Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [60]
This was the first time I thought, This seems dangerous. Maybe I should see a doctor. And then I thought, Maybe I’ll eat dinner. And I went with dinner. Partly because of my fear of doctors based on the bladder incident I explained earlier. And partly because sleepwalking is a terrifying concept. Your body is making a decision that is distinctly different from your conscious mind’s. Your conscious mind is like, We’re gonna rest for a while, and your body’s like, We’re going skiing!
Sleepwalking also involves your brain, which is a very precarious area. The list of fun and easily fixed brain diseases is very short. So I didn’t see a doctor. That’s when I bought The Promise of Sleep by Dr. Dement, who, like I said earlier, told me to turn off the news, turn off the Internet, turn off my phone, and to not eat big meals—the tetrad of my favorite pre-sleep activities. There is a lot in The Promise of Sleep about anxiety and how anxiety can be a major heightening factor with sleep issues. At this point, I was experiencing the height of my anxiety.
I was twenty-three years old and it was becoming clear that Abbie wanted to get married. I could tell because there were two shows that kept popping up on our TiVo and one was called A Wedding Story and the other was called A Baby Story. These are reality shows on the TLC network about weddings and babies. And they’re not the most exciting depictions of weddings. It’s always two people whose names have some kind of alliteration. Like, Tommy and Tammy! And they’ll ask Tommy, “Tommy, what’s your favorite thing about Tammy?”
And Tommy will say, “I saw that Tammy was beautiful on the outside and now I know that she is also beautiful on the inside.”
And they’ll ask Tammy, “Tammy, what’s your favorite thing about Tommy?”
And Tammy will say, “I didn’t know what Prince Charming was until I met Tommy and now I know what Prince Charming is.”
I’ve never seen Baby Story, but I imagine it’s a bunch of babies saying, “I didn’t know I was a baby until I was a baby and now I’m a baby.”
I knew Abbie wanted to get married and I knew my parents wanted me to get married, which was strange because it never seemed like they wanted to be married to each other. I always thought they were going to split up when I was a kid because Vince would fly off the handle suddenly and no one knew why. He’d shout something like, “Goddammit, I’m eatin’ pretzels!” And I would think, Is he angry? Is he hungry? What is the emotion being expressed?
My whole life my dad was constantly searching for the portable phone. He’d yell, “Where’s the goddamn portable phone?” My mother’s role in the household was to find the portable phone, and when I was in high school someone invented that pager function that locates the phone and I thought they’d get divorced and on the divorce papers under “reason” he’d write, “I found the phone. Goddammit!”
But they never got divorced. They’ve been married forty years.
That is too long.
If the people who invented marriage knew that people would be married for forty years, they’d be like, “This isn’t what we intended at all.” Back then, people only lived to be forty, if they were lucky. Those marriage inventors would be so confused. They’d be like, “Forty years?! When were they married? As babies? We don’t approve of babies marrying one another!”
Maybe I’m cynical but there’s a part of me that thinks that in the future, marriage will be the new divorce. People will say things like, “Yeah, I’m pretty messed up. My parents are still together.”
And you’ll say, “Wow. That sounds really hard. Is it a first marriage?” And they’ll say, “Yeah, it’s rough. I have this fear that I’ll love someone and then eventually hate them.”
I’m comfortable saying that, by the way, because it’s not just my family. I grew up in a very Catholic town where everyone was afraid to get divorced because it would reflect badly on their family. You know what else reflects badly on the family: them yelling so loud I can