I hate sleeping in a messy bed.

My kids are all starfish.  Give them the open space of a queen sized mattress and suddenly even the smallest body can take up a huge amount of space.  Blankets, rearranged and flung.  Pillows, piled and folded.  All three of them have been this way as long as they've been alive.  Waking up with one of them in my bed is like waking up in the aftermath of a hurricane...no disrespect intended.

Me, I'm a self-hugger.  I can get into a fully made bed, corners folded in precise military-style, all pillows fluffed, down comforter puffy...and ten hours later it would look like only the furthest left side seven inches of the bed had been mussed.  One indentation in my pillow.    The entire other side of the bed is completely undisturbed.  I've suffered from chronic nightmares all my life, but I sit straight up when I wake up with the horrors, and I flop straight back down again to drop back into the same horrible dream.  The bed is always neat when I wake up by myself, no matter how bad a night I might have had.

About a year ago, sleepily cuddled up to my boyfriend, he told me the Life Changing Story of the Linen Revolution.  I share this only because I'm sure that it's still an underground movement, not known to many outside of our speshul snowflayke circle.  It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he is a Flailer, a Spinner, a determined Twister and Usurper of blankets and sheets, especially fitted ones.

Our bed linens have been oppressed for thousands of years.  Pinstripes, paisleys, patterns, nay, seams, edges, the very corners of our coverings, all contribute to the unwitting conspiracy to enslave them, to force our linens to lie from head to foot on our beds, to keep our pillows fluffed and arranged, to make them conform to our ways.  It was a surprise to me, that morning, lying in a Saturday stupor and wanting him to just shut up and either go back to sleep or get out of bed and make me some tea, to understand that I was perhaps unwittingly partaking of the enslavement of an entire race of linens.  Thus was born the Linen Revolution.  And, my boyfriend solemnly told me, he was an ambassador of the linens, spoke to others of their oppression, and in support of their solidarity. He said, I try wherever possible to give them their freedom, to permit striped patterns to be diagonal instead of north-south or east-west, to allow paisleys to be upside down, to allow pillows to fold in half and fitted sheets to explore the middle of the bed.

And then?

And then....

And then I said, f*ck it.   I WANT to oppress the sheets.  I LIKE it when they stay fitted over the mattress corners.  I PREFER it when the comforter isn't balled up and hoarded under someone's knees.  I ENJOY having at least two pillows to myself, with the pillows straight inside the case and not twisted or bunched up or flattened.  I am an oppressor, dammit.

So...every other morning b/f gets up before me.  I sleepily flail about for ten minutes trying to make the covers go the right ways and the sheets to cover the mattress while I'm getting those last few minutes in bed, and eventually he brings me tea...better tea than I make myself, soaked with milk and honey.  Alternate mornings I get up and make black-as-night coffee for him, while he makes a gigantic cocoon of EVERYFUCKINGthing that's on the bed and sleeps soundly through me bringing him a hot beverage and getting dressed to go to work.

I very rarely get a night in my bed all to myself, and I always think I will enjoy it more than I ever do.  I'm not a Linen Freedom Fighter...but everyone I sleep with IS, and it's less restful than you'd think, waking up alone in a neat bed.