I'll Share a Life but Not a Bed

By Guest Writer Bethany Sarazen

The dog barks at the front door, and I spot the FedEx driver dragging a massive package onto the porch. I ignore it. I already know the box will be too heavy for me to move because inside it is a mattress. 

The mattress is not for my children although my daughter could use one less old and lumpy. The mattress is for my husband. He’s moving out of our room—our big, beautiful, peaceful bedroom where the crepe myrtle blooms purple just outside the windows each spring—and into the office. With the arrival of this box, the king-sized mattress in our bedroom will now be all mine.

It isn’t what I want, but it’s what I need. And I’m nothing if not practical.

I’m looking at the mattress box on the porch, but I’m thinking about this past September. My husband and I had run away for a month, to a tiny little island with a fishing village curved around a small bay. In the mornings, we drank coffee on the rooftop deck while the sun rose. We couldn’t see the Pamlico sound; there were too many trees crowding the view, but we could hear it when the wind blew hard enough. During the day, we’d head to the beach, or maybe to the small cove where, hundreds of years ago, Blackbeard was beheaded. That was our favorite place. The forest of live oaks had grown up nearly to the water, so the tiny strip of sand was dappled with shade, and the jetty teemed with hermit crabs. We brought books and bottles of cold chenin blanc. We spent the day in the sun, lounging and reading. We did not exercise, except for kayaking while the sun set–glasses of wine sloshing in our cup holders—paddling furiously to get out of the way of the ferry. It was a magical month. It did not seem real.

But the nights were decidedly less glorious.

Our room was tiny: there was a queen-sized bed shoved in one corner, a very noisy water heater screeching in the other, and a pair of glass doors that opened onto a narrow strip of deck. There was no headboard, no fan, no place to open a suitcase. The mattress was cheap, the pillows thin. We were used to bigger, softer, better—a bed that didn’t bounce when someone else twitched.

Almost as soon as we had unpacked, my husband dragged in a spare twin mattress from the attached barn and squeezed it into our tiny bedroom. And thus it began: me, alone in the bed, and him, alone on the floor.

It was not romantic, but the results were nearly as magical as the rest of our month.

I slept hard, for the first time in years, maybe. I’d blamed so many things for my sleep deprivation: children who scream in the night because their blankets twisted. Children who tap my shoulder because they’ve got to use the bathroom. Children who swear they saw a hand reaching out from the cracked-open closet door. I’d blamed myself too: I drank a glass of wine that probably disturbed my REM cycles. I didn’t exercise enough, so I wasn’t adequately worn out. I ate chocolate too close to bedtime, and who knows the caffeine content in half a bar of seventy percent cacao?

He slept, too. We were perplexed. Here we were, drinking wine in the late afternoons, never working out except for the kayaks and walks to the harborside coffeeshop. We broke all the rules, and yet we slept deeply and dreamed and woke refreshed. 

We proved something to ourselves during that month: Sleeping together doesn’t necessarily foster intimacy. 

What about the times we argue, and then resolve the conflict? What about the conversations we have on date night—the intentional questions, the focused listening, the practiced curiosity? We know each other now, after a dozen years of marriage, and none of that knowing came from lying next to each other at night. And what about the fun? What about the evenings I’ve traipsed through the woods while he throws discs at a nearby course, the nights we’ve sprawled on the floor at Barnes and Noble flipping through interior design books, or the dates when we share five rolls of sushi and they’re all amazingly delicious?

Sleeping together is a poor euphemism for sex. We are wide awake then. There’s no lethargy, no silence, and the lights are left on. There’s a thrill, a joy, a deep and unexhausted delight. We decided to split up when it comes to the night, but that does not render our marriage sexless. Our marriage bed will simply not be the place we rest our heads. We come up with a new arrangement, hence the box on the porch.

I thought it would be too heavy for me to lift, but I manage to haul the mattress up the stairs all by myself. The cardboard rips, and I squeeze the box with my knees to keep it from sliding down and crashing into the front door. I dig my fingers into the thick plastic wrapped around the rolled-up bed and, step by step, lug it all the way to the office. It unfolds and expands, and I cover it in sheets and blankets. We still have work to do. The chalky beige walls need painting, the fan should be switched out for an actual light fixture, and the sagging bookshelf should be anchored to the wall, but those are small tasks. We’ve already done the hard work: we’ve decided to make a change.

I want my children to see that there is deep love and rich intimacy in my marriage, and I also need them to know that that life does not spring from seven hours in a dark room. What we’ve built, we built in the light. What we’ve forged, we’ve forged with grit and intention and care. Maybe my children will, at some point, realize that our sleeping arrangement is unconventional. Maybe they’ll be bothered. But hopefully they’ll see that their mom and dad love each other. Maybe it’s not the fluttery, flimsy, volatile love of our early twenties, but instead it’s a love that is sturdy and stable and enduring. 

We won’t share a bed anymore, but we share a family. We share a life. We share our very selves. And we don’t do it staggering from weariness. We do it wide awake. We do it in the light.

---

This essay won first place in our annual Love After Babies writing contest—exclusively open to Exhale members. Learn more here.

Guest essay written by Bethany Sarazen. Bethany blogs at bethanymustinsarazen.com, although she considers herself more of a reader than a writer. When not pouring over words, she’s probably wandering in the woods with her children, drinking black coffee or Spanish wine, or baking something for breakfast: oat muffins, banana bread, honey cake.

Photo by

Jennifer Floyd

.

---

If you loved this essay, would you consider forwarding it to a friend? We’ll be delivering stories like this one all February long. ❤️