Snooze Button

Do not love sleep or you will grow poor; stay awake and you will have food to spare. Proverbs 20:13

I have a serious problem with hitting the snooze button. Not just once. I'm talking three, four times, some mornings. Then, I jump up and rush around (halfway in the dark, so as to not wake the 'sleeping giant' by my side) getting myself together, shaking my head and scolding the pillow-squeezing teenager inside of me for doing it "yet again".

I thought I had the perfect plan in my mind: set the clock ahead 15 minutes, which would motivate me to get up and start my day with plenty of time to spare, making for a supposedly smooth start to my day. The only problem is that even in my drunken cloud of REM slumber, my mind STILL knows that the clock is 15 minutes fast, and thus calculates what time it actually is, summons my arm to lift and hit the snooze button (knocking the remote off the nightstand in the process) and beckons me to turn over, until the alarm sounds again, and I repeat the ritual over and over. (shaking my head) See? Told you I had a problem.

To make matters worse, my morning ritual of calling my mother during the drive to work further condemns me to shame. By this time, my mother has already been up for an hour and a half, has prayed and meditated on her scripture for the day, taken her shower, vitamins, scrambled an egg, drank a cup of coffee and seen my father off to work. It is just a matter of moments, seconds actually, before she looks at the clock on her stove and lovingly asks me the rhetorical question, "My goodness, aren't you going to be late?"

Trust me, I am in no way trying to preach to ANYBODY but MYSELF, but I really had to look at this "getting up early" thing. There must be something to it, right? Particularly as it relates to women, and specifically as it relates to me, 'Sista Snooze Button'. Look at the Proverbs 31 woman; The bible says she gets up long before anybody in her household (YIKES), and prays over them in the wee hours of early morning. And then there's the saying, "The early bird gets the worm"....while it would be nice to assume that birds have nuclear families, we know it's the MAMA who brings that worm back to the nest before the crack of dawn.

I know better. And when we KNOW better, we are to DO better. I NEED to do better. I want to enjoy my mornings. I want to sip some coffee in my robe. I want to pray over my family, read the next chapter in that book I've been meaning to finish for 4 weeks. I want to write another post, another poem, another story. I want some quiet time to myself, without hearing the real life Family Guy episode: "mom.....mom........mommy.......mommy.......mama........mama........ma.......ma.......mom.." How many times have we as women claimed that there were just "not enough hours in the day" to accomplish all that we have to do? I say it all the time. And now, I know better than that too. There ARE enough hours. I simply haven't been awake to use them.

Soooooo, I've decided to do better, to take a step towards something productive, with the hopes of setting a new tone to my mornings: Note to self: Set the alarm one hour earlier. (well now, let's be reasonable..shall we say 30 minutes instead?) and DO NOT hit snooze (more than once...I am human, yes?)

Well, you gotta start somewhere. Baby Steps. I'll be sure to let you know how it goes. And don't sleep (snooze), I CAN do this.