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My husband skipped opening weekend of deer season for the first time in nineteen years. He told his hunting buddy Darryl he was too tired. And the thing is, that part was true. He was more tired than any man I've ever known. But tired wasn't why he stayed home, and it took me fourteen months to find out what was. He was scared. Not of the woods. Of himself in them. I watched him carry the rifle case out to the truck on Friday afternoon, stand there for a minute with his hand on the tailgate, and carry it back into the house. He never said a word about it. Men like Ray don't. That silence is the whole problem, and I'd bet it's sitting at a kitchen table near you right now too. If you're not from a hunting family, here's the only part you need to understand. Deer season opens one weekend a year, and men like my husband plan their whole fall around it. You buy your tags in August, the state permits that let you take a deer, and then you count down. Ray has bought his tags every August since 2006. Nineteen falls in a row. This year's tags are still in the kitchen drawer. I open that drawer for a bottle opener and there they are, and I close it again. There were two sets in there. That's the part I have trouble writing. The second set belongs to Wyatt. This was supposed to be our son's first season. Ray has been talking about it since the boy was seven years old. In October he sat him down at the kitchen table and said, next year, bud. I watched a twelve year old nod like he understood, and go up to his room. What Ray couldn't tell his son, what he couldn't tell anyone, is that the reason he benched himself had nothing to do with hunting. It wasn't his age. It wasn't his job, exactly. It wasn't anything the doctor found, because the doctor found nothing at all. And that, it turns out, was the biggest clue we had. The real story was happening every night, in the dark, right next to me. I just didn't know how to read it yet. If the man in your house is exhausted all day and wide awake in the middle of the night. If he's tired and wired at the same time, short with the kids, drinking coffee that stopped working a year ago. If he went to the doctor and every line of his bloodwork came back normal, and somehow that made everything worse. Then I want to tell you what the last two years have looked like in our house, because I've spent enough midnights on Facebook and in stress forums to know we are not the only ones living it. And because nobody told us the thing I'm about to tell you, and I wish to God somebody had. Ray is 47. He runs a construction crew of nine. He's been doing the same work since he was nineteen, he's good at it, there's nobody else who can do it, and the phone starts at 5:40 in the morning. You want to know what everybody tells a man like that? Reduce your stress. That's the whole prescription. Take some time off. Try meditating. Go for a walk. He can't reduce his stress. There is no version of this life where the load gets smaller. There's a mortgage, a truck payment, a daughter who wants to go to school in Columbus, and nine guys who don't get paid if he doesn't show up. The stress isn't a choice he's making badly. It's the shape of his life. So he did what men like Ray do. He absorbed it. It didn't happen all at once. There was never a day I could point at and say there, that's when it started. It was 3:12 in the morning, over and over. He'd wake up like somebody flipped a switch. Not groggy. Wide awake, heart going, staring at the ceiling. He told me once it felt like there was electricity in his arms. He'd fight it until 4:30, then get up and make coffee in the dark rather than keep losing. It was the coffee no longer working. Two cups, then three, then a fourth in the afternoon, and none of it doing what coffee is supposed to do. It was falling asleep in the recliner at 8:40 with the TV on, and being wide awake at midnight. It was his jaw. He clenched it in his sleep hard enough that I could hear it from my side of the bed. He cracked a molar in March, and when the dentist asked if he was under stress, Ray laughed at him. And it was the shoulders. Up around his ears, all day. I'd put my hand on his back and it was like putting my hand on a countertop. He was exhausted in a way that sleep didn't touch. Tired and wired at the same time. That's the only way I know how to say it. The Sunday after Ray backed out of the hunt, Darryl called the house. Talked about nothing for five minutes, the way men do when they've called about something. Then he said something that stopped me cold. "He tell you why he's really sitting this one out?" There were two things. Both from last November. I'd known about neither. Opening morning, a buck stepped out at eighty yards. The kind of deer they'd been passing trail cam pictures of back and forth for two years. The kind you wait a lifetime for. Ray watched it for a full minute and let it walk. Told Darryl afterward the angle was bad, there was brush behind it. Darryl was in the next stand over with binoculars on the same deer. The angle was fine. There was nothing behind it but hillside. Ray couldn't trust what his own eyes were telling him at eighty yards. And he knew it. Know your target and what's beyond it. He taught Wyatt that at our kitchen table with an unloaded .22, years before the boy was allowed to touch anything else. A man who isn't certain doesn't shoot. So he didn't. He never told Darryl the truth about that deer. He never told me anything at all. Three weeks later, the ladder stand on the north edge of the lease. Twenty two feet up. He hadn't hardly slept past three in weeks by then. Somewhere in the middle of the morning, warm sun on him, his head went down. He came to with his hand clamped on the rail. He climbed down, unloaded, and sat in the truck until Darryl came out at noon. Told him he wasn't feeling right. Never went back up all season. Fourteen months he carried both of those. Sleeping next to me every night. When I asked him about it, he looked at me for a long second and gave me four sentences. I was fine. I caught it. It won't happen again. Leave it. And that's when I finally understood what skipping opening day actually was. It wasn't giving up. It was a man who had watched himself let the deer of his life walk because he couldn't be sure of his own eyes, looking at four hours of sleep and twenty two feet of ladder, doing the math, and benching himself. Nobody thanks a man for that. There's no award for it. He just quietly set down the thing he loved most, told his best friend he was tired, and let everyone believe