I am currently thirty-five weeks pregnant, and every single night has become a grueling physical battle for even a few minutes of peace. My back feels like it is breaking, my feet are swollen to the size of watermelons, and the baby seems to think my ribs are a soccer goal. At this stage, sleep is no longer a simple habit; it is a desperate, elusive necessity. Last night, after hours of shifting pillows and trying to find a position that didn’t result in immediate heartburn, I finally drifted into a deep sleep around three-thirty in the morning.
Then, at precisely five-fifteen, a hand began shaking my shoulder aggressively. I jolted awake, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. My immediate thought was that something was terribly wrong—that the house was on fire, or perhaps the baby was coming early. I squinted through the darkness at my husband. He wasn’t looking at me with concern or love. He looked completely and utterly irritated.
“You are snoring,” he said, his voice sharp with annoyance. “It is incredibly loud and it is bugging me. Can you stop?”
I sat there in the dark, stunned into a heavy silence. I am carrying a literal human being inside of me. My lungs are compressed, my diaphragm is being crushed, and my nasal passages are perpetually inflamed thanks to pregnancy hormones. I had finally managed to find ninety minutes of rest after days of bone-deep exhaustion, and he woke me up—a woman in her third trimester—because he was mildly inconvenienced by the sound of my breathing.
“You woke me up for that?” I managed to whisper, my voice thick with a mixture of disbelief and a rising, volcanic rage.
He seemed surprised that I was angry, but the audacity was staggering. He, a fully capable adult, could have moved to the guest room or the couch if my breathing was too loud for his liking. Instead, he chose to wake the one person who is physically incapable of controlling the symptom.
“If you ever wake me up for that again,” I told him, my voice cold and steady, “you are sleeping in the garage.”
He stayed in the bed, huffing as if he were the aggrieved party, while I lay there for the rest of the night, the adrenaline and anger making it impossible to return to sleep. The irony? Now he is the one snoring, drifting right back off while I sit here fuming. Marriage is about compromise, but right now, my only compromise is not throwing his pillow out the window. I am wondering how I will make it through the next five weeks without a permanent room separation. He needs to learn that my comfort is not secondary to his convenience before this baby actually arrives.
