Blanket Wars

One of the most asked questions a divorcee is asked by single members of the opposite sex is “what were the reasons for your divorce?” So, when first asked this question I took some time and delved deeply into my past in search of answers. Thirty seconds later, I discovered the cause for my divorce: men and women are not compatible bedroom buddies.

You see, when I “hit the sack,” I very sloppily throw the covers backward (almost completely off the bed), pirouette into a back flop, and fall onto the mattress. Once in bed, I toss and turn, flip-flop, and wiggle around until I’m comfortable. Of course, this puts the bedding in disarray, but that’s not a problem. I can sleep like that.

On the other hand, former wife had a completely different approach for getting into bed. Inevitably, after I performed my nightly ritual and was almost unconscious to the world, she’d come into the bedroom, cut on the light, which seemed brighter than the landing lights of a jumbo jet, and proceed to straighten and de-wrinkle the bedding. This, of course, rolled me in every direction on the mattress one can imagine.

Now, as she tucked the bedding back under the mattress, former wife would lecture me on the proper way to enter a bed. What? Like the good housekeeping fairy was going to sneak in at night and grade us on how neat our bedding looked after we’d crawled into it?

And Heaven help me if former wife daintily got into bed ahead of me. Waking her up with my back-flop-drop and my tossing and turning was worthy of a penalty too torturous to mention.

During a good chunk of our marriage, we lived in the Rocky and Ozark Mountains. Winter temperatures could be brutal, and the fact that my body produced little heat and hers put out more heat than a Dutch oven, didn’t make things any easier.

You see, it always took me a while to get warm when I slept. So at bedtime, I’d pile on the blankets. But sometime during the night my body’s thermostat would kick in and, in my sleep, I’d kick all of the blankets off of me. And the blankets I kicked off never seemed to find their way to the floor. No, they ended up on former wife. A few hours later, feeling as if she were about to have a heat stroke, she’d throw the blankets back onto me. Once again, I’d overheat and the blankets would get kicked back in her direction, and so it went all night long.

Of course, this worked in the reverse. If for some reason we didn’t have enough blankets on the bed to keep us warm, I was known to steal the blankets off former wife as I tossed and turned in my sleep. She would wake up near dawn with icicles hanging from her eye lashes and frost on her teeth, chattering the accusation that I was a sadistic, evil person who loved to see her suffer.

I must say, we’d tried everything we could think of to solve the war of the blankets, including an electric blanket. The first night we used it, I turned the control for my side of the blanket up three or four notches, but the blanket didn’t get very warm. In fact, it seemed that the higher I cranked the control the cooler the blanket would get. At one point during the night, I had the heat control set so high my side of the blanket should’ve been hot enough to defrost a frozen adult buffalo. But nooooo, the opposite was true! It was as if I hadn’t turned on the electric blanket at all, and I began wondering if we hadn’t wasted our money on the darn thing.

The next morning, ex-wife mentioned that the blanket had a heck of a thermostat. When she crawled into bed that night, she had set her control to the lowest number for heat. Still, within a couple of hours she was so hot she was drenched in sweat, so she cut off her side of the blanket altogether, but it continued baking her like a roast. Well, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what had happened; we’d plugged the controls in backward. My control was connected to her side of the blanket and her control was connected to mine.

But even after we straightened out that problem, we found ourselves right back in the blanket war. As usual, I’d warm up as the night went on, and in my sleepy stupor, instead of turning down the heat on my side, I’d kick the blanket off, which of course landed on former wife.
Eventually, she’d throw it back on me and then I'd throw it back on her, around and around we'd go.

You know, during 20 years of blanket wars, we never did find a solution to the problem. Well, actually, I take that back. We did find a solution—sleeping single in a double bed.