Don’t Kill Your Mate! Ten Steps To Stop The Snoring

Posted on April 6, 2015 by Christine Vanderberg

Thinking back to my wedding day, almost 40 years ago, I remember my eternal vows to love and cherish “for better and for worse, for richer and for poorer, and through sickness and health.” I don’t remember any mention of snoring.

Sleep deprivation is a serious side effect of a mate’s deafening snoring. Besides being a form of torture, sleep deprivation can result in a multitude of health issues such as: an elevated risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, problems with concentration, weight gain, hypertension, depression, irritability, and poor judgment. Could that explain your recent desire to lunge across the mattress and strangle your mate?

Rest assured, there are other ways to stop the snoring. Though murder may seem like the quick solution when you’re in a state of irritability, hypertension and exercising poor judgment, I beg you to try some of my own personal attempts to stop the nocturnal torture. It might just keep you off death row – where there are probably other scarier sounds to keep you awake at night.

I’ve compiled ten steps to stop the snoring. I hope you find them helpful.

Martinis

  1. First, try calmly talking to your mate about the problem. It helps to make a batch of martinis before the conversation. Start with some small talk and tiny kisses to let them know you love them (even though you’ve imagined strangling them in their sleep the night before), and then say something like, “I know I’ve been a little edgy lately, but I’m having trouble sleeping at night.” Seductively place the martini olive between your lips and take a tiny nibble. Take care at this point not to let the martinis go to your heads. Keep your clothes on and stay focused! Lack of sleep over the past month will work against you and you will find yourself fighting to remain alert and concentrate on the problem you set out to discuss – your mate’s snoring. Be forgiving, and remember that snoring is not done intentionally. In all honesty, Step 1 is really a waste of time, except to enjoy some martinis and whatever else may follow.
  2. The cough, the sneeze and the sigh. If you’ve had your discussion and your mate is still snoring at night (he/she will be), try coughing, sneezing or sighing loudly between snores. If they are a light sleeper, this may be all you need to do to awaken them. Once awake, ask them to roll over. Sometimes a snorer will snore on one side and not on the other. And sometimes you’re out of luck and have to move on to step 3.
  3. Rustle the covers. You can also fan the covers, yank the covers, or flip the covers off the bed. This disturbance will sometimes awaken the snorer and stop their music for a few minutes – hopefully enough time for you to fall asleep.
  4. The bounce. If you are lying on your back, staring at the ceiling and counting sheep jumping over a fence, hoping this will block out the ear-splitting sound of your partner’s snoring, try the following movement instead. In your mind’s eye picture yourself leaping with the sheep. Lift your legs up high and then drop them down hard, lifting your butt off the mattress, and bounce. If this is too much effort, you can simply roll over and bounce a few times, causing the other side of the mattress – where your snorer is lying – to buckle and bounce in sync. Again, the objective is to gently, and unintentionally,awaken your mate so they stop snoring long enough for you to fall asleep.
  5. The cough, the rustle and the bounce. Step five is a transition step and the last effort before things get more physical. It involves employing steps 2, 3 and 4 simultaneously and with wild abandon. Cough-Rustle-Bounce, repeat.
  6. The nudge, the kick or the slap. Sorry folks, but lack of sleep brings people to irritable insanity. My husband actually gave me permission to go ahead with step 6. “Why don’t you just nudge me when I’m snoring?” he said. I tried to nudge him with my leg the following night but he didn’t budge, so I flicked my leg and kicked hard. Sometimes, if he’s balled up on the opposite edge of the mattress, I can’t reach him with a kick, so I’ll lie on my back and stretch my arms up and out in a sweeping circle arc and “accidentally” slap some other part of his body as my arms come down hard for a landing.
  7. The fart. This is something I learned serendipitously one night after serving baked beans for dinner. One of my less flattering traits is that I produce more gas in my intestinal tract than most people do. On one particular evening when the snoring was deafening, I felt a cluster of bubbles rumbling through my GI tract. In my sleepless state of hypertension, irritability and poor judgment, I thought to myself, “Why hold back?” It is cruel, but sometimes necessary, to use all the tricks in your bag. A few moments after I released the noxious gas, the snoring stopped, my husband awoke and began coughing and fanning the covers. I feigned my sleepy voice and asked, “What’s the matter? Was I snoring?” It was a small victory for my side.
  8. Leaving the nuptial bed. One night, I had no patience for steps 2-6 and I wasn’t feeling particularly gassy, so I simply got up and went downstairs to fall asleep on the recliner in the TV room. At 3:30 AM I awoke with a stiff back and drool dripping down my chin so I returned to the cold sheets, and miraculously, the snoring had stopped. Unfortunately, the sheets were so cold that by the time I fell asleep, my alarm went off.
  9. Leaving the nuptial bed and making some noise of my own. I’m approaching the end of the line now and sometimes steps 1-8 are ineffective and don’t give me the results I want, so I have to behave like a child and go around banging things. I start by banging the bedroom door as I stomp out. I’ll noisily empty the dishwasher or start a load of wash in the middle of the night. You can also run the vacuum cleaner, though I haven’t tried that yet. This physical outlet is healthy and actually prevents me from banging things over my husband’s head. If you have a weed whacker or a leaf blower in the garage, you might consider starting them up to do some dusting around the house.
  10. The scream. The other night I had a nightmare and was screaming in my sleep. This woke my snoring husband who nudged me to awaken me from my dream. Afterwards, I couldn’t fall asleep, so I lay awake listening to my husband nod off again, his gentle snore growing into a quiet rumble and progressing into air sucking and snorting. For once I didn’t mind the noise because my nightmare had been so frightening,  and I found comfort knowing he was sleeping there beside me. While I was lying there staring at the ceiling, I came up with a thought…Why don’t I skip steps 1-9 when the snoring gets bad and go directly to step 10 and scream? Heaven knows, that’s what I feel like doing anyway.

