The Time of Our Lives

Why is it that getting up after eight feels like the height of luxurious laziness. I come from a culture where most things aren’t scheduled before 9 am. For years, my time of getting up was seven thirty, and that was because I MUST catch a train to the city before starting school at nine.

And when we were young and childless, we were both prone to going to bed well after midnight. We didn’t know what the sky looked like before nine am. Dan worked late, but he also started work late. Heck, before Robert went to school, it wasn’t unusual for the whole house to be up and functioning in the wee hours of the morning. Dinner was rarely before eight. One of the reasons I loved diners so much is that when we woke on weekends and vacation and we wanted breakfast out, diners were the only places still serving it.

But then life changed. Robert entered kindergarten, then Marshall did, and often the only way I could write at all day was to get up an hour earlier. Even if I weren’t writing, during the noisiest years of childhood, particularly when Marsh was in pre-school and only had one or two hours of “school” a day, I had to get up an hour earlier to have my caffeine in peace and “center” myself for the day.

I confess for the last seven or eight years, I’ve got up at around six thirty, not before the kids, but when they start moving around the house. This way I can have some time with both of them before they go to school and be caffeinated and ready to work by the time they leave.

But then some weekends – not all – I wake up at around eight fifteen and I swear I feel like the day is half gone and I was indecently lazy.

Go figure. The rhythms of life do change. I guess someday my kids will be gone from the house and perhaps our timing will shift to the wee hours of the morning, like our empty nester neighbors who do construction projects and gardening at three am. Or perhaps the habit of years will prevail and I’ll be getting up early and having enough tea to get in gear, then writing at around eight thirty.

All I can say is if you’d told me fifteen years ago that I’d one day think getting up after eight was “late” and “luxurious” I’d have thought you were insane….