A HOPEFUL HEART ◽ YOU
An Unhurried Morning
by Christina Oberon
There is something that happens to me every year when June arrives. The school drop-offs disappear from my morning routine. The alarm clocks go quiet. The calendar, so crammed for nine straight months, suddenly exhales. And I exhale with it. Summer is here. And for the first time in what feels like forever, neither my son nor I have to be anywhere in the very early morning.
I'll be honest, it takes me a few days to actually believe it. That first week of June, I still wake up braced for something. My body hasn't gotten the memo yet. I lie there in the early light, waiting for the rush to begin, and then slowly, like remembering a gift I'd forgotten I'd been given, it settles over me.
So I stay. I pull the covers up a little higher and I listen to the birds doing their elaborate, unbothered thing outside. I watch the light move across the ceiling. I don't reach for my phone. Not yet. I just let the morning be long and slow and mine in a way it simply hasn't been since last summer. And my son is doing the very same thing.
He has been counting down to this, the glorious, kid-sized freedom of sleeping in, of waking up with nowhere to rush to, no backpack to find, no shoes to hunt down in those last frantic minutes. On school mornings he drags himself out of bed like it costs him something. But on a slow June morning? He surfaces gradually, happily, on his own terms. There is something about watching my child rest, like really rest, that feels like its own kind of answered prayer.
Eventually we both find our way to the living room. He settles into whatever adventure is calling to him that morning, and I ease into my day, still including work, but the morning belongs to us a little longer before the world calls me back. I find myself pausing by my hibiscus plant, checking for new blooms. Then I drift toward the window to see if the hummingbirds have found the feeder yet. They usually have. There is something about those tiny, fierce, flickering little creatures that never gets old. They show up every morning like a small reminder that beautiful things are still happening, right outside the window, whether I stop to notice or not.
This is what I've come to think of as my summer reset. It's not a vacation or some grand wellness plan, just the ordinary miracle of a morning with a little more breathing room in it.
During the school year, hope feels like something I have to chase, something waiting on the other side of the next thing I finish. But on a slow June morning, hope just shows up. It hums quietly alongside the soft sounds of summer and the way the light comes through the window like it has all the time in the world.
June is the best kind of beginning. A sleeping-in, no-alarm, what-do-you-want-to-do-today kind of beginning.
And this year, just like every year, I am so glad it's here.