Life in the Morning Lane

I’ve had my bra frozen a lot.  You get used to it. You learn to bring a spare to hide in your pillowcase. It’s what happens when you are the first to fall asleep at a pre-teen slumber party.  I’m always the first to fall asleep at slumber party; well, any party really.  I was that kid that couldn’t stay up. I always brought a book because I knew I’d be awake before anyone else.  I spent many mornings at my friends’ houses talking to their moms in the kitchen. It’s ok – I liked talking to adults.  I guess to state it more accurately, I liked talking.

I won’t lie to you (I can’t lie to you) – I’m a morning person.  I wake up naturally around 5:30A/6AM – I bounce out of bed like a chipmunk and start my million projects before 3PM hits. That’s when I start to shut down for the evening.  I’m typically asleep around 9PM.  This has been a pattern my entire life. I’ve noticed that I’m waking up a little earlier as I get older – before it was always in the 6 o’clock zone that I woke up, now it’s around 5AM. I’m worried that I’ll be getting up a 3AM in my 60s.

In the early heady days of my relationship with Scott, in a half fog, he’d notice me start to squirm in bed, – put his arms around me and ask me to stay. It would last about 2 minutes, I’d start to squirm again and he’d encourage me to leave.

But I love mornings. I’m a reverse vampire.  I feel so energized and my mind is clear. I am instantly awake and totally alert.  Scott shuffles around like a zombie for the first hour or so in the mornings. We both don’t understand how the other can wake up as they do.  I love it when I can start work at 5:30AM. I love being done by 2PM because I have an entire hour more of ‘alert’ left in me.

I have never pulled an “all-nighter”. I tried no-doze once; it made me all jittery and nauseated, so I slept it off.  It’s probably some sort of defensive narcolepsy.  Can’t cope – sleep…   I can count on one hand the times I’ve ‘slept-in’ past 7AM.  I slept until noon once, when I was 14.

Of course all my friends could sleep all day long when I was in high school.  And we stayed out late on Friday and Saturday nights (as long as I started my evening around 8PM, I could sometimes last until 11 or midnight). I had to work the next morning at 6:30AM. I hated knowing that I would only have 5 hours of sleep.   It didn’t/doesn’t matter what time I get to bed, my body still wakes me up at 6AM – and if I try to sleep past that, I generally become really nauseated. I think my body thinks I need to get up and go to work.

So of course when I met Scott at the tender age of 19 at college, he had a hard core band.  Hard core bands don’t generally play at reasonable times. And for me, a reasonable time is 8AM. I want to start a trend of ‘morning bands’.  Anyway, if they were ‘headlining’ (a term I came to dread) – they’d generally be the 3^rd band to play – which translates to midnight at the earliest.  And I was a baker during those years, and had to be at work at 6:30 in the morning.  You can imagine my joy.

Luckily I can sleep ANYPLACE. Noise is not an issue for me. Here are some places I’ve dozed:

• During a hurricane when I was  7 and 29
• Age 8, I laid down in line at the bank and took a catnap (my mom was not really down with this)
• The school auditorium at most of my brother’s Boy Scout meetings – BORING….I did wake up for the end-of-meeting cupcake however. I’m sleepy; not stupid
• At every single friends’ house during movie night. I never made it to the 2^nd movie. I now rarely make it through the 1^st movie
• Various parties from high school through my 20s – find a corner, take a snooze
• My crowning achievement was falling asleep (in front of the speakers) during a  DRI show  – as long as you mosh around me and not on my head, I’m fine

Now that I’m in my (early) 40s – as are our friends, they are finally on my schedule.  It’s been a long time coming, but I’m not always the first one to fall asleep at a gathering.