Good Morning

Or not. Honestly, it's not my favorite time. I'd rather be asleep. Really I'd rather be doing anything except being awake between 5 and 8 am. My creativity flows at night. I want to curl up with a book or a new project or Netflix or organize a closet or redecorate a bathroom... seriously, I'm a night person. A proud night person. Years of theatre rehearsals and after show drinks, late night laughter and deep conversations with friends make me long to continue right on being a night person.

But y'all I'm a mom. And whether I like it or not, my children have to go to school and that bell rings before I've usually had my first cup of coffee. It makes me cranky. And those boys come running down the stairs. So. Dang. Early. And they're loud. Which adds to the crankiness. I think you know where this is going...

I NEED a morning routine. I know it's nothing new. Women and Instagrammers everywhere share their morning rituals, their solo workouts and delightfully quiet breakfasts across social media every day. And it makes me jealous. It really does.

I had coffee with a friend recently who used a sentence I'm not new to but I think I will start putting into my everyday vocabulary.

"It doesn't serve me."

Now she was talking about something else entirely but that sentence has stuck in my brain. It's played over and over. I've rolled it around, tested its weight, and applied it to nearly everything in my mind. And the one thing I keep landing on, what would serve me right now, what would serve me most, is a morning routine. It would serve me and my soul and my life in all ways.

So here I sit trying to figure out how I make myself get up "before God" (that's a Cathy-ism), focus my mind, sit in silence, maybe journal (?), maybe workout (?), maybe meditate (?), just be alone with my thoughts. I've tried this before. And I always, *always* turn the alarm off and go back to sleep. Why? Because I find it daunting. I put so much pressure on myself to achieve some magical list before my house is moving that I just close my eyes and go back to sleep.

And it has to stop. My life as a mother has revolved around me creating an image of something/someone I want to be, letting myself be defined by that image, living in inner terror of never being able to achieve it and letting myself give up before I even begin. Hello too much honesty for a Thursday morning.

So I'm determined to change. No pressure right? Ha! That's funny.

But this time, I don't have a picture of who or what I want to be in the future. This time there are no unrealistic goals. This time it's about serving myself from the inside out. I'm not sure what it all looks like yet but maybe, for now, that's okay. Maybe I just get up and let myself be. Let myself breathe. Let myself find stillness both outside my body and inside my mind.

Or... and hear me out here, maybe? I just have a hot cup of coffee.