Journal Entries

After Cyndi and I got home from our Christmas holiday adventure in northeast New Mexico, I realized one of the best parts about being back is sleeping in our own bed. That was the first thought I thought the next morning when I woke up and slid across the bed and up against Cyndi: It sure is good to be back. It isn’t the location of the bed, or the firmness that matters so much; it is the size.

Cyndi and I have slept on a king-sized bed since we first married. We bought it on advice from Cyndi’s mom and it was the best advice we acted on as newlyweds. It was our first big investment, and it wasn’t an obvious decision at the time. We started out our young marriage in a mobile home in the Careyville Park in Brownfield, Texas, and that king-sized bed took up 99% of the floor space in our bedroom. We had to walk sideways, like Egyptians, around the room to get to our closet. I still don’t remember how we got the mattress and box springs down the hall and around the corner.

We seldom get to sleep on a king-sized bed when we travel, and so we seldom sleep very well. (I should mention that we slept on king-sized beds during our trip to China last summer, but that doesn’t count. The Chinese beds were no softer than plywood; we had to be careful not to plop down or we’d hurt ourselves.) As much as Cyndi and I like each other, sleeping on a smaller bed feels like an all-night wrestling match, like traveling cross country with too many people crammed into a too-small car, always in each other’s space, continually banging into each other.

But in our own big bed at home we still like to be close. It’s a strange paradox: in a small bed we struggle for freedom, but in a large bed we sleep as close together as possible. We usually start out the night as close to each other as we can get, arms and legs tangled, contacting as much skin as possible, drifting away into blissful close-contact sleep, two humans melting into one.

We don’t stay that way; in our sleep we move to the edges. I usually wake up sometime in the night and wonder why I am all alone with my arms and legs splayed in four directions. Then I crawl my way through the covers back toward the middle to find Cyndi once again. This happens over and over, night after night. I think it happens to Cyndi as well, but since I’m asleep when she does her crawling, and she is asleep when I do mine, who knows how it works.

Our first morning back home after Christmas I pulled my way toward Cyndi and dug into her as close as morning breath would allow. I thought about how our back and forth movement through the night, toward each other and away from each other, is how Cyndi and I live together. We start out close, fall asleep, find a comfortable spot, drift apart, wake up, and make a conscious effort to come back together, over and over, every day. The decision to come back close is seldom a mutual decision, but is made by whichever of us first observes the separation.

Cyndi and I like to be very close to each other almost all the time, but we also like our individual space and freedom almost all the time. So we are constantly moving toward each other and away to freedom.

The next best advice we got when first married was from our friend, Tommy, in Hobbs, who told us to always find time for ourselves; it was important to have individual identities. We didn’t understand the advice at first since being individuals was what we were hoping to escape in getting married … we’d had enough individualism and we wanted to be a couple. But Tommy was right. It was great advice. Through the years we’ve learned to fit our lives together like a king-sized bed, with room to snuggle and room to be free.

It is a goal of our marriage to live close together, yet with freedom to move … both at the same time. We can’t live every day all tangled together; but neither can we love each other every day without touching. One is suffocating, the other lonely and depressing. It takes an attitude of total acceptance to leave emotional room to both snuggle and be free. It takes constant attention, making adjustments day after day, moment after moment.

And it sure is good.