Sleepyhead

For the first time in my 52 years I don’t have something that drives me out of bed in the morning. School, work, children to feed, carpools to drive, meetings to get to: there was always some external reason that I had to get going. I am most definitely not a morning person but over the years I figured out a method that worked for me: I set an alarm 15 minutes before I absolutely had to rise and would lay there in a stunned daze bringing myself from my dream world to reality slowly but deliberately. And then, knowing there was something or someone waiting I pushed myself into action. I celebrated when Franny went off to college and I no longer had to get up at 6 am for my one quick and grumpy interaction with her before she left for the day. As much as I would miss her I was thrilled that my mornings, at last, would no longer be dictated by someone else’s schedule.

I work at home, so I have the blessing and curse of making my own schedule and it turns out I am not very good at it. The most defining feature of my routine, my discipline, up until now, has been that it was flexible enough to meet the demands of family, and now I find I don’t know how to be my own driver.  It is not that I don’t have things to do: I have so many things to do that once I get started, I find it hard to stop. I am definitely not lazy and once I get started I don’t look up until suddenly I am late getting dinner started, and it is too dark outside for that walk I planned…  seems I need a better supervisor than the one I have now. So it is not for lack of things to do that I cannot get myself out of bed. Other people I know use some personal sort of motivation: the promise of a cup of coffee… nope, I don’t drink coffee. My husband rises for the promise of a quiet run before his day starts…  but the thought of a run makes me dive deeper under the covers. My dear friends who are morning people hop out of bed in answer to some joyful inner alarm, which – night owl that I am – I imagine sounds much like the one that keeps me up into the wee hours of the morning. For awhile the allure of the Kundalini yoga class at my gym did the trick, but a sprained ankle has given me too easy an excuse to pass on that. The bottom line is, I really, really, love to sleep, and when I wake, instead of thinking of happy things I am flooded with vague anxieties that clench my stomach. I think of my lovely, spiritually minded friends who do yoga and meditate as soon as they get up, but I can’t muster the serenity at that point in the day.

So it turns out that the first lesson of the empty nest is this: after being driven by pint-sized bosses for 20 years, I must now learn to be my own boss. I think I can draw on my years of mothering to help me with this task. If I must be my own boss, I would like to be kind but firm. I will write myself a memo, and tack it to the foot of my bed so that the first thing I see when I open my eyes will be this: