Sleepless Dreams

11:00pm By the time my husband and I arrived home from a friend's party last night, the tension was so thick between us, I didn't have the wearwithall to attempt to machete through it, so I simply put the kids in bed and retired myself for the evening. He, apparently, found it necessary to stay up late extricating the new computer software which can now merge all our bills and pay them online. By the time I shut Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography by David Shields, my eyes were so heavy with sleep, I hardly noticed the office light still blazing on into the darkness beneath my door.

4:30am I rolled over to find myself starkly alone. His half, still cold with the night air, jarred me awake right in the mist of a dream in which my husband admitted to kissing another woman. This too-real dream, along with my empty bed, refused to allow me to tenderly drift back off into a peaceful sleep. After lying there for nearly an hour, I sat up and saw the light still penetrating through the crack of my closed bedroom door.

5:30am I shuffled down the stairs carefully feeling my way down the dark hallway. I walked into the office squinting at the man I've known for the last 10 years, sat down on the chair next to him at the desk, looked him square in the eye and asked, "I want to ask you something, do you promise to tell me the truth?" Avoiding the temptation to laugh, he looked past my frumpy pink p.j.'s, my frizzy hair atop my head in a bun, and ignoring my morning breath--he somehow must have picked up on the estranged way I spoke and the panic in my eyes. He looked directly at me and said "OK, I promise."

7:00am I tried to roll over but found his arms still wrapped tight around my body. I was uncomfortable and wanted to move over to my side of the bed, but instead I laid there quietly and reminded myself how blessed I was because I was the one being held...