At home, the morning is like a child that we share custody of on weekends.

Midnight is when it arrives to the house. Two daughters greet it with open arms, wide eyes, and lights.
either the numb blue lights of the television & its reflection in sleepy blinking cats,
or outside with streetlights, headlights, and other willing friends.

The daughters keep the morning company until the sky starts to pink and the sun is coming up. More cars on the road, more honking, more squawking and more chirping; birds alarmed at being awake by themselves. Among other things awake at this time are the lights in the third bedroom upstairs. The two daughters are now in their beds, tired of playing with the dawn. It puts on a face full of sunlight and flowers and goes to greet the mother in the only lit bedroom.

The mother of the daughters treats the morning very well too, but in her own way. She is freshly showered, freshly scented. Maybe she will take a walk around the park for a few kilometers, the streetlights are off by then and she is breaking a clean sweat. Or maybe she will take to the market and get groceries. If she already has groceries, she will buy some food and cook the rest.

She has spoken to the cats, she has traded calories with the morning, and she has laid out food on the table every weekend. Even though she must know by now that breakfast exists only to her, the food is laid out nonetheless, a belated morning wish,

probably in replacement of her person, because she is fast asleep on the sofa downstairs by noon, when her pair of daughters are finally awake and go downstairs to find her.

(My mother isn’t well acquainted with dawn. My sister and I are hardly post-dawn people. You can see slight traces of it in our hair when we wake up, grumpy from fending off the sun in our eyes. We take turns living entire secret lives over each other’s hibernation, it is just that we leave behind a properly locked gate, grill, door, and she leaves behind a house entirely woken up for us. With cold food.)

The morning is a child that grows up in 12 hours every day. We didn’t plan to take shifts and watch it transition, but the pattern just fell that way.