pet connection

Three major problems I have with sleeping in:

Born on a farm/ranch – I grew up on a small family farm/ranch in southern Idaho (where the famous potatoes are raised). We had dairy and beef cattle, chickens, pigs, sheep, horses, and of course, dogs and cats. Because the cows always need to be milked at the same time, because the water needed changed on our crops, because there was always too much work to do, my three brothers and sisters and I always had to get up before the roosters crowded to get our chores done.

I wasn’t one of those people who sprang out of bed when the alarm went off, so my Mom had a sequential method of getting my feet on the floor and out the door. First, Mom would do a knock on the door. If that didn’t work, she’d follow by opening the door and hollering. Finally, if five minutes had passed and she knew I wasn’t up, she’d come tromping down the hallway and into my room, hold a glass of water above my head and threaten to pour. Yes, if I didn’t get up by the count of 10, she’d let some of it drip onto my face, and I’d reluctantly get up, muttering and sputtering. Did any of your moms pull the water torture on you? In my adult life, because of my rural upbringing and the early routines that were set for me, if I don’t get up early and start working, I feel like I’m letting somebody down.

My prostate and bladder – I used to travel a lot with my father-in-law and best friend, Jim Burkholder. He was born in 1920 (I was born in 1954), so when I first married Teresa in my mid-20′s, he was over 50. In the hotels we stayed at, he’d always have to get up to go the bathroom in the middle of the night and his rustling around would wake me up.

One day, tired of this “NO-Doze” routine, I asked him, implored him really, “Jim, why don’t you just hold it until morning!” Jim simply replied, “You just wait.” That was it. Fast-forward 20 years later and my bladder suddenly got smaller while my prostate got bigger. Between the two, now I was the one getting up and it was my kids who shared a hotel room with me that were saying, “Dad, why don’t you just hold it until morning!”

Four-legged bedmates – Enter the cliche, “The Perfect Storm.” It’s around 3 a.m. My adolescent internal alarm clock is rumbling. My grape-sized bladder is swelling. And pets have already got me trapped in a semi-paralytic state on the edge of the bed. I’m riding the ridge between still sleeping and waking up. One side of my brain says, “Get up, go the bathroom and come back to bed, no biggie.”

But the logic side of my brain counters with, “Sure, go ahead and get up and go the bathroom, but when you come back to bed, that depression you left in the pillow-top-mattress will be filled with a pile-o-pets that has collapsed into the warm depression you left, and you won’t have anyplace to sleep. And as any pet owner who shares the bed with four-legged bed hogs knows, you can’t just come back to bed and shove them out of the way — like you would your human bed partner in a millisecond — because the poor little things have only slept 18 out of the last 24 hours and we don’t want to interrupt their beauty sleep!

So night after night, my bladder and my brain compete to see who wins out. Typically the pets “rest” while I “rise.” At 4:55 a.m. PT today to be exact.

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