Up Sheet's Creek Without a Paddle

Back in the day, when I was younger, I would wake up in the morning and, for the most part, look like I had gotten a good night's sleep. Not the mornings in my early 20s when I was hung over, of course. Or the mornings in my 30s after being up all night with my kids. Or the mornings in my 40s after waiting up all night for my kids to come home. But I'm sure there were some mornings when I didn't look like I'd been hit by an ice cream truck, dragged for a mile while the tinny music drowned out my screams, then attacked by a pack of rabid badgers. Actually, it was less like I'd been hit by a truck and more like I'd been driven over by one, because every morning there seemed to be tire tracks across my face that wouldn't go away until about lunchtime. My nightly tire tracks had become so prevalent that my husband started calling me, in the most loving way possible, Mrs. Bedsheet Face .

Of course, I had no control over what happened to my face when I slept. I'm naturally a devoted back sleeper, but in recent years I've had to switch to sleeping on my side, because if I slept on my back I snored (another surprising joy of turning 50). And apparently, when I slept on my side, I engaged in a bout of extreme championship wrestling with my pillow all night trying to get comfortable, and the pillow usually won. The next morning, I would have so many lines and crevices across my face that I looked like a longitudinal map. This was an interesting look for a globe. For a woman in her 50s ... not so much.

I understand wrinkles, saggy knees, gray hairs, and chin hairs are all part of the aging process, and I am willing to let them all do as they may (except the chin hairs, of course). But this bedsheet-face thing was not something I was going to take, er, lying down. When people start asking you if you got that long scar down your face from your days as a pirate, you know something needs to be done.

I grabbed my laptop and googled "bedsheet face." I got nothing. There were plenty of articles about bedbugs -- fortunately not a problem I had. Then there was another one about how to get rid of bedsheet wrinkles. But they meant wrinkles on your sheets, not wrinkles on your face from the sheets. Then there were a few more essays about the challenge of making a bed. I would think if you couldn't figure out that the sheet with the elastic at the corners goes over the mattress, you have bigger problems than dealing with your bedmaking skills.

So now I knew how to get rid of bedbugs, smooth out bed wrinkles and make a bed, but I still had the dreaded bedsheet-face dilemma.

I scrolled a little further and finally found an article. Could it be that someone else out there suffered from the same sleep-induced, tire-track-face dilemma that I did? Was I not alone in my quest for a smooth-faced sleep experience? Eager to rid myself of this blight on my appearance, I clicked on the link for the article "How do I get rid of sheet wrinkles on my face?"

Their advice?

Sleep on your back.

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Tracy Beckerman is the author of the Amazon Bestseller, "Barking at the Moon: A Story of Life, Love, and Kibble," available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble online! You can visit her at www.tracybeckerman.com.

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