Dear Husband: Enough With The Snooze Button

I fucking hate snooze buttons. I don’t need one and I never have. I hear an alarm, I wake up. No question, no fuss, no chance I’m going back to sleep. I’m fucking awake. On rare occasions, I might drift off again, but only if I make the conscious decision to sleep in and I have literally nothing else to do that morning. But hello, mother who works at home. Like that ever happens. So I wake up almost every single morning at the asscrack of dawn. I need this time to exist as a separate entity from my children. Many moms do.

My husband asks what time I want to get up in the morning. “Five o’clock,” I say, because I often get up at five. “Me too,” he agrees, and sets his alarm. Well, alarms. Plural. Because my husband is incapable of getting out of bed without hitting a snooze button.

Half the time, this is what happens: at 4:30, his alarm blares. I’m immediately awake, because I wake the fuck up when an alarm goes off. I try to lie there and fall back to sleep. Useless. So I end up stumbling into the kitchen, fumbling with the coffee, and booting up my computer. At 4:30 in the goddamn morning. The alarm blares again at 4:45. It’s like an airhorn; I can hear it from the living room. He slams snooze. Then again at 5:00. Snooze. Again at 5:30. Snooze. He may stumble in at 6 o’clock.

“How long have you been awake?” he asks.

“Since 4:30,” I growl.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He’s truly contrite.

This isn’t the worst of it. Because he hits snooze so often, and in his sleep, he doesn’t trust himself not to hit the snooze button. So my husband has multiple pre-programmed snooze alarms set to go off during the week that assure he will wake up for work. These go off whether or not he’s actually fucking awake. Like, say, if he’s in the shower. Or if he’s in another room dressing. This means that the stupid phone randomly blares at certain times. And more often than not, I have to drag my ass off the couch and turn the fucking thing off. Not my job.

Except if I don’t get there quickly enough, the worst thing happens.

The kids wake up.

Mornings are sacred. Mornings are kid-free. Mornings are a chance for me not to parent. Not to harangue small children into eating breakfast, out of fighting. Not to entertain them. Not to listen to my seven-year-old sing, tunelessly and endlessly, “I’ll take you right into the DANGER ZONE!” Not to say, over and over, “No, you cannot watch TV,” and watch them crumple. Not to yell at the dogs to calm the hell down because my 9-year-old is awake and he’s the one who feeds them so clearly they must be fed RIGHT THE FUCK NOW.

And they’ll tell me, “Oh, Daddy’s alarm woke me up an hour ago. I’ve been in my bed reading.”

Well, fuck that noise.

Sometimes the snooze alarms don’t even work. I have to go in and yell at him to wake up. This is annoying, because the only way to wake him is to yell, and this makes me look like a raging bitch. But he won’t wake up if you’re nice. So he wakes up huffy, snarking, “God, you could have been a little nicer about it.” REALLY?!

Once morning, he kept hitting snooze and I was busy working. At 7:30, my 9-year-old asked where he was and I sort of went, “Oh, shit.” I thought he’d left, but he hadn’t even gotten out of bed yet. Daddy was late for work that morning. He also accidentally wore a shirt that smelled like dog pee (it’s best not to ask why, but I suppose he grabbed the first thing he found on the floor and our Boxer, god love her, is elderly).

So god forbid I want to sleep in. It’s impossible. If he’s getting up, I’m getting up. Full stop. Because, well, alarm. Then he’s slamming snooze and I’m awake anyway. Which sucks, because there’s no one to make my coffee and hand it to me in a Yeti cup.

Once in a while, he’ll get up without hitting the goddamn button. But most of the time? Oh, “just a few more minutes.”

What the fuck good does a few more minutes do? I mean, seriously. Ask your goddamn Fitbit or something. Maybe Google it. According to Business Insider, it doesn’t do a goddamn thing: “Most sleep researchers says snoozing won’t make you any more rested. If anything, it can make it harder for you to wake up.” Huffington Post says, “When you let yourself go back to sleep, your body thinks, ‘False alarm! I guess I didn’t need to do anything, because we’re not getting up after all,’ and settles in. When that buzzer goes off a second time … your body and brain are taken by surprise, resulting in that groggy, fuzzy-headed feeling called sleep inertia. The more you snooze, the more confused your body and brain get.”

Basically, hitting snooze is bad for you. AND those you live with. Setting multiple snooze alarms, waking up everyone in the house, and annoying the shit out of them sucks.

Just wake up already.