Morning Person

 

For years, I’ve had a goal of becoming a Morning Person. For those of you who know me, this is a really bizarre goal because the only kind of morning person I have been most of my life was the still-up-at-2:00-in-the-morning kind of Morning Person. Sleep wasn’t my friend, it was my enemy – forcing me to slow down, to quiet my racing mind, to be still. And I’m just not good at being still.

After my kids would go to sleep, that’s when my personal day really began. I’d work, clean, paint a room, take online classes – anything really to keep myself from resting. When your mind never stops racing and your body constantly begs you to keep it moving, sleep is the last thing that you want to do. I’d go until my common sense finally yelled at me, “If you go to sleep right now, you’ll still get four hours before the kids get up.” And I’d give in, waking a few hours later and pouring caffeine into my body until I could function like a normal person who does normal things like sleep when you’re normally supposed to.

Then last year, just after my 35th birthday, my body decided that enough was enough and gave me shingles. My doctor told me the only thing I could do was take the pills and rest and I must have given him the most horrified face because he said, “You know how to do that, right?” The truth was that I didn’t. I had no idea how to do that, but I promised I would try. Months passed where I stuck to my old night-owl ways, but then three months ago, I fell asleep at 8:00 pm on accident and woke up 10 hours later feeling better than I had in years. The next night, I went to bed on purpose at 9:00 and eight hours later, I was up, happy, and finally fully awake. I felt like I had come out of a fog that had lasted the better part of almost two decades. And that was the beginning of our morning dance parties in the kitchen.

Being awake – really, truly awake is something I don’t know if I have ever really experienced since I was a little kid. These days, I wake up at 5:00 am and get control of my day while the rest of the house is still. It’s two hours until my kids wake up and now, that time I get with them before they leave for school is the best part of my day. It took three months for me to make sure it was really going to stick, but I’m now officially calling myself a Morning Person.

Mornings now are a time of peaceful calm, where I don’t yet have to fight with my mind or my body to slow down. I’m not fighting with my kids to hurry because I haven’t had to hurry. I’m not fighting with myself because of the guilt I carried for not taking care of myself the way I knew deep down I was supposed to. And I’m not fighting with the morning anymore. I’m quite literally dancing with it.