Muscle Memory

There is still enough baby fat for me to believeably incite a conversation between my daughter and my navel. I have not yet begun "walking away the pounds," as I had hoped I would by this point in the new year. My schedule is beginning to move in that general direction in the mornings, but I just have to tweak my evening routine so that I will get to bed earlier. There is no way I will ever discipline myself to get up extra early for exercise when I haven't had enough sleep. I will rationalize in my drowsiness that sleep is just as important for my body as exercise, and I will grab the alarm clock while pressing the snooze button and proceed to hold it in my hand in the bed so that I can just effortlessly press it again in my quasi-sleep every nine minutes until Ava cries out "Mommy! MUCK! MUCK!" shortly thereafter.

I feel so irresponsible when I really think about how difficult self-discipline is for me. I have always been like this. By junior high, I was the kid who could never get up in the morning, even after her mother came in and abruptly turned on the lights and threw back the covers, yelling obnoxious cliches like "RISE AND SHINE!" or "UP AND AT 'EM!" I would convince her I was awake, and then I would get up only long enough to turn on the news and lie down on the foot of the bed, "waiting to find out what the weather was like" or to open my closet door and lie down on the foot of the bed staring into the closet "to decide what to wear." Naturally I would fall right back asleep with the covers pulled backwards over on myself, all cozy warm, rationalizing that these events were perfectly reasonable. In a few minutes, Mom would come blustering in again, this time yelling "CAROLE DIANNE! I TOLD YOU TO GET UP! NOW GET UP!" It was miserable for both me and my mother daily (and my dad on all those days when we had to chase the school bus along my route, and he was inevitably late for work because of me). I never had my homework done by the time Sunday nights rolled around either. It totally stressed me out that it was looming in the future, and I might run out of time to get it done, and yet I had no mechanism for making myself do any part of it like I should have before Sunday after evening church. That sure didn't leave much time to get things done. And being a diligent contact lens wearer was quite a feat for me during the college years. It was hard enough to get out of bed and to early classes within ten minutes of on time. Ginger saved me from certain doom in Old Testament our freshman year simply by ensuring that I was "up and at 'em" before she went to class. She eventually just resorted to waiting on me so that I would hurry to keep her from being late, which in turn helped me get there earlier than I would have on my own. The wise old professor soon fell savvy to this scheme and no longer marked either of us tardy. He trusted that Ginger would get us both there. But I should have been able to get there on my own! This has plagued me forever, and I am fearful of the pending personality closure that I'm told happens around age 28-30. Here I am, staring 28 in the face and desperate to counter all my worst qualities before I get too old to care, or to have the drive to change myself, or whatever happens that makes you stuck like you are.

On the positive side of my ordeal, I recently realized that I can't remember the last time I slept without my bite plate (a device for combatting my bruxism and therefore my TMJ syndrome). I have employed it consistently for probably the better part of a year without slipping up, and evidently without thinking about it too much. There was a time when I never would have thought it possible. I finally trained myself to do certain things before bed until they became automatic. It seems that if something actually provides enough of a benefit for my disciplined effort, then I really do eventually get it programmed into the good ol' muscle memory. I'm desperately trying to put some things there now (washing dishes and cleaning up the kitchen after supper, putting Ava's toys away each evening, managing all the paper that accumulates in our home, etc.), and I have to believe that if I benefit from doing them enough times so that not doing them feels even more uncomfortable than the nuisance of doing them in the first place, then (and probably only then) perhaps they too will enter the muscle memory and become automatic. That would be so liberating! I think life would feel easier if this stuff happened "automatically" for me. I know it means I will be doing consistent work to keep everything maintained, but that was my goal all along. I love being at home, but I want my home to feel like a nice place to be--a peaceful retreat after a long day, somewhere friends could drop by on a whim without embarrassing me. I'm getting there, slowly but surely.