It Took a Pandemic to Turn Me Into a Morning Person

Waking up early has never, ever been my thing. Certain dramatic people—okay, both my husband and best friend—have gone so far as to declare themselves “scared” to rouse me from precious REM sleep. The latter likes to tells the tale of tip-toeing into my college bedroom at 9:45 a.m. to find me still snoring before a 10 a.m. Lit final, then nudging me and scurrying out, as if provoking a slumbering bear.

I’ve always thought it better, and infinitely more fun, to be a night owl. As a little girl, I relished staying up for the opening drumbeats of the Johnny Carson theme and banging pots and pans out the window of my grandma’s Astoria apartment after the ball dropped on New Year’s. Later, I became a nighttime producer at ABC News, and the hours some others dreaded suited me perfectly. After my shift ended at midnight, I was free to meet up with friends at a dive in Hell’s Kitchen, then head to the diner for 4 a.m. disco fries. Morning people? Ugh. So regimented, so smug.

Then, six years ago, I had my first child—a serious blow to the luxury of sleeping in. Snoozing until 8 a.m. now, tragically, counts as “late.” My husband is charitable about getting up first (I’m sure he’d say something here about avoiding my “wrath”) but as my days eventually became more crowded than ever with two kids, work, and attempting to squeeze in exercise and (much earlier) dinners with friends, the cliché about “not having enough time in the day” started to feel true. The annoying thought crossed my mind that I was wasting the early-morning hours I spent sleeping as late as possible when I could, hypothetically, be knocking out a dance class or getting a jump on writing. Years ago, I pitched an editor at Vogue on an experiential story in which I’d try to make myself into a morning person, methodically setting my alarm 15 minutes earlier and earlier over the course of a week or two until, voila, I rose with the sun. After two failed days, I simply never mentioned it to her again.

I’d all but given up on the pipe dream of becoming a super-productive early bird, choosing instead to see sleeping later as a non-negotiable kindness to myself (a form of self-care, as the buzzword goes). At first, during quarantine, this felt especially true. There were so few pleasures in this socially-stripped life; far be it from anyone to tell me not to make a blood orange margarita, binge Normal People until my eyes bled, and wake up just before my daughter’s Zoom school began at 9:15. This worked, until it didn’t.

As the strange new pandemic reality set in, I felt like I was waking up and being thrown to the wolves. I’d come to at lunchtime still in my pajamas, unshowered, tapping away at my laptop, serving as my daughter’s Zoom kindergarten IT coordinator, tearing my son from the TV to try to do a puzzle. For the first time in my life, both of my children and my husband were home, all day, every day, and in the most fraught moments, the endless, chaotic together-time sparked a roiling rage inside me. I consider myself an almost hyper-social person, but as much as I intensely missed hugging and lunching with friends, I also missed the serenity of being alone: ushering my family out the door in the morning and having blessed hours to myself to sneak in a workout class, do my job at my now-shuttered workspace, grab a coffee with a friend; even, on occasion, catch a Broadway matinee with the silver-haired crowd for a show I’m covering. On Mother’s Day, Gloria Steinem wrote on Instagram that she hoped “mothers are also women who are living out their own lives as unique human beings.” The quarantine had wiped out any semblance of my unique life, and I yearned to have even a sliver of it back.

I knew what I had to do, and, as I set the next day’s alarm for 6 a.m., I felt strangely steel-willed about it. A good friend I’ve been Marco Polo–ing through quarantine with had been waking up early, doing a Peloton dance-cardio class in her son’s playroom, and showering all before her husband and baby stirred. She seemed bright-eyed and happy. I begged her to text me when she was out of bed, to keep me from rolling over and hitting snooze, so I could follow her lead. My husband rolled his eyes when I announced my plan, which only gave me a little more ammunition. It had finally come to this. There was something I wanted more than to sleep in: to bust a move to Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch’s “Good Vibrations” while my family slept; to pad around in the dark, make a pot of coffee and listen to the sound of silence.

Getting up on Day One turned to Two and then Three. That was a few weeks ago. My initial impulse is still to hit snooze and go back to dreaming that Barack Obama is my high school Spanish teacher, but the early-bird text chain helps to keep me accountable. Another friend and I have started taking socially distant 7 a.m. walks together in Central Park to start our day on a positive, kid-free note. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but getting up with the sun is such a small price to pay for much-needed, mid-pandemic “Me Time.” It just takes the edge off: When I slip back into my apartment after a walk, or my family wakes up to find me sweaty from sashaying through another dance class (sunny instructor Cody Rigsby helps), I’m able to greet the chaos with more calm. I’ve become such an evangelist for it, I cringe to admit I recently tweeted about the benefits. (Morning people: They really are smug.) I can’t control when life will be less upside-down, or when my kids’ schools will open, but it’s refreshing to be able to control at least this one thing: When and how I get up and face the day. The weekdays, anyway. Don’t even think about waking me on the weekends.

Originally Appeared on Vogue