Prewarmed Clothes

A mother reflects in the early morning before waking her child for school.

To my child: It's five thirty in the morning and I’m sitting here at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in my hand and the rain pattering on the roof above me. I’m still sleepy, but the coffee helps with that. It’s good strong coffee. I’m never up this early, but Alan always is. I wonder if he is already awake, if he is already getting dressed in whichever hotel his work put him up in. He probably is. Alan always gets up early. In the background I can hear the tumbling of clothes in the dryer, the very clothes you picked out last night when I asked you what you wanted to wear tomorrow. You chose jeans and your pink sweatshirt. I can hear the zipper on the sweatshirt now as it spins round and round, tapping against the metal surface of the dreyer. Your clothes have been warming for some time now and you are still asleep. When you wake it will be because I have thrown open the door to your room and shouted, “Good Morning!” just as my mother used to do to me. You will squint and frown and stir beneath your sheets in the way that you do, and I will make up for the cruelty of forcing you from your bed at this hour by presenting you with prewarmed clothes from the dreyer. My mother used to do that for me as well. There's about five minutes to go until that moment. My coffee is half finished and the chores for the morning are all done. Breakfast is sitting on the stove, but I will wait until you are with me to eat it.

 

I can hear the rain on the roof like fingers tapping impatiently. It is sunrise, probably, but the light isn’t visible yet. All of the windows in this apartment face west. This time of morning makes me think of your father. The day after we were married he woke early, and he made breakfast and brought it into our bedroom. After I had woken up we sat and ate it on the bed. The next day he did the same thing. And the day after that, and every day. I asked him if he planned on making me breakfast in bed every single day. He responded by asking if I planned on staying his wife every single day. And even though we both had to go to work as soon as breakfast was over, it made such a difference to start the day like that: In blankets, with each other, with eggs and bacon, with crumbs in our sheets. Each morning, when I felt him wake early and climb from bed to make me breakfast I thought that it was a chore for him. I thought it was something he made himself do. I would always tell him that he didn’t have to do it. And of course he did it anyways.

 

But today I realize that it was no more of a chore for him than it was for me to wake early for you and put your clothes in the dryer. I see now that it's nothing like a chore at all. It’s a gift. It’s a privilege to be able to wake early and to serve the ones you love. It’s a joy and it only becomes a chore if you do it for yourself.

Sunlight is creeping through the western window and my coffee has gone cold. I’ve let it sit while I’ve sat and thought. The dryer will be beeping any minute now and it’s time that I wake you up. The rain makes for lonely mornings. Only a week until Alan gets home. Then we will have breakfast in bed again. I wonder what he will bring for you. He always brings you something when he comes home from his trips. I’m standing in your doorway now and it seems a shame to wake you. You look so peaceful in your sleep, in your dreams. But wake you I must, and I know that it isn’t truly a shame, not so long as there are prewarmed clothes.

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