I’m not a coffee person. Never have been. My 6am isn’t a French press and a quiet moment. It’s a Red Bull cracked open in a dark kitchen, because Alayna’s already up and somebody has to be a functioning adult, and today that somebody is me.
The Diet Coke comes later. I poured one over ice at 9-something this morning. I found it again a little after noon, on top of the dryer, warm and flat, sitting exactly where I’d set it down to do something I genuinely can’t remember now.
Between the pour and the discovery: a diaper that defied physics, then eleven minutes hunting one specific sock. The Diet Coke never stood a chance.
This is the season nobody photographs. Everyone tells you to get the milestones, the first steps, the first words. Nobody warns you that you’ll measure a whole stretch of your life in drinks you never finished. Warm cans on the dryer. A fridge full of half-flat ones I keep meaning to dump.
They told me the days would be long and the years short. They left out the part where you forget what cold tastes like.
Some mornings it gets to me, if I’m honest. Not the soda. The fact that it’s 6am and it’s just me. There’s no one to hand her to while I sit down for five minutes. I do the mornings alone. I do most of it alone.
I used to pray for ten quiet minutes. Now I mostly talk to God over the sink while I rinse bottles. Figure He hears it over a cracked Red Bull too.
Somewhere around Alayna’s first birthday I stopped apologizing for it. People love to tell you Red Bull for breakfast is a problem. People who tell you that have usually slept. I’ll trade them. They can have my mornings, I’ll take their opinions.
This afternoon she found the warm Diet Coke before I did. Grabbed the can with both hands, tipped it toward her mouth, then looked at me deeply betrayed when I caught it, like I’d been hiding something good on purpose. Sorry, kid. That one’s mine.
It’s 1:30 now. The can’s still on the dryer, warm as bathwater. I’m going to go drink it anyway.
If your mornings look anything like mine, I send a short list most weeks of the cheap things that make them survivable. No spam, just what I actually use.