Daylight Savings Time
Yes, I know we are almost two weeks away from our clocks rewinding, but as usual, I still have something to say about it. As a teenager, “fall back” was delightful. That extra hour of sleep invigorating. Sunday was never so full of rest, after all, isn’t that what the Sabbath was for? It was easy enough to ignore the fact that a few months later we would “spring forward”. Even when the time came to lose an hour, I would gripe about it for approximately two moments, once to my parents and once to my friends, and then life moved on.
But now as a mother, “fall back” or “spring forward” means the same thing... grumpy children. And the spoils of inadequate sleep last a lot longer than two moments. I can see the sea of mother’s heads bobbing up and down in agreement — all of this goes without explanation, so naturally, I have something to say about it.
My oldest, without proper sleep, is both bickerer and bicker-able. I admit it is not entirely her fault, something about inheritable traits and her mother having similar issues or something. Last Monday morning was particularly rough for more than one in our party and my oldest ended up missing the bus. I found myself spit firing against no one in particular within my own head about what had happened to throw us in the trenches. I did not wait long before Daylight Savings Time laughed. Curses.
Wednesday morning came and my youngest daughter screamed the entire morning ritual of school drop off. She wanted to put on her shoes by herself and I had made the mistake of doing that job for her. Her demands were simple, “Take me back home!” The only trouble was, once we got home, she wanted to go back out. Seeing there was nothing I could do to change her predicament, I told her I would be just inside the house if she needed me. She proceeded to scream for twenty minutes before coming inside and asking for a snack. Who happily took the blame when I questioned, “What is going on today?!” Daylight Savings Time.
I could recount several more moments, but I don’t want the bobbing heads to lull, after all, we’ve already lost an hour of sleep. To combat the rising blame (though DST seemed happy to take it) I decided to remind myself why we even have Daylight Savings Time and the good it did for the people before us, particularly in our world’s two wars. It saved us energy. It brought more sunshine to the evening, which consequently brought more baseball sales and made many people happy. Well, besides the movie industry, who lost sales because people didn’t want to go into a dark theater while it was still so blasted light outside. I digress.
While spending more than a fair share of brain time with DST over the last twelve days, I have come to this conclusion. At its instatement, Daylight Savings Time had a purpose greater than it does today. It served the generations before me and the difficult time they had to learn to live through. It got me thinking, what are the things that I value, that have great purpose in my life, but may not or even will not have purpose in the lives of my children? My grandchildren? Will I be sad to see it go?
I can hope that I will be the kind of person that understands, that listens to the gripes and bickerings about things that once had Great Purpose, but I imagine it will hurt. It will hurt and no one but the sea of Old Age will understand as our tide goes out and a new generation’s comes in.
Already, the signs of poor sleep are forgotten mist and the sun is shining on more important things, like how I’m going to pack the seven of us back home after our week of Spring Break. Daylight Savings Time is safely tucked away until the fall when I’ll wake up early because the clocks have a mind of their own and my children’s biological clocks do not and, naturally, I’ll have something to say about it.