In the summer, when the windows are wide open, the neighbors will hear me screaming. If they peer into our bedroom window with their binoculars, they will see the blankets flapping, the mattress bouncing, my legs kicking and my arms flailing about, and they’ll think we’re pretty wild in bed together for people our age. Won’t they be envious!

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Learning About Sex And Ladybug Vaginas

Posted on March 30, 2015 by Christine Vanderberg

I learned the facts of life when I was nine years old. I was just getting over the trauma of learning that there was no Santa Claus, when I was hit on the head with this horror story as told by my friend, Susan.

It happened one lazy hot summer day, while I was sucking on the end of a piece of grass, staring up at the clouds and minding my own business…

“Bet you don’t know how babies are made,” she said, towering over me, casting a shadow across my face.

“I do so.”

“Oh, yeah? Tell me.”

“No. I don’t want to,” I said.

“That’s because you don’t know.”

And then she pointed to her crotch and said, “The man sticks his thing in here.”

“You’re disgusting!” I said. Running home at full speed, I burst through the back door, out of breath and panting. I found my mother in the kitchen, ironing my father’s shirts.

“Is it true that a man has to stick his thing in you to make a baby?” I blurted out, leaning against the wall for support.

She pressed a red button on the iron and steam hissed out. Her silence bored through me as she continued ironing, letting moments pass. The fact that she wasn’t reacting with horror, like I did, made me fear the worst – that Susan was telling the truth about the facts of life.

“Who told you this?” my mother asked, her eyes fixed on the shirt she was ironing.

“Susan.”

She turned the shirt and pressed down hard on the iron as she methodically went around the shoulder seams.

“Don’t believe everything you hear from that one,” she said, avoiding my eyes as she turned her back to me and placed the pressed shirt on a hanger.

And that’s when I knew it was true. Since I had two brothers I knew my mother had done this horrible thing with my father – three times. It was too awful to imagine.

I was changed that day. I would never again be that innocent child, minding my own business, lying in the grass, gazing into the clouds waiting for my turn at hopscotch. I knew the truth of how babies were made and I was terrified at the thought.

