Morning becomes her
Tell me: Is there anything more gloriously sensual than lying between body-warmed flannel sheets on a chilly winter morning watching the dawn slowly light up the room? I think not.
As much as I love nestling into bed at night and reading a book until my lids grow heavy, I love this slow awakening more. I have long awakened without the aid of an alarm, both a blessing and a curse. When I must be somewhere early, it is a blessing not to be jarred awake by whatever tone—however dulcet—I’ve chosen for my iPhone alarm. My slumbering husband appreciates this too. But at 5:45 am, in the dead of winter, when I don’t need to be anywhere until 9, this early rising can be a curse…unless I recast these unhours as an opportunity to drift and self-snuggle, to wander in and out of light dreams. And, oh yeah, to make to-do lists. That last one would not seem relaxing. But I am a list-lover, and lists calm me.
I was not always such a happy sleeper. Years ago, as an extra-added-attraction to my (undiagnosed) post-partum depression, I suffered persistent insomnia. Well, it would have been persistent had I not been prescribed, re-prescribed and re-re-prescribed Ambien. Taking Ambien was like flipping a light switch. One moment I was tense, hyper-alert, staring at the ceiling; the next, peacefully asleep until morning. I loved that little blue pill. I loved it every night. I loved it even when I hated it.
I didn’t fall asleep without it for more than a year. Over the course of that year I slowly slowly reduced my dosage, first shaving off a little sliver of the pill, then a little more. Then I was down to half a pill. Then a quarter. Finally, toward the end, I could barely see the spec of pill I was taking. It was, as my husband rightly pointed out, a “sub-sub-clinical dose.” It was not doing me any pharmacological good. But if I had managed to break my biochemical addiction, I was still addicted to the act of taking the pill.
I don’t know if it was that experience that made me the happy early riser I became. But I do know that many mornings, opening my eyes in the dark, my first thought is: I fell asleep last night. I slept.
4 comments
You write so beautifully that the reader steps inside your experience and even self-congratulates on finding a way to gradually lose dependency on the pill. Well done and beautiful to the bone.
Thank you so much, Randy. These little essays for the blog are part of my writing “discipline,” and it’s hard to know who actually reads them. (Very often people click a “like” on FB and never actually click through to the content. I mean VERY often. WEIRDLY often.) So I appreciate more than I can say that 1) you read my work and 2) you take the time to comment. May you have sweet dreams.
A lifetime of manual labor has made me a retiree who wakes up at five-thirty every day with soreness. There’s nothing glorious about it.
So delighted you read the piece, Robert. I’ve been a fan since Overstory Zero. I purposely reframed these pre-dawn risings into something pleasant. But waking up with soreness and pain never is.
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