The Best Kept Secret Blog - He Shoots, He Snores

I love my husband, I really do.

But as I lay here on the sofa at three in the morning, there are a few choice phrases going through my head and “I love you honey” isn’t one of them.

I’m here because “Honey’s” snoring is keeping me awake. A dilemma that I know is shared by many of my friends. And we all have our strategies when dealing with the problem.

“I pray I can fall asleep before he does,” shares M. “He doesn’t know this but a little trick I have is to give him regular coffee but tell him its decaf. Works like a charm.

"Oh sure, he occasionally questions me but I just murmur something like, ‘Poor baby, you’re under so much stress at work.’ It’s enough to convince him that there’s nothing wrong with the coffee. He just rants about being over worked and underpaid.”

My approach is less backhanded. I simply roll my guy onto his side. The problem is, after years of sleeping that way, he’s developing a few issues with his shoulder and his shape is morphing into something vaguely resembling The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

But at least I’m gentle, unlike my friend H. “I gave up rolling him over years ago. I just elbow him in the ribs until he wakes up. Then I yell at him to stop snoring.” (Did I mention that H. has a little anger management issue?)

If I must be perfectly honest, it’s not just the snoring that’s keeping me awake. At midlife, there are all sorts of things that are turning my friends and I into nocturnal creatures. In fact, a poll by The National Sleep Foundation found that 40 percent of menopausal women suffer from some type of sleep problem.

It’s one of life’s little ironies. When you finally get to the stage in life where there are no more nursing babies, toddler’s climbing into bed with you after a bad dream or school age children that go puke in the night, you’re hit with night sweats, “anxious” bladders, and worries about why the heck your teenage daughter isn’t home from that party yet.

Some professionals hypothesize that the infamous menopausal mood swings we hear so much about don’t really exist. Rather, we’re just a group of sleep-deprived women desperate for some shuteye.

At the end of the night, though, what can a woman do? I for one am not ready for separate bedrooms yet and do I really want to force my partner to have the special operation that his friend V. had? The one that was supposed to fix the snoring problem? The one that V. describes as having the Roto Rooter man remove a hairball from a clogged drainpipe only the drainpipe is your nose?

I know that somehow it will work out in the end. And in fact, there’s already a glimmer of hope. I was just reading somewhere that many women start snoring for the first time around the menopause transition.

Ahhh, sweet revenge.