A Little Mischief in my Wake

We have all suffered the endless night; tossing and turning, watching the hours tick by minute by minute.  For me, this happens most frequently on those occasions when I must awaken especially early, as I did this morning to catch our return flight home from Italy. 

The 5:00am wake-up time does not seem that extreme, unless you consider that I have been living 6 hours ahead of my body clock for ten days.  I never really adjusted to the European time difference.  I blame the blogs for this—having to write for an hour or so each evening, and then wake early to post them each morning on Facebook.  I suppose having two college kids is a contributor as well, as mine are divided between east and west coasts.  Most mornings during our trip I was treated to a barrage of text messages from our progeny who, rather disconcertingly, had yet to go to bed from the night before. 

But besides the blogs, the kids, and the occasional annoying email—each enough to prevent deep REM cycles—I am most plagued by the unnatural distrust of my wake up management system.  When you have an early morning international flight, you simply must get up.  There is such a heavy penalty for failure that it is not an option.  This is why I require a fail-safe system with overkill squared.  I set alarms on both my cell phone and my husband’s—5 minutes apart—and also request a wake-up call from the hotel.  But this is not enough.  The phones must be positioned on the other side of the room, requiring that I get out of bed to shut them off.  This lowers (but does not eliminate) the possibility of falling back to sleep.  And even after checking and double checking that they are set properly, I still get out of bed several times during the night to check that I did not inadvertently switch them off while checking them earlier.

My diligence is never rewarded with prolonged or restful slumber.  When I actually succeed in drifting off, I awake in 15-minute increments.  I check for indicators that the power has not failed silently during the night—usually by leaving a light on in the bathroom to give off a telltale glow through the crack in the door.  Normally during these painfully long nights I regret the last post-apocalyptic television show I watched (Revolution comes to mind). 

There have been several incidents that have brought me to my current level of insane wake-up paranoia.  I once fell asleep studying late into the night for a final, awaking with the morning sun and dashing in slept-in hair and wrinkled clothes to the exam.  Only days after my son was born, my husband traveled alone to a close friend’s wedding.  He never received the hotel’s promised wake up call and missed the nuptials completely.  My poor son had an alarm malfunction before his very first college midterm, arriving too late to be admitted to the room.  (Never fear; that one had a happy ending.)  Once, with his cell phone on silent, he missed his 4am alarm and the 4:30 taxi that was to take him to the airport for his winter break trip home.

For years I traveled for business, hopping early morning flights to westward time zones, trying to arrive at clients’ offices by start of business.  Without fail, I would toss and turn before those flights, waking again and again in anticipation of the alarm.  I would always make it to those appointments, but I am sure that restless lifestyle took years off my life.

It was a familiar scene last night as I booby-trapped the hotel room with my wake-up devices.  My husband no longer attempts to dissuade me from my system.  It works well, even if he does shake his head and chuckle to himself.  After all, he is able to sleep like a baby, knowing that he has the most effective alarm system ever invented at his disposal—me.