MAMA BEAR MOXIE: Sanity savings time

I have never been a fan of daylight saving time. I have had my fair share of late nights, early mornings and the occasional being late to church-to-hear- the-very-last -sermon-your- pastor- will-preach- before-moving. As a kid, you don’t really notice the change. As a teen, you may understand the glimpse of daylight saving time. As an adult, it becomes more of an inconvenience.

But as a mom, daylight saving time is pure evil.

OK, maybe not actually the evil one himself, but if there is anything that has the potential to cause a horrible rippling effect on your sanity, it is daylight saving time. In the fall, others see the potential to sleep in an extra hour. As a mom, this means you will actually be getting up an hour earlier as you rise to the internal clock of little ones who can’t tell the difference between a letter and a number. Baby usually gets up at 6 a.m.? Hello 5 a.m. And not just one day and the little bundle adjusts to the obviously slow clocks, but weeks upon weeks of crying, cranky children whose schedule has been torn to pieces by this insane and futile attempt to save energy.

For the love of everything that is holy!

And what is with states that just choose to not follow this mandated “drink the kool-aid” rule? Arizona and Hawaii … you are my heroes. There had to be a mom in those states who understood the underlying issue here and stood up for her fellow mothers statewide. Well that, or it is their strategically placed locations among time zone boundaries, but I am pretty sure it was a mom who started the idea.

I was always under the impression that this idea came about to help save energy during wartime. After doing some research, and by research I mean believing every edit of perfect strangers on Wikipedia, I have learned that I have been saying it wrong my entire life. It isn’t called daylight savings time but daylight saving time. And apparently this idea has been going on for centuries with evidence that early civilizations adjusted their days to coincide with the sun.

Most countries in North America and Europe observe daylight saving time while most countries in Africa, Asia and South America do not.

I understand trying to get as much sunlight in a normal work day as possible, but why can’t we leave the clocks like they are during the summer? This would result in darker winter mornings, but would also take away the possibility of it being sunset at 4 p.m. I would rather get up and start my work in the dark than come home after a long day needing a flashlight to be outside.

Maybe I’m a bit on my soap box here. I have to admit I have contacted my congressman about this horrible idea on more than one occasion. Not that it did any good. Six months later, I had to, yet again, bow to the generalized rule of changing my clocks. Hey, I tried. No doubt you will see other moms on social media this week relenting about the pure evilness of this useless tradition. It seems that we are all getting fed up with this daylight saving thing.

And it is about time (pun intended).