I can blame my traumatic awakening on the fact that reproduction was never discussed in a casual, truthful way in my home. Talk of sex when I was growing up in the early 60’s was labeled “dirty language.” Our private parts were generically called “things.” Guys had a “thing” and girls had a “thing,” and putting those two “things” together made a baby.

Today, it’s different. While coloring a picture of a ladybug at my kitchen table last year, my seven-year-old granddaughter asked me, “Grandma, do you think ladybugs have a vagina?”

I was stunned. How did my sweet young granddaughter know what a vagina was? It wasn’t until I was pregnant with my first child and sitting through that terrifying Lamaze birthing movie (I covered my eyes through most of it) that I learned the names of all the different parts that made up my female genitalia. Saying them out loud was a different story. I still have trouble with that.

“Let me think about this for a moment,” I told her, trying to remain calm and stall for time – as my mother did with her meticulous ironing when I asked her to verify my newfound knowledge of how babies were made.

I feared where this conversation might lead. How much does my granddaughter know about sexual reproduction, I wondered. It wasn’t my place to have this discussion with her, and especially at such a young age. But, I thought, if she knows what a vagina is, she’s already light years ahead of where I was at her age.

“Well, grandma?” she asked. “Do you think ladybugs have a vagina?”

Staring out the window, I continued plunging the lettuce up and down in the salad spinner and remembered some advice I had read about answering a child’s questions about sex. Don’t go into detailed explanations, it said; just answer the immediate question. I did better than that; I played to my ignorance.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Do you think ladybugs have a vagina?”

“Hmmm,” she pondered as she colored in the little black spots on the ladybug’s shell. “I think they do.”

“I do too.” To answer otherwise would have opened up a discussion I wasn’t prepared to have. And saying the word “vagina” so many times was enough of a breakthrough for me for one day.

ladybug

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What’s In A Name?

Posted on March 23, 2015 by Christine Vanderberg

We parents place such importance on naming our children. There are books we consult on the meanings of names.  There are dear friends and relatives that we  honor by naming our children after them. And then there are the nicknames that are given to us as we go through life – unique names – that most often aren’t so flattering.

My father told me about a kid in his old Brooklyn neighborhood who everyone called Joey ca-ca (from the Sicilian word cacari), because when he walked, he looked like he was carrying a load of ca-ca in his pants.

Then there was a cousin in his family named Gus. Gus wasn’t the brightest bulb, so everyone referred to him as Gus babbu. No one ever called him that to his face, of course, until my aunt slipped up one day when she answered the door announcing, “Gus babbu is here!”

I almost did the very same thing at my wedding shower when I opened a gift from “fat Mary.” You see, we had two aunts named Mary in our family: one was obese and the other was old. Because they both had the same last name, (the fat one was the older one’s daughter-in-law) the only way we could distinguish between them was to call the obese aunt “fat Mary” and the other one just plain old “Aunt Mary.”

It worked fine when their names came up in private conversations at home, and we never slipped up in person, until I opened that damn gift and someone called out, “Who gave you the soup tureen?”

Without thinking, I started to say, “It’s from F-a.a…” I caught my tongue just in time, as I looked up to see both aunts standing next to each other. I pointed to fat Mary and shouted: “It’s from the young Aunt Mary.”

My grandmother was the queen of nicknames. When she became angry with someone, she picked out the most prominent physical feature about that person and created an unflattering Sicilian nickname for them.

She had a neighbor who lived across the street from her. There was a generational age difference between the two, but both women were Sicilian and that common denominator bound them together real tight – until the neighbor got on the wrong side of my grandmother.

“She’s too bossy,” my grandmother admitted. And besides that (God, forgive me) she was incredibly terribly ugly. She had bad teeth and bad breath and came in too close when she spoke to you, sometimes spraying you with saliva. She was bruttu, as my grandmother would later describe her when the friendship was on the rocks.

Once the friendship had completely dissolved, my grandmother never referred to her ex-friend and neighbor by her real name. She was now La bedda a setti velo – the Beauty of the Seven Veils.

