I think the threshhold of my bathroom is a mind-wiping device.
At 5:53am, I woke up unexpectedly. No alarm, although there was one additional child in the bed at the time, and they tend to kick. I mused at the idea of how he might be affected when the alarm went off in seven minutes, and concluded that he’d simply sleep through it, like any good 2-year-old. It then occurred to me that the alarm wouldn’t be going off in seven minutes, but in eight.
After a power outage on New Year’s Eve, I had to reset the alarm, and I was lazy. When the time shot past 6am by a minute, I let it slide. In this small aberrance I found a world of speculation, and, I believed, fleetingly solved one of the deepest mysteries of my time - why the snooze is only 7 minutes long.
Odd that the snooze length is exactly how early I woke up before the actual alarm. But that’s just coincidence.
So I spent the early morning springing from bed and darting over to the TV cabinet, atop which is perched our alarm. I’d poke the snooze button and head back to bed. Several miscellaneous thoughts passed through my mind while I repeated this process. Will Berta wake up after too many snoozes, erroneously thinking it’s her day to get up first? How many times will I hit the snooze button today? Will Riley ever stir? Why does he take up more space in the bed each time I get up to push the snooze button?
One important thing about the mystery of the snooze button is to note that when you add that extra minute, two snoozes puts you squarely at quarter past the hour of the alarm. This isn’t much different than 14 past the hour, but it seemed very significant in my hypnopompic state of marching across the 15 feet from my bed to the clock.
After the third hit, I had the answer to my question of “How many times?” and instead of returning to my warm spot under the covers, which was somehow now fully ensconced by toddler, I myself toddled off wearily to the bathroom, grinning with the full of knowledge of the brilliant secret of the seven minute snooze alarm.
And as I passed through the doorframe, flipped on the lights, rubbed the first bit of sleep from my eyes… gone.
