of my bedroom. It's so very uncomfortable.

But snoring has its uses too. No, I'm not even going to try to talk of scaring burglars off or some no-brain crap like that. Listen to this: The father snores and the mother's so used to it after 26 years of married bliss... er... life, that she gets uncomfortable when he doesn't snore. Recently, dad's been having these episodes where he can't breathe temporarily. In his sleep. Uhmm yes. Scary. Well, so anyway, kindly consider the situation. Dad's sleeping, snoring in iambic pentameter. (I can vouch for this. The snores are snored at precisely timed intervals. Quite amazing to listen to, if you happen not to be a sleep deprived child who needs to sleep.) So, he's snoring away, and suddenly the break in snoring happens. It actually wakes up my sleeping mother, and she pokes him someplace. Hard. He wakes up in a blubbering sort of a "Wha..?!" She mumbles asomething about breathing. He's already asleep.

Yes. The father can fall asleep in seconds. So can the grandfather. Both of them can also fall asleep everywhere. And I mean everywhere. It's a constant delight to visiting kids at our house. They simply cannot imagine how someone can fall asleep while sitting on the sofa. The father and grandfather resemble laughing buddhas while they're asleep, so I think the 'cute' factor also attracts the kids. However, I hope this tendency skips a generation because I'm the grandfather's first-born's first-born. And you know what that means. I do not want that particular gene, thank you very much. I'll be falling asleep while walking if I don't look out because the particular predisposition also becomes more potent as it gets passed down generations. While the grandfather has his sleep affliction confined to sofas and other stationary things, the father once fell asleep in the driver's seat of a car. While he was driving. On a highway. Yes, he's alive and in one piece, but you see what I'm fighting against?

To talk of my sleeping habits, well, I've done that already. No point going over it all over again.

So I think our family has all sleep related abnormal behaviour covered. Almost. How I wish I was a pro at sleep-walking too. That would be quite something.