Salome

Another one of grandma’s friends was nicknamed– pettu rossu – big breasts, after that friendship went kaput. Setti culu –seven asses – was another woman who fell out of favorable graces with my grandmother. She also had names for some relatives who are still alive and, thus, shall not be named here.

My grandmother had a nickname for me: bedda figghia (beautiful daughter). She called me that for most of my life – until I refused to take her to Pathmark one day. Here’s how my fall from grace went down.

“Bedda figghia, you take me to Pathmark today? They have a sale on cans. I want to get some tomatoes.”

“I can’t, grandma, I’m too busy today.”

“Bedda figghia, the cans are ten for $1. You take me; I’ll buy you some cans.”

“I can’t, grandma; not today.”

– Silence –

“You no take me today?”

“No.”

– More Silence –

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

She never called me bedda figghia again, and I’m sure I had a new nickname from that day forward.

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Is This Fish Fresh?

Posted on March 16, 2015 by Christine Vanderberg

I have been trying to cook more fish these days. When I do my weekly grocery shopping, I look over all the various fish displayed on ice, say eeny meeny miney moe, and pick one to make for that night. Tonight we’re having cod, and I already know the first question my husband will ask: “Is this fish fresh?”

I always answer, “yes,” because it didn’t come out of a Gorton or Mrs. Paul’s package in the frozen foods section. So what if the little signs in front of the fish say previously frozen. I’m just glad that someone else caught it, cleaned it, scaled it, chopped the head off and filleted it. It’s not cooked yet, so, to me, it’s fresh enough.

When I serve steak or pork he doesn’t ask me if the meat is freshly caught, freshly skinned or freshly butchered, so why this concern for fresh fish?

Tonight, as his fork is poised over the cooked fish on his dinner plate, before he even takes a bite, his next question will be: “Where did you buy it?” He asks this question every time I serve fish, and every time I tell him: “I bought it at King Kullen.” Every time. Same question, same answer.

Once I got annoyed at him and asked, “Why do you always ask where I got the fish? Where else would I get it? Do you think I got on a boat this morning and went fishing for it myself?”

“Well, you could have gone to B&B Fish Market. I’m sure the fish is fresher there.”

“Listen, the fish isn’t any fresher at B&B than it is at King Kullen. In the winter, all the fish we buy is previously frozen.”

“Is this fish previously frozen?” he asks. “I thought you said it was fresh.”

I don’t know why I bother to cook fish at all. It’s supposed to be good for the heart, but I get so much anxiety with all the questions and the intimation that I’m not serving something healthy for my family, that I’m better off making cheeseburgers and French fries. My husband chomps down on a cheeseburger and never asks if the cow was grain fed or pumped with antibiotics, allowed to graze free or penned up its whole life. But he wants to know if the fish is farm raised or wild, fresh or previously frozen, purchased in the grocery store or at a fish market.

One day I bought two pounds of haddock fillets from King Kullen for dinner. At 5:00 PM, as I took out the raw fish and began assembling all the ingredients I needed to cook it, my son told me he wouldn’t be home for dinner.

“Oh no!” I said, “I bought all this fish; who’s going to eat it all?”

“Why don’t you put it back in the refrigerator and cook it tomorrow? I’ll be home for dinner then,” he said.

“Are you kidding? Your father would never eat day old fish.”

“How is he going to know? Just shove it in the back of the refrigerator and tell him you bought it fresh.”

So that’s what I did. The next night we sat down to dinner, and I placed the day old, previously frozen, King Kullen grocery store fish on the table.

“What kind of fish is this?” my husband asked.

“It’s haddock.”

“Is it fresh?”

I swallowed hard. “Of course.”

He brought his fork up to his mouth for a taste and paused, asking, “Where did you get it?”

“B&B Fish Market. I got it this morning – fresh.”

“Mmmm,” he said, taking a taste. “I can tell.”

“Really?”

“Yes!  I can tell the difference.  This fish is so flavorful!  It’s the best fish you’ve ever made!”

 

dead-20fish-jpg

 

 

 

 

 

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