Waking up with Carl Jung, or Why I Hate our Mattress

Have you ever made a very expensive purchase only to find out later that it was bad and wrong? Call to mind, if you would, the costliest shitty purchase you've ever made and meditate on it. Then leave me a comment and tell me what it was because it might make me feel better about the mattress we bought in Florida.

My husband and I bought our Marriage Bed, the most symbolic of symbols, from a Sears in Pensacola, Florida. We weren't exactly using spare twenties to light the grill, so the fact that thing was over a grand (or, as I called it at the time, "a THOWsand fucking DOLLARS?!") was kind of a big deal. But it was supposed to be top of the line, and when it came to a bed, our collective reasoning took on my dad's slow, measured West Texas tones: "On a deal like this, what you're payin' for is quality."

What we were paying for, it turns out, was a bed with all the lush firmness and support of a wet graham cracker. In the space of one year, my husband and I wore two deep body-shaped grooves into the mattress that no amount of turning, rotating, or acrobatic sleep poses would remedy. Did we sleep that whole year, only rising to empty our bladders and bowels and eat quick handfuls of pound cake? Are we massive humans with leaden limbs who sleep in one corpse-like pose all night? And what does it mean on a Jungian level that our Marriage Bed has aged so quickly?

These were the thoughts spinning through my head at 4:52 this morning, which has got to be the hour that God takes off for smoke break because it's desolate and miserable and if you happen to be lying there in incredible back pain, praying doesn't help. I even tried seeing some advantage in sinking forever into a Rachel-shaped hole in my mattress-- it could be like those trick books where people cut out the shape of a revolver from the pages and hide the gun inside. You could make the bed right over me and I could pop out and surprise everyone. Or rather, slowly and painfully creak out and bitch at everyone. The background music to these thoughts went, "a THOWsand fucking DOLLARS, a THOWsand fucking DOLLARS..."

My husband, ever practical, doesn't even think about what Carl Jung would say about our mattress. Instead, he stumbled out of bed this morning after getting an earful of my neurotic
growling and went straight to see what Sears' warranty website had to say. Now an added perk of the Mystery Move Reality Show is that we'll be taking the mattress back and hoping to see our money again.