Writing Club - As Different as Day and Night

As Different as Day and Night
Samantha Weber, 13 Jan 06, 8th grade
“Tomorrow I want you to get up early so we can get started with school and get finished. You’ll feel much better if you go to bed now so you can get up early and get things out of the way!”

“Mom, I don’t want to get up early: I’m, just not a morning person like you!”
This was another attempt by my mother to try and get me to wake up early for school. She just doesn’t understand that we are two totally different people.
My mom is obviously the “early bird: she likes to get up around 5 a.m. and take pictures of the sunrise with her digital camera! (I don’t think I’ll ever be able to understand why she does this.) Once she takes the pictures, she uploads them onto her computer and adds them to her very long collection that is displayed on her screensaver as a slideshow. Occasionally, much to my chagrin, she wakes me up just to go look at the “beautiful” sunrise. Personally, all sunrises look the same to me; but to my mom, every one is a unique masterpiece: the artwork of God. I also appreciate the fact that “The heavens declare the glory of God,” but I prefer to find my artwork on my computer after the sun has set. You see, all day long I toil doing schoolwork and chores; and by the time all of it is done, it’s dark outside. I’m ready to be a rebel – to be “bad.” I have this nervous and excited (hyper?) feeling as I invade the web, pillaging for some kind of spoils. My gang is hanging out on IM, waiting for me. A perfect homeschooled student by day; but by night I’m “a bad white girl!” (Remember the Titans) Then at 10 p.m. when the whole gang is online, my mom disrupts the conspiracy and says I need to go to bed!

It’s absolutely not fair. She did the same thing to my brother and sister before me though. My sister would sneak back out of her bedroom to the computer after my mom went to bed. Occasionally, she would get caught, but as I hope you can see, it’s just natural for us to want to stay up. So many of my memories are of watching movies in my brother’s bed with my sister and Hannah Richman, late at night, eating frosted flakes and poptarts, then falling asleep on each other one by one; all the while my parents are in their bedroom on the other end of the house clueless. Come to think of it my parents have no idea of all the things that have happened on the “kid’s” end of the house, and don’t think I’m about to reveal my secrets either, because if I did, I would be stabbing my siblings in the back. I can’t imagine my life without those wonderful memories and midnight snacks, without them I think I would be incomplete Sometimes the two different worlds do collide as when over the Christmas holiday when my brother came home at 5:00 a.m. from with his two best friends to watch a movie and bumped into my mom when she was just waking up with her morning cup of coffee. Just because we all are “nocturnal” doesn’t mean we don’t love to sleep, as a matter of fact sleeping is one of my favorite things, but I like to do my sleeping during the morning hours. The house is its most quiet and peaceful then. The dog is asleep; the TV is off and all is quiet. Nothing has started and I think it should stay that way. Around 9 a.m. I am in a heavy state of dreaming and should not be awakened. Over the years, my mom and I have had numerous battles about the time I go to bed and the time I wake up. Usually, I lose at night but win in the morning because it is almost impossible to wake me up – or, if awakened, I’m so miserable to be around that my mom has learned to avoid the unpleasantness.

Hours earlier, while I’m snuggled down in my bed as peaceful as an angel, my mom has leaped out of bed, made the coffee, taken her sunrise pictures, and settled down with a good devotional book. She’s also got a load of wash started, taken something out of the freezer to thaw, straightened up the house, and made a list of chores and schoolwork for me. Maybe she is able to get up so early because she too feels stealthy, like she’s doing something that no one else would even think of doing (at least in our family). One day, maybe I’ll be just like her, getting up at the crack of dawn, making my kids go to bed early; who knows? But, for now, I think I’ll settle for staying up a little bit later
Just as I don’t appreciate the sunrise, my mom doesn’t appreciate the midnight hours and all the life it brings with it. I can’t help that she is a morning person and automatically is awake at the very ridiculous hour of 5 a.m., and I also can’t help that I perk up after dark.

Writing this controversial paper on our differences has brought us somewhat closer: I am starting to understand some of the reasons she likes to get up so early, and she is also trying to understand why I like to stay up. After writing this paper though, I still think my mother and I are two totally different people. In fact, maybe there are really only two kinds of people in the world anyway – the people who like to watch the sunrise and the people who like to see the sun set.