What Would You Do For A Good Night’s Sleep?

My husband, John, & I had been saving up for a new bed for a very long time. Poor John had been sleeping on the couch for some time because our old bed was just intolerable to him. We’d thought about the foam beds, the air beds and the pillow tops. But we finally decided what we really wanted was a softside waterbed.

What made us choose that? Well, when I was twelve years old I went to a chiropractor once who told me the very best bed for your back is a waterbed. Now, I won’t argue the truth or mythology of that. I’m just saying–those things make an impression upon you. The problem with waterbeds is that to me, they are just awful. I have slept on them a few times in my life. I always hated it. I’m a wiggler while I’m sleeping and the times that I slept on the waterbed I felt like I was trying to sleep on a air lounge in the middle of a pool, only it was dryer and darker and didn’t smell of chlorine. John had almost exactly the same opinion and experience with them. A regular waterbed was out of the question. The search continued.

Almost twenty years ago, when I was pregnant with my first child, I had spent the night with a family friend and slept on her softside waterbed. Our friend, Lena, had unzipped the top from the mattress and showed me the tubes inside. How neat! I remember that night as one of the all-time greatest nights sleep I have ever had in my life. As luck would have it, John had also slept on a softside waterbed many years ago and loved it as much as I did. We had made our decision!

After ordering the bed, it took a month for it to get to us. But that is another story. The truck drivers brought the bed and unpacked it in our living room. We had to assemble it ourselves. Once you have to assemble one of these things you learn just how committed you are to sleeping well. I was thrilled that my husband already had the frame, foundation and mattress shell set up when I got home from work that day. All we had to do was fill up the tubes.

After a couple of false starts, we developed a system that made the job go a little easier. At first, we tried to make sure the tubes all had the same amount of water, but that got tedious very fast! By the time we made it to the other side of the bed and filled up the tenth tube we had decided that any amount of water was fine. We were tired! So, after making sure all the tubes were securely closed, we wiped down the inside with a towel and zipped up the pillow top.

I climbed up onto my side of the bed and stretched out. I thought I had died and gone to the morgue, because it felt like I was sleeping on a slab! I was astonished that mere water could create such an unyielding surface. I rolled over onto John’s side which we had filled up first. It was a little softer than my side, but still pretty hard. Still, as hard as it was, there was something eerily and fascinatingly comfortable about it. It felt good and I didn’t want to get up.

We slept on it that night as it was. It was after nine o’clock that evening and we didn’t want to bother with it anymore. I slept great! But it was still too hard. The next evening after work, I got a trash can and emptied a quart or two of water out of each of the tubes on my side of the bed. John waited until the following night to do the tubes on his side. We discovered then that neither of us had wanted to claim the two tubes in the middle of the bed, so there was what felt like an iron post running the entire length of the bed. But, the next night, we drained those, too.

We have been sleeping on the bed for a couple of weeks now. After the third night I stopped asking myself if it was worth all the money, the wait, the aggravation and the work. It was. I am sleeping and dreaming. I still don’t want to get up.

Cassandra Hall

Contributing Editor

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 4:48 am and is filed under Home And Garden Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.