A reluctant lark

I wish I were more like my mom.  She was the nicest, most good-natured, loving person ever born.  But I'm more like my dad, moody, spiky, with a tendency toward passive aggression.  Like Dad, I was a natural night owl, and could barely stand Mom's morning cheer.  When I was a teen, she would come into my bedroom and throw open the curtains, singing "Rise and shine and greet the new day".  No matter how much I growled or whined, she never seemed to catch on to the fact that her a.m. energy was too much for me to bear gladly.  Although I eventually became less grumpy when I woke up, even into adulthood, even into seniority, I could stay up until midnight or later and sleep until mid to late morning.

The past few years, though, I have been alarmed to see myself turning into a morning lark, unable to sleep past 6:30, sometimes awaking as early as 4:30.  I see now that when I was wishing to be more like Mom, I should have been more specific.  This was not the trait of hers I wanted to emulate.  These days I find myself nodding off at 10:30 in the evening, sometimes missing chunks of whatever movie Sweet Hubby and I are watching or whatever book I'm reading.  I fight the sleepiness, grimly avoid going to bed until at least 11pm, but my days of being a night owl seem to be behind me.

Of course I realize that it makes perfect sense to simply surrender to sleepiness whenever it occurs, taking a nap or going to bed early, waking up when my body is ready to.  Why fight it?  It's not as though I have a job I have to get to, or deadlines I have to meet.  Why all this resistance to my natural, though changing, rhythms?

I've come to see that it's a matter of identity.  I have always identified myself as a night owl.  There have been times I would stay up all day, all night, and all the next day and be perfectly fine, with no loss of energy or spirit.  So to find myself snoozing and snoring before the crack of midnight makes me feel old and not myself, not who I think myself to be.  Giving up my identity as a night owl feels like a concession to age, like taking the legs off my step bench in order to still do those vigorous workouts without collapsing.  And if I make those concessions, isn't that just admitting I'm old, and won't the aging process speed up because I'm conceding?

Since I can't seem to change my body, I guess I need to change my attitude.  So here goes:

I am grateful to have lived long enough to experience the ravages and detriments of aging.  And I'm going to do my best to live as though aging gracefully will extend my healthy life by ten years.

So there.