Saturday used to be my most favorite day of the week.

Sleeping late, leisurely coffee in the morning, with the newspaper that I used to obsess about reading. There were different clothes for Saturday, the light seemed brighter, the hours an endless stretch in front of you that led to a Saturday night that morphed into an even lazier Sunday morning, a bigger newspaper, more coffee and even more comfortable clothes.

Then life came along, with it’s endless responsibilities, and children that don’t get the ‘sleeping in’ on Saturday and suddenly it’s a free day that you don’t get during the week while you work and so you rush, do, move, make, clean, go, visit, fix, tend, leap and eventually, collapse. And then Sunday comes, and it’s a short segue into Monday, where the cycle starts all over again.

Or, like me, you take a job where you work every single Saturday, the busiest day of all in the grocery business and then Sunday takes on a whole new meaning. The one day of complete and total rest that you get. And you realize, quickly, that it isn’t enough. You realize how much you miss those lazy, long Saturdays.

My teenager, as teens go, never gets up early. I loved that stage when he finally stopped bouncing out of bed so early, where I could wake up late on the weekend without the gasp of panic that I’d missed something, that he’d woken and stealthily slipped downstairs to wreak havoc on our house and our kitchen. And now, with working every Saturday, I miss those quiet and loose mornings of nothing.

This past weekend I had one of those throwback weekends, where I could wake on Saturday with the entire day ahead of me, that light and those clothes and the coffee that somehow tastes so different and no real tasks that needed immediate attention. I could just stare down the hours, flitting from one point of interest in my home to another and think ‘If I want to just stop, right here, and just be right here, right now, I can do that.’ and it felt amazing, and lazy and grand. And when Sunday came around, instead of using those hours to recharge and rethink, I felt enough energy to bust out several tasks on the home front, especially after a vigorous morning hike.

I miss my weekends. Real weekends of down time and recharging. I miss lazy mornings with Saturday coffee, staring out the window as the world wakes up. Because somehow, on Tuesday, when my real weekend starts, it doesn’t feel the same. It’s Tuesday light and air, and the clothes don’t speak in the same way. It’s Tuesday, not Saturday, but it is a ‘Saturday’ because it’s my ‘weekend’ even though it’s the middle of the week and that just doesn’t make much sense in my head.

So I guess, instead of trying to force one day to always feel like another, sort of like expecting Easter to feel like Christmas, I’ll just remember to take off a Saturday when I can manage it, to not expect Tuesday to be anything besides Monday’s follow-up and to embrace my mid-week ‘weekend’, time off when the majority are at work, coffee in the Tuesday morning, a different light. It’s still a long stretch of hours that morph in to an evening that follows through with another long day of hours.

And all those hours are mine. Whether Saturday, or Tuesday.