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. Now
don’t get me wrong, I do love to sleep.
I like to do my sleeping, however, 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.
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