Climbing in Bed

So Lynnette and I had girl time today. In the afternoon we were at home with the baby taking turns during the meltdowns. When Sam returned from work, he graciously took in the little bundle of spit-up and sent us off to dinner. More Girl Time! And over blackened Salmon and beer. Nice.

So I'm laying in my bed, having just finished watching Love Actually with Lynnette (one of our favorite movies), and I have half an instinct to whisper up to her bedroom to see if she wants to come crawl in bed with me. In the old days of apartments and college dormatories, bunking in another friends bed was the norm. If I couldn't sleep or was a little nervous, I'd go sneak quietly into Brooke's room, careful not to wake Colie; Brooke without even needing to ask would pull back the covers and whisper in her oh so tired morning voice (except that it wasn't morning yet), "get in." And Cat. When we lived together she had a huge queen bed and i had a little twin. Climbing in bed with Cat was much less of a maternal sleeping relationship, it was on the other hand much more a slumber party, and usually involved a giggling session that inevitably began right before the other dropped off to sleep. They'd subside, and then a few minutes later the giggles would usually start up again. It was like slumber partying with your sister. And then there was Julie's bed: Cuddle Island we called that. Where the women would come when they needed to be loved, to be cuddled, to hold that ratty old teddy bear of hers or was that Lisa's old bear? Who knows. One could end up on Cuddle Island due to some late night drama with a boyfriend or maybe over some existential question for a paper you couldn't quite finish. So you slipped on tennis shoes with your jammies and headed over to Cuddle Island.

I know, girls are weird. We sleep with one another. In the same beds. And we play with each other's hair and scratch each others backs and sometimes sing in bed or laugh in bed or do our nails in bed, but eventually we sleep. Eventually the reason we have crawled into each others beds is to sleep... in company. In community. For all our faults of nitpicking against each other and fighting one other in the men's world to get ahead, we do get one part of community right. That is, when we find women we love and cherish as sisters, we sleep with them. We crawl into the sacred bed that is usually reserved for our husbands or the husbands we plan to one day have, and we share all our intimate fears and joys together, under the covers, whispering, or with the covers pulled up to our chins as we stare at the night sky wondering if from it we will find our answers.

But ultimately, I think we find our answers with each other. And just to make sure, we climb into each other's beds and sleep next to our sisters and know that even if we don't find all those answers or heal all that heartache, at least we have each other. And while those beds will all probably be (and in many cases already have been) filled later with men, right now they are the beds of the sacred sisterhood of sleeping.

Cause sometimes the Sandman needs a little help getting started.