ghosts in the night

eric woke me up in the middle of the night two night ago. on purpose.

maybe you don't realize what a weighty statement that is. sleep is precious and I need a lot of it. not in a "oh, I really enjoy a good night's slumber" kind of way. more like "if you expect me to be a functional human being, I need a good solid seven hours. and if you want me to be nice to you, better make it eight and a half." and waking me up in the middle of the night is no easy task. I am a babbler prone to long conversations I don't remember at all the next day. or I am overly emotional in a way that is not at all comfortable to my audience. it's really not pretty, either way.

sleep is not something we take lightly here at mudflower. we worked for years (years!) to perfect our bedtime routine for the kids. jamin didn't sleep through the night until he was about four, and I am not exaggerating. combine that fact with a mama who desperately needs her shut eye and you'll know why I don't remember much of my life from 2008-2012. seriously.

eric's relationship with sleep is a mystery to me. he needs much less of it than I do, for starters. he is up late into the night puttering around doing goodness knows what. and it is not unusual for him to lie awake for hours just running things over in his brain. when I can't sleep like that it is a sign that something is very wrong in my life. for eric, that's just the way it goes.

so two nights ago, eric was puttering and saw something that just couldn't wait until morning. I can imagine him weighing the consequences while standing on the deck: waking me up could mean a grouchy grump of a wife or a tearful incoherent one, hard to guess which. but what he had to show me was worth it he must have decided. because at 11:44 he gently shook my shoulder. "the blue ghosts are back. come see."

national geographic gets credit for this one.

there is nothing predictable in my story with eric. we've done everything out of order and unconventionally and none of it has turned out even close to the way I thought it would. there have been big adventures and huge heartbreaks and long stretches of "what the heck are we doing with our lives." I found an old shoebox of letters this summer full of mementos of our first year together, letters he would write to me from school where he sat next to behaviorally disruptive kids just waiting for them to, well, disrupt. and I can gush about how far we've come, how much we've done, but what amazes me even more is how much is exactly the same. how waking me up in the middle of the night is worth it because he wants to share his life with me. how sharing something with me makes his own experience even more enjoyable. how we can revel together in the simplest of joys. how we just keep finding miracles to celebrate, right under our noses.

they weren't actually blue ghosts. it's the wrong time of year for them to make an appearance, and I am not sure what those little glows really were, but that hardly matters. especially when you are standing under the stars with the one you love best watching a firefly display like you've never seen. these are the realest of love stories, the ones that matter most and last the longest, the ones worth getting out of bed for.

as long as when we get back in the bed, you let me put my cold feet on you, of course.