There are a lot of modern conveniences I’ve come to appreciate in life. Heated seats. Grocery delivery. My Keurig coffee maker. But the one thing I do not have — and will apparently never have again — is a snooze button.
Merida does not believe in snooze buttons.
Every morning — and I do mean every morning — I wake up because I can feel it. That feeling of being watched. Not in a horror movie kind of way. More like a managerial oversight kind of way.
I open one eye, just slightly.
And there she is.
Merida. Sitting. Staring. Unblinking.
She doesn’t bark. She doesn’t whine. She doesn’t paw at the bed. That would be too obvious. Too amateur.
No. She prefers psychological warfare.
She positions herself close enough that I can feel her presence, but far enough that she maintains plausible deniability. If I move, she immediately perks up as if to say, “Oh good. You’re awake.”
I have tried pretending to still be asleep.
She knows.
I don’t know how she knows, but she knows.
Merida knows our routines better than we do.
She can tell the difference between me rolling over to sleep and me rolling over to surrender. She understands patterns — and heaven help us if we break one. If I dare to sleep in, even by twenty minutes, she does not panic. She escalates. The stare intensifies. It’s never chaotic. It’s strategic.
There is something oddly comforting about knowing that no matter what the world is doing, no matter what news cycle is spinning, no matter how late I stayed up scrolling or thinking or solving nothing in particular — Merida will be there.
On duty. Focused. Unwavering. Staring straight into my soul at 5:02 a.m. And while I would absolutely love the option of a snooze button… I also know this: one day there will be a morning when I wake up without that stare.
And I will miss it.
So tomorrow, when I feel the weight of her expectations pressing gently against my closed eyelids, I’ll sigh dramatically — just to make her work for it — and then I’ll sit up.
Because Merida has things to do.
And apparently, so do I.
Now you know: 7-year-old Bonnie Lohman went to the store with her stepdad & saw her own face on a milk carton. She asked to keep the image & was allowed to on the condition she kept it a secret. However after her neighbors saw the image & reported it, she learned that her mom had kidnapped her when she was 3.