This morning as I lay awake in the dark sometime around 6:00 am, wondering why I wasn’t still asleep, I began to think about how many times in my life I’ve been able to just go to bed when I was tired and get up when I wanted to. With the exception of vacations and the occasional free Saturday, there haven’t been too many times in my adult life where that has been the case.
Looking back, I’ve often thought that the most natural sleep – wake cycle of my life was when my children were little babies. No, there weren’t always long periods of sleep; sometimes only a few hours at a time. But those days did have a rhythm that was dictated by genuine human needs; for food, comfort, or a clean diaper.
I wasn’t working then, so it really didn’t matter when I slept or showered or any of the things most adults find as requirements of daily life. With Dave at sea so much of the time, there were no alarm clocks clanging and I was often solely responsible for tending to my little ones. Yet, we found our routine, generally rising, having meals and going to bed at the same general time every day.
Years later, when I led Baptism prep classes for parents in our parish, I showed them a video by Kathleen Chesto. I can’t recall the name of the video but it was a great resource for teaching the history, tradition and theology of Baptism. One of the points Ms. Chesto made in her presentation was how the hours of the day when babies generally want to eat; 10, 2 and 6, corresponded to the Liturgy of the Hours; the times of the day when Catholic religious folk stop to pray.
Looking at my own early days of motherhood with this in mind helped me see that that those days were not merely special, they were sacred. If you’d asked me at the time if I was praying as I fed my infant at 2:00 am, I’d say that I wasn’t. But, if sacrificing your own comfort for the needs of someone else isn’t prayer, I don’t know what is.
Now that Dave’s not working, we don’t have to get up so early but something in my internal clock hasn’t reset yet and I still find myself awake somewhere around 6:00 am, trying to decide if I should get up or roll over. I don’t really mind. I’ve always enjoyed having a slow, quiet start to my day and I do like having the time to ponder and unpack the times in my life that seem to have sped by too quickly, to remember and savor them. Sometimes I wish I could do my pondering after the sun comes up!