I’ve never been a morning person. Not only have I never been a morning person but I sometimes I actually wake up with disdain that morning decided to creep in and disrupt my sleep rather than waiting for afternoon to come and rouse me with its warm sunlight.
But alas, we can’t exactly always wake when we want, right? There’s school, work, dogs to be walked, babies to be fed, or some equivalent thereof for most of us. And those are all things requiring an early start and clear head, ready or not. I don’t exactly start my mornings so much as I cope with them. I’ve gotten better, but it took years of shifting my mental perspective.
When I was a kid I devised little ways of tricking myself into getting up and out of bed. One of those ways was with Pop-Tarts. As the oldest of six siblings, I knew that if there was food stuff in the house that I wanted, I had better hurry and get my share otherwise it would be gone. At breakfast it was literally “if you snooze, you lose.”
So occasionally when there would be Pop-Tarts in the house I’d lay in bed early, dreading having to get up for school and then I’d remember the sweet, brown sugar Pop-Tarts in the kitchen cupboard. Even though Pop-Tarts come in packs of six or eight (I can’t remember) I’d tell myself that if my younger siblings got up they would be gone. Because they would be. That stuff was enough sugar to power anyone’s day, and some of my siblings had no problem helping themselves to a double or triple dose.
Amazingly Pop-Tarts would be enough to get my lazy, morning-hating butt out of bed on time and get me to school. That could very well be why despite the fighting they caused, my parents often kept a box of Pop-Tarts in the house.
Realizing I could trick myself out of bed, I began to look at other incentives to get out of bed on time; that new outfit I bought, the new cute boy in my history class, anything to give me that jolt to push back the covers and get my feet on the ground. Surprisingly that worked for a good number of years.
Unfortunately, my kids inherited my lackluster attitude toward the start of a new day—except for one. My middle son, who is now 13, has always been a bundle of energy. As a child he would scramble out of bed the second the sun cracked a beam over the horizon and jump into our bed. To train our kids to sleep in their own beds when they were toddlers, we had a rule that they couldn’t climb into our bed until the sun was up. Our kids took this to mean when daylight had fully enveloped our house. My middle son, however, got technical about it. The minute the sky became fully light, just shortly after sunrise, he would bound into our room announcing, “The sun is up, the sun is up!”
For this kid there was never, nor has there ever been, a need for a Pop-Tarts motivation to get him out of bed. Just the thought of a new day starting is enough to get him moving.
These days I’ve trained myself to love mornings—in theory. Those early hours are truly magical. I can get my gym time in, I can get dishes washed, or I can get a couple of loads of laundry done and then I can make some coffee and just sit in near silence, nothing but the sounds of the coffee maker and a few birds chirping outside. I appreciate getting up early because I am rewarded with those moments, but, it still means prying my eyes open and ditching the embrace of my down comforter—not an easy task.
To be honest, it’s harder and harder to find the incentive these days to get out of bed. Even though I like that getting up early allows me to get housework done, it’s not exactly an exciting idea. I can’t lie in bed and tell myself, “Hurry, get up! You can do some housework if you get out of bed now.” Or, “Come on, wake up! You get to go to work today.” Or how about, “There’s a giant stack of dishes waiting in the sink from last night, you know you want to wash them.” See, that trick doesn’t exactly work as a grown-up.
I don’t know, maybe the Pop-Tarts incentive could still work. After all, being adult means that I can get up early and buy a box myself—heck, I can buy two boxes, if I wanted—and eat them all by myself. Then again, as an adult, you get a free box of empty calories with every Pop-Tarts purchase. Maybe I need to sleep on this one.
Editor Shelly Cone powers her morning with Diet Coke and extra-strength coffee. Email her at scone@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 21-28, 2016.