it. He wasn't passive about it. I need you to hear that, because people assume men like Ray just white knuckle everything. He cut the caffeine after 2pm. That lasted four days. He went back to lifting five days a week, the way he did in his thirties, on the theory that if he wore himself out, he'd sleep. It made it worse. He'd finish at seven and be more wired at eleven than when he walked in. That one discouraged him the most, because that used to work. That always used to work. He tried a beer or two at night, which got him to sleep and got him up at 2:45 instead of 3:12. He downloaded the meditation app his sister sent. Used it twice. And he went to the doctor. I made the appointment myself. They ran his bloodwork and every line came back normal range. Manage your stress, get more sleep, come back in a year. He sat in the truck in that parking lot for a long time before he drove home. Eleven months of doing everything right, and what he had to show for it was a piece of paper saying there was nothing wrong with him. I'm ashamed of what I did with that paper. For a year I let normal mean it was in his head, and I treated him accordingly. There was a morning in July I told him to snap out of it. He didn't argue. He nodded and took his coffee out to the truck. I'd give a lot to have that one back. Ray did something different with the paper. He said it out loud in the kitchen, the night after the appointment, and it's the sentence I can't forget. Bloodwork's fine. So it's me. He put his mug in the sink and went to bed at nine. He was awake at 3:12. I started reading at night. Not because I'm clever. Because I was out of ideas. On that Sunday call, Darryl had mentioned something almost as an afterthought. Deb's pharmacist had put him on magnesium back in the spring, and he'd been sleeping better since. I half dismissed it on the phone. But men tell each other nothing. It took my husband quitting deer season for that fact to surface at all. Then it kept coming up on its own, in study summaries and in comment threads from people describing our exact life. Magnesium. And I kept running into the same explanation for the 3am wake up. It's a stress hormone spike. Cortisol. Your body fires it when it's under pressure, and cortisol burns through magnesium. The more pressure, the faster it burns. Not as a miracle. As something your body just needs. Here's what I understand now, in the words I'd use for my sister: Your body uses magnesium constantly, and a lot of what it's used for is the machinery that runs hardest when you're under pressure: muscle function, nerve signaling, the normal stress response itself. Sustained pressure means running that machinery more. And magnesium isn't stored in a way that's easy to keep topped up. Plenty of people don't get enough from food in the first place, it's one of the more common shortfalls in a modern diet. So the picture I'd had backwards was this. I thought the goal was to lower the demand. You can't lower the demand. Ray's demand is nine guys and a mortgage and a phone that starts at 5:40. What you can do is stop running the tank empty. Not the load. The tank. And here's the piece that explains that doctor's visit. A standard blood test measures the magnesium in your blood, which is only a small fraction of what's in your body. Your body works hard to hold that blood number steady, drawing on stores elsewhere to do it. A normal result doesn't necessarily tell you much about what's actually in reserve. His results weren't wrong. They were answering a different question than the one we were asking. I want to say this plainly: I'm not a doctor and I'm not telling anybody to skip theirs. Ray still sees his. If the man in your life feels like this, get him looked at, because plenty of things cause these symptoms and a lot of them are worth ruling out. But when I went looking at magnesium, four things mattered, and most of what's on the shelf fails at least one: The form. This is the one nobody had told us, and it's the only technical thing in this whole story that matters. Most forms of magnesium never cross the blood brain barrier. Bisglycinate is the form that does, which is why absorption runs up to 90 percent. The elemental dose. The number on the front of the bottle usually isn't the amount of actual magnesium inside. Check the back. The timing. Evening, with food, is what worked here. Third party testing. If nobody independent has checked what's in it, you're taking somebody's word for it. That's what led me to SPNutrition gummies. Pure Magnesium Bisglycinate, 400mg elemental, every batch is third party tested. And it's a gummy, not another horse pill. That matters more than it sounds, because Ray does not stay consistent with pills and never has. I'm not going to tell you he was a new man in two days, because that isn't what happened and I don't trust the people who say it does. What happened was slower and smaller. The first few days, nothing I could point to. Somewhere toward the end of the first week he slept through to 5:20 and mentioned it at breakfast like it was nothing. His shoulders came down off his ears. The 3am thing didn't vanish at first, it stopped being every night, and when it happens now, he gets back to sleep instead of surrendering and making coffee in the dark. Darryl says the same. He's been on it since April. Ray's schedule hasn't changed. His job is still his job. The phone still starts at 5:40. He's still got 9 guys to look after. But last Tuesday he took the tags out of the kitchen drawer and set them on the counter. Both sets. And Saturday he took Wyatt to the range. Just the range. He walked Wyatt through the rules in the parking lot first, same as always. Know your target. What's beyond it. Wyatt talked the whole drive home and Ray let him. There's a late season in January. He hasn't said he's going. He hasn't put the tags back in the drawer, either. I still open that drawer every night for the bottle opener. It's just the bottle opener now. Anyways, if the man in your house is stressed, dealing with a lot at work, waking up at 2 or 3AM, and snapping at you, it could be a magnesium problem. Like it was for Ray. I'm sharing a link to an article below that explains it better than I can. https://spnutrition-us.com/pages/consumer-tested-men-listicle P.S. If the man in your life has gone quiet and tired and short-fused, and his tests all came back fine, please don't let the normal results be the end of it. Ask him about 3am. Ask him what his shoulders feel like. Ask him if there's anything he's quietly stopped doing. Ours went a year and a half assuming there was nothing to find.