Five In The Morning

In my life, the only other period I had to get up at five am on a regular basis, was when I was in that God awful movie, Ishtar. It was supposed to be a one or two day gig but it turned into four days. The paycheck was nice, as was meeting Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman - but that was about it. The movie flopped and my part, which was a guitarist in a band, was cut from the movie...so much for that.

Now, I am forcing myself to wake up at five in the morning to do nothing other than write. After reading a blog entry at bizmommy.com and yet another entry correlating the attention-divided-mommy topic on tatterscoops.com, it occurred to me that I was heading for disaster this summer if I didn't have a clear writing schedule. First thing in the morning seemed to be a logical choice.

Of course the first day I had set my iPhone to ring at 5:03 am, Samu crawled into my bed at 2 am and proceeded to puke - on the sheets, carpet, p.j.'s, the whole nine yards - until 4:45 am. Needless to say, I turned off my alarm and canceled that show.

The second day, I fared a little better. The alarm went off, I got up - which is a miracle in itself - stuck my contacts in and was surprised they didn't burn my eyeballs off, stretched and then sat down with my laptop and a glass of ice water.

Forty-five minutes into writing, I'm thinking, Hey, this is going really well. And then I heard it. A small body, falling off his bed and hitting the floor. Then the rapid footsteps towards the bedroom door and the telltale creak of it opening to release a mini-ogre who got up. Coming down one step at a time, I saw his feet followed by his hair.

My choices at this point were either bring him back upstairs to get another forty minutes of sleep or have him lie next to me and get no more writing done. I chose the latter. There will be other mornings, I convinced myself and relaxed. Though, he was worse for the wear.

Ever since that morning, Zuki's learned never to wake up early with mommy again. I learned not to waste any more mornings because there will always be setbacks. There are times I want to hit that snooze button and when I'm about to, I let the conjured Jewish mother in my head lay on the guilt trip until I can't take it anymore. The only thing that makes her go away is brushing my teeth.

As for sleep - I tell myself, one of these days. Yes, one of these days I'll have one of those jobs I can call out sick and just crawl back under the covers...or maybe not. For now, it's reveille.