My Mom’s Ridiculous Sayings. Part 1

When I was a kid my mom used to put me to bed by saying, “Good-night, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite”... Bed bugs?  I think this is what started my insomnia.

I would lie awake imagining all sorts of possible scenarios that included a wide variety of mattresses turning into bugs, much like the asshole typewriters of William S. Burroughs, and, sometimes even a chair or sofa cushion style bug. They all had sharp, gnashing teeth and were on the hunt for little girls like me.

Of course, I also imagined actual bugs, the thought of which was far more terrifying than a mattress that turned into a bug, mostly because they were small and unseen in the dark. At least if my mattress became a giant, snapping monster bug it would wake me up! My imaginings took me to bugs of all sizes and shapes, with hidden little teethies that packed a big punch. Some crawled slowly on me as I slept, some traveled in giant packs or swarms and smothered me in my sleep; some swarms covered me like a blanket and held me down as I wriggled to get free. The bugs would bite me all over with their Drauculian teeth, or burrow under my skin and bite me from the inside like that internal itch on your kidney or rib cage that you can never reach but never stops itching.

All night I would spend imagining the horrors of bugs lining up to take a bite out of me, and what the results might be when they did. And, usually somewhere in my terror of awakeness that turned into nightmares of bugs or of becoming a bug myself, or of being bitten by my mattress, I would hear a voice and feel a warmth and realize, in my struggling, aching exhaustion, that my mother was now saying “Rise and shine!” or “Good morning, merry sunshine!”, which I thought was a nickname for me: Mary Sunshine, and I took it as sarcasm since, after the night I’d just had, I was far less than sunny…