Pillow Fight

I haven’t been sleeping well lately.  It’s not the warm weather – I lived in South Africa for fourteen years and carried a monster baby through several months of an extremely hot summer, so the occasionally sticky night doesn’t bother me.  It’s not the mattress: we bought one of those foam topper things and it’s fabulous; no more waking up and finding myself impaled on a spring making a bid for freedom.  I think it’s the pillows.  It’s time we had some new ones, but we spent all our money on mattress toppers and chocolate (the Hub didn’t know that last bit until just now).

There’s one pillow I won’t part with: I sleep clutching a feather pillow for support, otherwise I wake up in a foetal position with back ache.  Last time I did that it was because the Hub had taken away my pillow so that he could get into bed: I have a habit of taking up the middle ground in my sleep.  One night he came to bed to find me occupying three-quarters of it, but he gamely tried to get in.  I must have stirred like a dog guarding a bone because he touched my pillow and I distinctly recall the malice with which I snatched my pillow to me and flung myself over onto my other side.  Semi-conscious, I remember lying there needing to go to the toilet but not getting up because I wasn’t letting him get his hands on my pillow.  I can recall how aggressive I felt: poor darling, he could feel it radiating from me.  After what felt like an hour of my bladder impersonating a leaky dam, I suddenly had the answer; it was obvious: I took my pillow to the bathroom with me.  I can’t imagine why I hadn’t thought of it earlier. 

I don’t remember getting back into bed but the Hub tells me he couldn’t sleep because he was shaking with laugher.  He says that at one point I turned over in my sleep but left my pillow there and clasped it to my back with my arm uncomfortably behind me.   Conscious or not, my husband wasn’t getting hold of my pillow.  He won’t want it now, anyway: it’s covered in toilet germs.