Insomnia

...the master shower has been unavailable for the past few months, so for a shower, Lucy and I have to use the guest bathroom.

So my alarm goes off and I’m on autopilot, grab some clothes and head to the shower. But something is off. So I turn around and Lucy isn’t in bed. Diego is fast asleep. She’s in the bathroom, I think, but a quick check under the door tells me, nope, she’s not there.

Now, this is surprising for one reason alone: Diego isn’t fussing that she isn’t there. Normally, when Lucy is gone for a millisecond, Diego usually senses a disturbance in the force. Not now. He’s knee deep in dreaming of whatever babies dream of--

So I go in search of my wife and turns out she’s in our shared office watercoloring. Lucy has taken that up in recent months.

Turns out, she’s been up all night. A bad case of insomnia. We chat for awhile. A good chat, but then I start getting ready for work.

Our first job was kinda of weird. We had to stop at a house to pick up a bed. The house was in central Austin and had a studio in the back and even from the windows I could tell it belonged to a painter. I could see the back of the frames.

There was this elderly lady that had trouble speaking.

While there, they told us to pick up this bed that belonged to a day bed along with the frame sans the pull out bed. The mattress weighed next to nothing. Then came the frame and this lady she stood there in this tight space as we tried to pick up the metal frame. We almost bumped into her a couple of times and I asked her politely if she’d like to move. Nope. She just stood there.

We loaded up the bed and the frame and went to our next stop. Well, that same lady was there. I later found out she was the wife of the guy we were moving. He wasn’t there, because he wasn’t happy about moving, so they kept him away.

The wife communicated as best she could with us to tell us what of her husbands was going to his new place and what was being sent off to storage, our third stop on this move.

Again, there was a few times, she was in the way. I have serious issue with this, because it would be bad form to hit or bump a customer while moving.

When we got to her husband’s new apartment, she told us, again in this sort of mumbling, where she wanted everything to go.

Now, her Sister in Law, who was there to help, and was really diving the move, told her to stay at her husband’s new home, instead of going to the storage facility. She was having none of it and there wasn’t a lot of resistance from her sister in law.

Our client’s wife met us at the storage facility where we met her son, who opened up the storage, and was instructing us where to put the remainder of his belongings.

And it was during that, I caught the son, telling his mom that she was needed back at her husband’s living facility and they were waiting for her.

Again, she was having none of it, and again, got in the way as we stacked everything into storage.

She finally left after we were all done.

All I know is that it’s very rare now, in this time I’ve been alive to be there for someone through thick and thin. To see the job through.

It’s nice to see every now and then as a reminder and the hope, that someday, either that will done for me, or I will do that for someone.

Especially when they can’t sleep.