First, a confession…

I am not now, nor have I ever been — A MORNING PERSON!

Since childhood, I’ve strongly believed that mornings would be more bearable if they started two or three hours later than they do, but unfortunately, time waits for nobody, especially an incoherent-hot-mess-at-six a.m. like myself.

Thankfully, God knew when he created me and countless others like myself that we would need help starting our days, or things would end badly. Hence the existence of that life changing magic bean most people call coffee, but I call the sweet brain power elixir I can’t live without. Nobody really knows who discovered how to make a cup of coffee but whoever it was deserves our infinite debt of gratitude, and that of our families as well. Coffee is not just a drink, it’s life itself!

Think I’m exaggerating? Though coffee doesn’t usually let me down, there is a significant time lag between making it, consuming it and it fighting gravity to soak my little gray cells in liquid genius. The most dangerous twenty minutes of my day (and my husband’s too, by default) is right after I wake up, when all I can do is start the coffee and hope for the best.

My husband is a morning person, which makes our attempt at conversations interesting, to say the least. This morning was no exception. His usual routine is to get up and do his online “OMG check” before he hits the shower while I stumble around the kitchen. This is where he doomscrolls through the internet to see what has gone wacky while we were asleep – today he announced, “Oh my God, they’re going to let people with HIV in the military.”

My brain, or the few cells that were attempting rational thought, wanted to say:

Oh great, something else for medics to worry about when someone steps on an IED and gets their leg blown off.

That’s what I THOUGHT

That isn’t what I SAID.

Instead, the connection between my brain and my mouth was severed and I blurted out –

Oh great, something else for medics to worry about when someone steps on an IUD…

Uh, excuse me, brain? What the hell was that?

Who knew Freida Womb** was an explosives expert?

Bill didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. I took a second to process what just shot past my mental censor and the momentary silence was shattered when I started laughing. He joined in and we laughed until we couldn’t breathe.

I think tomorrow morning, I’ll wait to speak until I’ve had a few sips of coffee.

Nah…where’s the fun in that.

**Freida Womb was an inflatable IUD displayed at the Democratic National Convention.