Where is that motivation?

I am not a morning person. If anything, I'm "mourning" every morning. Mourning the fact that I should be getting out of bed.

If I don't have something fun to look forward to, good luck keeping me up. Bijou, my puddy-cat, dragged me out of bed today at 6 a.m. I'm trying to make myself stay up, even though my eyes feel like they'd make a good litter-box right now.

I've seen lots of movies with bodies being dredged from a river. That's what mornings feel like to me, most of the time. I'm the dead body, and even though I set the alarm clock, have plans and a schedule to follow, it still feels pretty chancy most days whether the grappling hook or the weeds will win. I get turned over, but sometimes the hook misses, and down I go again, spinning back into unconsciousness.

I envy Morning People. Heck, I even envy the obsessive-compulsives!

Back a few years, when I was married with Stepchildren, we used to hear Stepdaughter wake up every morning. (This was before she became a teenager.) We'd hear her take a deep yawn, hear her roll over, yawn again, then - Boom! She was up. Thud-thud-thud-thud her feet would go down the hall. She was wide awake and ready for action, setting off from her bed in a running start, looking for signs of life in the world around her, and cheerful.

And I'd g r o a n , and roll over and bury my face in the pillow, thinking, "Oh god, not another day!"

I talk to people who are older than me, like by twenty years or so, and they all have variations of a theme: I woke up, therefore I'm alive - hooray!

I envy them.

Oh, there are days when I wake up eager to be up and about. Days when I've got somewhere to go that I WANT to go, like a trip somewhere. Or people I love are coming over to see me, or I'm invited to a friend's place, or I'm going out to a movie that night...

I envy some of my female friends who wake up with mental lists running through their heads of all the things they could get done - before leaving the house for work!

When I have to work, I lie in bed mentally calculating what I could SKIP doing before I have to leave! "If I pack a peanut butter sandwich, I don't have to eat breakfast... If I have my shower first, I can let my hair air-dry, so I won't have to style it with the blow dryer... If I use a frozen dinner, I can stay in bed five extra minutes so I won't have to search for stuff for lunch..."

And on a day when I'm not working, the question "Why?" looms very large next to the little voice that says "Come on now Deborah - you should get up now."

Or sure, I've got things to do. Like my business taxes, for instance. I've got to find my receipts and papers and file my business taxes within the next ten or fifteen days, or be fined something awful like, six thousand dollars.

Be still, my beating heart. There must be some needles I could poke into my eyes first...

Today seems to be especially difficult - it's grey out. About as grey as when I close my eyes. The only difference between my eyes being open, or my eyes being closed, is that my eyes hurt less when they're closed, and I don't have to pay for the electricity to run the lights.

Oh yes, I wish I could wake up with a little enthusiasm. Because right now, when I wake up, my reaction is...

What's the point?