A Morning Person, Finally?
Has the reign of ten-hour sleeps ended for good?
You thought maybe I was going to say “Heyyy guys I’m back!” and then skip town again, didn’t you? Well. I’m going to stick with this regular writing thing even on the weeks when I feel like I don’t have something to say. Or maybe I have too many things to say, and not enough time to organize my thoughts into something either coherent or meaningful. Regardless, I’m writing, baby!
It’s been eight days since we started school again. Notice my use of “we.” I did not start school again. I now have a high school junior and a middle schooler, my friends. For those familiar with my “day job,” I teach early childhood music classes four mornings a week, but I haven’t yet resumed classes. Every year I wait to begin music class until after Labor Day, and every year I am grateful as hell that the first 2-3 weeks of school, I’m not pulled in that additional direction.
Managing and navigating my kids’ return to school feels like a full-time job. Maybe it feels like that for every mom, or maybe my girls and I are just more . . . (bonus points if you can fill in the blank with today’s Wordle answer) high maintenance. Shout-out to parents who are indeed working full-time jobs AND managing the additional full-time job of the back-to-school tsunami. The school-nami, if you will (and I hope you will).
Last year I had a piece published with Mutha Magazine (one of my favorite publications!) called "Greeting My Kids After School Is Like a Bucket of Cold Water.” I read a version of this at last spring’s Listen to Your Mother Boulder, too. And damned if it isn’t true, year after year: no matter how beautifully I managed my time, no matter how much neurotic self-care I practiced (winky face to my friends Megan and Lea, and I sense a future post coming. . .), I am always woefully unprepared for the tidal wave of my children’s after-school transition.
Because, my GOD, it’s a lot, this back to school stuff. Especially for those moving up from elementary to middle, and other equally taxing milestones. But this year, I am taking a different approach. And it’s not because I’m super prepared, proactive, or inspired. It’s because I have no freaking choice: I am now waking up at the crack of dawn.
No, not 4:00 like my husband. No, not 5:00 like my truly early-rising friends or 5:23 like my music class mamas of babies. But, dammit, 6:30 am is still early for me! Because, and I’m only mildly embarrassed to admit it, most of the summer I slept for ten hours a night. (Cough, sometimes eleven.) I have often said that when left to my own internal devices, my natural body rhythm prefers sleeping from 10:30 pm to 8:30 am. Ahhhh, bliss.
But this year, I have to usher a 6th grader out the door at 7:10 am to walk down the street with her pals to middle school. I’m not going to lie—for months I have been dreading this circadian adjustment as though it were the 5th level of hell. And then last week, after not doing the thing you’re supposed to do every end of summer or daylight savings where you adjust your sleep ten minutes a night for a week, blah blah blah—who is that prepared anyway?—we always just rip the bandaid off here in Lazyville, I went to sleep at 9:45 and woke up at 6:30. And it didn’t suck.
So here’s the thing. My goal is to spend as few minutes as possible with my middle schooler in the mornings—we do the whole “pack your lunch and lay out your clothes and braid your hair before bed” thing so there are very few morning tasks. Snuggling happens, breakfast happens, and then BOOM, out the door you go. And then. Then it happens.
It’s 7:12 in my home, and I’m awake, and I don’t have to rush. I can sit in the hammock chair with my latte and marvel over the fact that it isn’t 92 degrees. I can gaze out at my garden at the hollyhocks and tomatoes and dahlias in that blissful way that only a newly awake person can. I can listen to the birds, and watch the sun slowly rise over our backyard fence line of trees, bushes, and flowers. One industrious day, I climbed into the garden at 7:15, beating the busy wasps, and harvested this majestic bounty, which I later prepared into a self-indulgent feast that I felt quite satisfied with, in that special, smug “I AM A MORNING PERSON AND LOOK WHAT I HAVE DONE!” kind of way.
Sometimes, when I’m done listening to nature and shit, I’ll sit in bed with my coffee, snuggle my dogs, and do my Wordle. Or I work on my laptop, or read a book. Some days I take my oldest at school at 7:45, sometimes 9. Even when I begin teaching again in ten days, I will still get to savor this morning slowness and quiet—most days I won’t need to leave my house until after 9:00.
For years I’ve listened to or read about my friends—especially my creative or writer friends—sharing inspiring tales about their early morning rituals. How they wake up hours before their kids and do their “morning pages,” or work on their book. Some of them paint, some do yoga, some meditate. While I’m not quite at the point of waking up *before* my kids (let’s be honest, I have only made this life change because I had zero choice in the matter, aside from the choice of whether to be a bitter sloth or embrace the morning), I feel like waking up early *with* them and then turning the morning into something beautiful is a good start.
Full disclosure, in the past 48 hours I did take an unplanned one-hour nap at 11:00 am 😳 and despite the extra sleep boost, woke up the next morning feeling groggy, disgruntled, and just plain TIRED. But still I peeled myself out of bed after stretching, snuggling, and greeting my dogs. Still I trudged to my Nespresso machine and prepared the oatmilk, cream, Vietnamese cinnamon, and honey required to make the best latte in the world. Still I drank my warm water with half a lemon squeezed in it while coaxing my child into a less shitty mood. And still I reveled in the fact that, at 7:30, I was AWAKE! and sitting quietly by myself in the cool morning air of my beautiful backyard.