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I’m not a morning person by nature. If I had my way, I’d go to bed every “night” at four A.M., sleep until noon or so, then get up and go about my day. In fact, that WAS the way I lived my life as a single person with my own place. I was tending bar then, so I could work ‘til the restaurant that employed me closed, then go out with other night owl friends to bars that stayed open even later, then come home and decompress over the mail and newspaper, then go to bed just before the sun came up. I didn’t have a problem with insomnia back then, because I was able to live by my body’s clock with no problem.

Ah, good times, good times.

As a married mother, however, I have to live by a bunch of different clocks. The school clock. My husband’s job clock. My mom’s doctor’s appointments clock. Some days, the New York publishing clock. And none of them run anything like my own. I’ve suffered from chronic insomnia ever since I stopped working nights and started living my life by day.

There have been some nice benefits from living during the daylight hours, however. I no longer have to make my bank deposits via the ATM and wait to have them post. I can get prescriptions filled while I wait. Sunrises, I’ve discovered, are every bit as beautiful as sunsets. Still, it was fun to go to the all-night grocery store at three A.M. and see the cashiers running up and down the aisles to keep themselves entertained, and never have to wait in line to pay for my purchases.

The one thing that has made my forcible entry into morning-personhood bearable, however, is the family bed. Morning, surprisingly, has become my favorite time of day, because that’s the part of the day where my family and I steal a little time for closeness. We deliberately set our alarm clock ahead a half hour every weekday morning, and we program the coffeemaker to have our coffee waiting for us when we wake up. My husband always brings me my first cup in bed, then he and I spend about fifteen minutes holding hands and chatting about what the day ahead holds, or what happened yesterday.

At the halfway point, my husband goes to wake up our son, and then both of them stumble back to our room and tumble into bed. By now, both cats have joined us, as well (or, more likely, they’ve both passed the night sleeping between my husband and me), so the bed, a cozy queen-size, is more than full. My son usually dozes for another fifteen minutes while the cats wrestle and pounce around and over him. If we’re lucky, he might mumble something meaningful (he was a real chatterbox until he became an adolescent--go figure), but more often, he just sleeps.  He’s joined us in the family bed every morning since he was a baby, a custom I always adored, but which I honestly didn’t think would continue this long. I love that it does, though I doubt it will last much longer.

Which is all the more reason to embrace these quiet mornings with the family for all they’re worth. And to me, they’re worth more than anything. Certainly more than a little readjustment to my body’s clock.

So how about you? Do you have any morning rituals to help you face the day? Things you have to do, or else the day seems a little off-kilter? What do you like better--morning life, daytime life or night life?