Sleep Talk

My mom has a pretty unique world view when it comes to sleeping. It’s pretty complex but I’ll try to explain it. My mom thinks that if you wake up after 8:30am (even on weekends) you are lazy and have no right to be tired later in the day. Naps are irritating to her, she refuses to take one even if she’s sick and anyone else who tries to take one in our house while she’s around gets woken up by the vacuum or is asked to mow the lawn. There’s only one time that my mom falls asleep and it’s when she watches a movie. I would say about 99 per cent of the time she falls asleep within 20 minutes of the start of a movie…and then starts snoring. Listening to someone snore while you’re watching a movie is distracting so when we wake her up she refuses to believe that she was asleep and says that she doesn’t snore; this goes on for an hour sporadically until one of us basically has to drag her to her bedroom.

The reason I’m telling all of you this is because I came home to be on vacation and relax but since I got home I’ve had nothing but rude wake ups at obscene times in the day. I was seriously jetlagged from my flight and extremely tired when I got home from the airport so I went to bed around midnight. Suddenly I woke up to the paper shredder at 7:00 in the morning. I tried to tune it out and keep sleeping but my mom used it for two hours. How there was that much paper to shred in our house I’ll never know. The next day I was woken up at 8:30am by the lawn mower. The day after that, the radio at 8:00am.

At first, I didn’t notice that the noise was purposeful. I knew something was up when I noticed the paper shredding stopped as soon as I woke up as well as the radio. Being forced to wake up so early really started to bother me especially when I started to notice that my brother was able to sleep until two or three in the afternoon. I figured out that the reason for this was because he sleeps in the basement, where there is no sunlight, you can barely hear anything, and my mom refuses to go down there unless she absolutely has to. My room is on the first floor right next to our home office, which means I can hear anyone who uses the computer, shreds paper, prints something, or answers the phone. I also have the weirdest curtains ever hanging over my window. They don’t block out any light at all, it seems like they actually make the room brighter. I am a really light sleeper and I need darkness to get a restful sleep so I haven’t been in the greatest mood since I’ve been home because I haven’t been able to sleep the way my body needs it to. Luckily, my mom starts work tomorrow (she’s a pre-school teacher) so I’ll be able to sleep-in as late as I want. YES!