The hour or two before sunrise was the hardest time with a newborn. When the schedule was two to three hours between feedings, it was the last stretch that felt the longest. You watch the clock and calculate how long until the next one, your mind foggy but still somehow alert to every rustle and sigh. Sunrise meant survival; one more day completed for a new soul and a new mom. It also meant the world would soon start moving again, and maybe, if you were lucky, someone else would take a turn.

Back then, the quiet wasn't peace — it was isolation. You were awake while everyone else wasn't, living in the timeless space between exhaustion and devotion. The hum of the refrigerator and the slow rhythm of the baby's breathing were the only proof that you hadn't somehow slipped out of the world entirely.

Now, that same time of morning is the one I sometimes wish lasted longer. It's the soft stretch before the manic race of the day begins, before the emails, the alarms, or finding out that a favorite pair of pants hasn't been washed yet. The hum of the refrigerator is still there, but now it's joined by the gentle snore of children in their rooms, and a cat who seems annoyed that I'm disrupting his night shift.

There's no one crying now. No bottles to wash. Just space to think, and maybe even breathe. The light is still dim, but it's no longer oppressive. It feels like a gift.

Time changes shape, depending on what fills it. The same hour can feel like forever or a blink, depending on who you're waiting for or who's waiting on you.

When you're young, mornings feel like something you must rush into, as if the whole world depends on your momentum. Then you have a child, and mornings become something to survive. Later, they might become something to savor. And if we're lucky, someday they might return to the quiet, when the house no longer holds small snores or the stomp of rushing feet.

We spend so much of our lives trying to negotiate with time. We wish the hard hours away and beg the tender ones to linger. We rush through seasons we later ache to return to. But time never bargains. It keeps moving, steady, and unbothered. What changes is how we meet it and how our hearts keep recalibrating to the moments we're in.

Maybe the lesson isn't in mastering time but in learning to stand still within it. To see each hour for what it holds: the fatigue, the peace, the ache, the sweetness.

The rhythm of life teaches us to reinterpret time, over and over again. What once felt like loneliness becomes solitude. What once felt like waiting becomes rest.

I sometimes wonder how I'll see this same twilight time 10 or 15 years from now. Will I still wake before the sun, listening for sounds that no longer come from down the hall?

The hour before sunrise will keep coming, no matter where we are in life. Some mornings it will feel endless. Others, fleeting. And maybe, years from now, when the rooms have fallen silent and the small snores have drifted away, I'll still find myself waking early.

There's no way to know. But I suspect I'll still measure mornings by what they have held and continue to hold: love, memory, and the faint hum of a world not yet awake.

Cassie McClure is a writer, millennial, and unapologetic fan of the Oxford comma. She can be contacted at [email protected]. To learn more about Cassie McClure and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Grant McIver at Unsplash