Last fall, just as the clock was falling back, I decided to start setting my alarm for an hour earlier. I was inspired by a friend, also a working mother, who gets up early in order to have several hours each day to herself to enjoy her coffee, meditate, and write. I get up and make my coffee and sit curled up under a blanket and get into a dreamy headspace. As I drink my coffee, my inspiration for the day comes, solutions to problems filter in. I have the spaciousness to dream, connecting to beautiful visions that today will somehow make more real.
In spite of having to get up earlier, if I have this time to myself every morning, I find I’m better able to meet the inevitable challenges of motherhood with patience.
Then I stumbled across a piece on NPR where Merriam-Webster asked for words that don’t have translation to English. “My name is Stephanie Thompson. I’m originally from Lebanon. And in Lebanese Arabic, one of my favorite words is soubhiye, which refers to that period of time in the morning when no one else is awake but you and you can have some quiet time to yourself before the household is awake. My mother often used to have a soubhiye by herself or with one of my aunts or friends. And now that I am a mom of two myself and I don’t sleep in anymore, I really value that time when you can just gather your thoughts and have that moment to yourself.”
Suddenly I felt connected to mothers all over the world, across time, sitting in the darkness of early morning, enjoying the peace of a sleeping house, and appreciating the spaciousness that a cup of coffee and the right environment can create. And to my own mom.
The only time I can remember my mom sitting down during the day was when she’d sit at our kitchen table and enjoy her morning coffee. It was a ritual for her. She was very precise about the whole preparation – measuring the coffee (pre-ground Medaglia D’oro out of the red, white, green and gold can), measuring the water, using a stovetop espresso maker. She’d drink her coffee out of the thinnest tea cup with a proper saucer underneath it. I suppose I would have taken the opportunity to climb into her lap. I can definitely remember enjoying the smell of the coffee and asking for sips, and being disappointed by the bitterness. The taste didn’t offer any insight into why this was so important, so beloved, something that she took the time for no matter how much was going on in our house. (I’m one of five kids, so there was always a lot).
I love that coffee, regardless of the quality, is the way that mothers all over the world are able to connect with themselves, however briefly, amidst all the chaos that is being a mother. And that coffee helps us show up as the parents we want to be.
