The divorceworthy incident of the booklight in the nighttime.

I’m always floored when other people tell me they don’t fight much with their spouses. “Oh, you know us,” a female friend will say. “We don’t argue so much as silently agree to disagree.”

“Huh,” I’ll murmur, trying to summon up an image of such a harmonized marital existence, a coupling rife with his-and-hers monogrammed towels and maybe matching warm-up suits, royal blue and striped down the right leg.

Adam and I argue about most everything, albeit usually good-naturedly. We seem to thrive on disagreement, competition, and besting each other in the comeback department. In other words, the ideal environment in which to raise a child.

Twenty years from now, when Aura invites us to her therapy sessions, I sense that the family dynamic might be portrayed as askew. “But, honey!” we’ll say, our disbelief nearly tangible. “Our need to disagree on all principals, morals, and brands of Thai hot sauce had everything to do with US and not you, sweetie!”

Happily, there is one area of disagreement to which Aura is not privy, simply because she is asleep when the argument begins: The Fight Over the Booklight. Adam gave me a booklight for my last birthday (a romantic gesture rivaled only by the pregnancy pillow he gifted to me on our first wedding anniversary). It’s one of those little goosenecky LED things, otherwise known as a piece of crap. Here, I don’t even have to draw it:

There was not a shred of thoughtfulness in this gift. I was only given this gift because Adam has some kind of mental and potentially psychologically revealing block against me reading in bed when he is trying to sleep. Normal bedside lamps? TOO BRIGHT. Often, they are BLINDING, EVEN.

It matters not if I put the bedside lamp on the floor, then kind of lie halfway out of bed, angling my book toward the weak glow and developing permanent vertigo. It also matters not that Adam is capable of passing out cold in front of a blaring television under the glare of the overhead living room light. BEDSIDE LAMPS ARE THE DEVIL’S WORK, and, for the record, ALMOST AS BAD AS COOL WHIP AND GUY FIERI.

The most infuriating part of the whole thing is that the booklight doesn’t even work. I mean, it works, I guess, but not in any kind of impressive way. The gooseneck is all floppy and the clip is too wide for my Kindle yet too thin for a hardcover book. To add insult to injury, Adam now claims that even the booklight is too bright, so I am forced to use it under the duvet.

There I lie, the booklight slipping off my book, beads of sweat making their way down my forehead and plopping wetly onto the pages. It’s…horrible. It’s gotten so bad that I return my library books under the cover of night, when I can just slip the sweat-upon-and-then-dried-so-that-the-pages-are-suspiciously-warped-and-maybe-kind-of-crunchy books into the box outside the library, rather than face the librarians.

Huh. Rereading this, I’m thinking that maybe Aura won’t have to talk to her therapist about her parents’ arguments. Perhaps instead she can just talk about their MARITAL SEPARATION.