Monday Morning Again

It’s Monday morning. Again. I realize it comes around once a week, but really? It’s just one of those things in life that annoys my body into torrents of misery on all levels. Sleep in? Nope, there goes the alarm. Enjoy the freedom to do what I want? Nope, time to go to work where there are humans who actually require me to do stuff. Life real stuff, not just playing around with the look of this blog, which I spent most of yesterday doing to almost no avail except for changing the font. Eat what I want? Nope, I have a designated lunch time. It’s just the structure of a normal work week, but I have never been a real fan.

For someone who grew up with structure within every day, every hour, and every nanosecond, one would think I would be used to this because it was instilled in me so early. Life is structure. One follows rules. Days have schedules. Meals not only have exact times but contain the same elements each day. Meat, canned or frozen vegetables, and boiled potatoes were dinner every night when I was growing up. I still can’t look at anything that resembles a boiled potato without flashbacks of sitting at the table and not being able to leave until I ate the damn things.

I didn’t know it then, but I was struggling, even as a child, between the strongly German family in which I was growing up and the sensitive, creative personality I was born with. I wanted to write and make paper buildings held together by miles of Scotch tape and play in the woods with no time constraints. But my family was ruled by the clock. I wish I could have rigged some sort of a counter on my Mom’s eyes so I could have had a record of how many times a day she looked at her watch or a clock. When we cleaned out her house, we found clocks in every room (of course), but in her living room there were FIVE CLOCKS. Who, I beg you, needs five clocks in one room? But that’s just how she was. My dad was ruled by the clock in terms of work, but he wasn’t as completely obsessive as my mom was. And so I toggled back and forth, forth and back, between trying to be me and being the perfect little German daughter. This was not an easy task. It never was.

This is what Monday mornings are to me, I guess. Putting the free and creative part of myself back into a box and opening the other box, the one containing the part where structure reigns. I guess I’ll never get used to Monday mornings. I’ll always want the freedom I was not given as a child. But, as I straddle the line between 50 and 60, isn’t it really time to fuse the two sides of myself? Come together as one entity that is not still whining every Monday morning?

Perhaps this merging of my two selves is indeed possible, and I strive to sew the seam that seals them as one lovely garment that I can wear proudly. In the meantime, however, I have only one question: where’s the coffee?