Waking up is hard to do
By LYDIA TEH
WHEN I was much younger, wild elephants couldn’t wake me up from my slumber. My mother used to have a tough time waking me up. Still she found it easier waking me up in the mornings than trying to rouse me from nocturnal sleep.

Those days my father used to buy supper home after dropping off his last cab passenger. My siblings and I looked forward to digging into the oodles of fried noodles but due to the late nights he kept, this meant that sometimes we were asleep by the time he got home. Despite instructions to my mother to rouse me if father brings supper home, inevitably I would wake up some mornings to discover that I had missed out on supper the previous night.

If I accused her of not waking me up, she would tell me that she tried but that I slept like a pig. For the non-Chinese, this is our equivalent of sleeping like a log. All the hand-pulling, shoulder-tugging and face-slapping couldn’t bring me out of the Land of Nod. What was more surprising was that I would have no recollection of the calisthenics that went into rousing me.

When I got married and had children, a 180-degree change took place. If before I slept like a bear in hibernation, motherhood bestowed a catnap’s characteristic on my slumber. I became like this young mother whom I read about in a Reader’s Digest anecdote.

A doctor was preparing to go for his night shift when he accidentally knocked down a metal ashtray. He dived to catch it but both crashed down onto the floor loudly. He held his breath, afraid that he might have woken up his wife and baby. Nobody stirred.

Then the baby coughed. His wife flew out from their bedroom to the baby’s room. After checking on the baby, she came out from the nursery and, seeing her husband lying on the floor for the first time, asked: “What’s with you?”

God is wise. When He created women, He stirred in some maternal instincts so that even the soundest of sleepers can wake up to tend to their little ones. Though my babies and I slept in different rooms, the teeniest cry would jolt me from my sleep. Firecracker or thunder I can sleep through, baby’s little whimper I can’t.

Now that my youngest child is two, the biological alarm clock is somewhat out-of-use. My little girl still wakes me up in the morning with her cry for “Milk! Milk!” but most of the time I have to rely on the radio alarm to wake me up to prepare my preschooler for kindergarten.

I tried to rise and shine early by heeding the Bible’s admonition of “Sluggard, go to the ant and observe her ways”. Not that I intend to jump out of bed and go ant-hunting in every nook and cranny of my house, mind you. Once in a spurt of zeal, I even pasted the verse on my dressing table mirror but its warning that “your poverty will come in like a vagabond” due to “a little sleep, a little slumber and a little folding of the hands to rest” wasn’t stern enough to motivate me to become an early bird. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.

I read in the papers recently about Hollywood’s Celebrity Wake-Up Service which has signed up Pamela Anderson to lend her voice to urge subscribers to “wake up, get down on your hands and knees and bark like a dog.” I don’t think that line is going to work with me. The vision of our dour-faced Boxer wagging her stump of a tail would spring to mind and that’s not a very appealing picture, I assure you.

Pam would probably need to deliver this stinging rebuke in her sternest dulcet voice to get me going. “Every second the sun releases enough energy to supply our planet with power for over a billion years – and you can’t get out of bed? What kind of work ethic is that? A bad one, that’s what. Now get up, get to work, and fuse with hydrogen, or a least have some coffee.” But for US$7.99 (RM31), I think I’ll pass.

A better idea would be to get a recorder and tape my toddler’s cries of “Milk! Milk! Milk! Milk!” Never fails to wake me up unless hubby is up-and-about and I’d just holler “Daddy, make milk for Su Yen!” and sink back into bed.

-END

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