These mornings back to work and school after a holiday break are gruesome affairs. No one seems able properly to wake up, even when finally dressed, and the household is essentially strewn with backpack-trailing, coffee-cup-clutching zombies until the awful moment, five minutes after everyone should have hustled out the door, when we all realize that we’re five minutes late and—
“I forgot to pack my lunch!” a former zombie will cry, now rather alert.
“Too late!” snaps a parent from the doorway.
“But the child has to eat!” returns the other parent.
Then everyone lurches belatedly to life. And while a lunchbox is hastily packed, various children realize that they don’t know where they left a piece of homework, or ask to have the macramé at the top of their sneakers undone, or start drawing on a stray bit of paper, oblivious to the urgency of the situation.
This happens in many families, I believe, after every holiday. Given freedom, we all revert to our natural pattern of staying up and sleeping in late.
When school resumes, it takes three or four days for the household to undergo a ghastly readjustment to life by the clock, after which we tick along reasonably punctually until the next break, and then it all falls to pieces.
You would think we’d learn. The school routine is one of the hoariest cycles of modern life, like the putting-up and taking-down of Christmas trees, or the waxing and waning of poor Oprah’s waistline.
Yet every time one of these fatal predictabilities takes place, there’s a sense of surprise and dismay. We also get, paradoxically, a feeling of renewal.
“This is the year of hopefulness,” Oprah said recently, putting a cheerful spin on her reawakened desire to lose weight and get fit. Her attitude pretty much sums up the curiously refreshing nature of predictable seasonal developments.
In millions of families, for instance, everyone looks forward to getting and decorating a Christmas tree. Children rush about unpacking boxes of ornaments and exclaiming over the ancient tattered reindeer they made in kindergarten. The house fills with a feeling of purpose and excitement and, if the tree is live, a woodsy fragrance.
A matter of weeks later, this seasonal development has overstayed its welcome. And although it’s about as much fun as starting a diet, there comes the austere satisfaction of putting all the decorations away again, hauling the tree out to the curb (sometimes over the frantic pleading of children), cleaning away tinsel and pine needles, and collecting Christmas cards off kitchen windowsills.
At first the house seems bare, but with that feeling comes a sense of renewal and hopefulness that, oddly enough, is derived simply from reversing the very thing that in December gave such a pleasant feeling of …renewal and hopefulness.
When it’s winter, we long for spring; when it’s spring, we wish it were a bit warmer; when it’s sweltering, we yearn for autumn, at which point it hits us with a jolt of surprise that it’s going to turn cold soon and oh my goodness we haven’t done anything to get ready for Christmas.
Oprah is right, but she doesn’t go far enough: This is indeed the year of hopefulness, but so is every year. That’s why we begin in January with our brave resolutions to save money, slim down, floss twice daily, or quit smoking.
Still, it would be nice if certain aspects of renewal were less painful to achieve. Take the going-to-bed and waking-up ordeal.
Dragging our exhausted carcasses out of bed in these first mornings back after vacation somehow doesn’t make it any easier to cause those carcasses to become sleepy when they should.
“Please stop singing,” a parent calls into the darkened nursery at 9:00 p.m. Half an hour later: “No more whispering! It’s a school night!” It’s almost midnight when the older children drag themselves away from their novels and turn out their bedside lights. As for the adults:
“It can’t be one in the morning. I’m wide awake.”
“So am I. Argh. The alarm goes off in five hours.”
“We’ve got to get on the right schedule.”
“True. Let’s just read a little longer.”
“Tomorrow night we’ll get everyone to bed early.”
“Right.”
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
