Circadian Arhythmia
I was not born a morning person.
My parents can vouch for this.
As a child I never found it easy to get myself up in the morning. I was never one of those teenagers who spent two hours locked in the bathroom before school, primping and preening to look my best. I was the sweatshirt/t-shirt and jeans girl whose hair was always swept into a ponytail and who rarely wore makeup. Not because I didn’t want to look nice, I just could never get up on time to put anything more fashion-friendly together. That and I was too self conscious to try wearing anything too trendy, since most of my friends and classmates were a size 4 and I was a 12. In retrospect and compared to what I am now (16W…sigh), I should’ve flaunted more of myself when I had a nice figure to flaunt. But I digress.
Me. Not a morning person.
Until CB and I started talking regularly and my insomnia faded off. After a few months of almost daily chatting, I figured out that if I woke up at 6 in the morning, that was right when CB took his lunch hour and we could chat for an extra 45 minutes or so before I went to work. But of course, I had to be showered and dressed for work, so that led to me to getting up around 5:30 in order to be ready for work before we started talking. At the time I was also taking night classes a few days a week for my masters degree, so I wouldn’t get home until after 9 in the evening and then I often had readings or assignments or parent conference materials to work on, so I had no trouble falling asleep before midnight and getting up early the next day.
After CB visited me the first time, I briefly changed jobs, before returning to my old daycare (the new daycare had had better benefits and a 401k, but the staff was verbally abusive to the children and no insurance policy is worth selling out my morals). Upon my return I was assigned to a new classroom and given a new schedule. For the first two years at CHCC I had worked the 10-6 shift and had spend almost an entire year trying to get that changed, unsuccessfully. I had also been trying to get moved to a classroom where the two main teachers got along better, also unsuccessfully. Now, upon my return (despite my tendency towards the school of hard knocks, I do often emerge as the prodigal child) I was in a the 3 year old room (which meant I got to stay with the kids I’d been with in the twos room) and my schedule was 8-4. Work was a lot more pleasant and I had almost two hours of talk time with CB in the evenings instead of a meager 45 minutes in the mornings.
So basically, I converted myself to a morning person (and quit smoking, thanks to the power of loooove). And I liked it that way! I liked the early morning darkness and quiet and solitude. It’s why I really didn’t mind working the opening shift in the Brussels crèche. It wasn’t the waking up early that bothered me at all, it was the way the commute sucked up so much of my time and also how the boss and managers treated me like dirt and made me the fall guy for everything that didn’t work out how they wanted. Even after I started my job at the coffee kiosk, I was still set internally to wake up around 5 in the morning until recently.
See, now I work the evening shift, which is usually from 1:30-2:00 in the afternoon until 9:30-10:00 at night. this means I’m not home until 10:00 or 10:30 and often not in bed until close to 1 in the morning. So my body clock has finally given up its hold on the early morning wake up time and has now flip flopped and I find myself waking up around 10 am or lately even closer to 11 am. And I hate it! I feel like I’ve slept the whole day away. And it doesn’t help that Cb has never been, nor has ever converted, nor likely ever will be a morning person. So he’s pretty cool with me not moving or fidgeting or turning on the light before dawn anymore. But seriously, 11:00 in the morning? This can’t continue. There has to be some sort of happy medium and I have the next two days off, so I guess I’ll try to start reprogramming myself tomorrow.















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