For eight weeks now, I have been able to get up and write before 5 am. It’s been a longtime coming.
Over the summer, we embarked on moving our newly two-year-old out of our room and into the room she shares with her big brother. My husband was absolutely key in this working, and now mainly due to him, I have been able to sleep through the night and wake up before the children to write.
It is hard to emphasize enough how happy I am to be getting up at 4:30 in the morning to write. I love it so much.
I am a morning person, who also absolutely needs at least eight hours of sleep a night, and I fall asleep pretty fast as long as I have a consistent bedtime. So that means I need to be in bed by 8:15pm or so, if I am going to get up at 4:30am. It also means that I need to not be nursing babies in the middle of the night. And it’s taken nearly five years of motherhood to get to this point.
This is a new season.
Of course the metaphor of season when it comes to motherhood is nothing new; it’s so common it’s practically a cliché. But I’ve been thinking about how as someone pretty disconnected to farming, I tend to think of things being “in” or “out” of season in terms of the grocery store. Like how buying fresh blueberries out of season means buy a really tiny carton of really expensive blueberries that are going to probably be a little bruised and mealy.
I don’t tend to think of it like someone going outside in the dead of winter in Wisconsin with twelve inches of snow above 12 inches of frozen ground and trying to plant blueberry seeds. It’s not inconvenient and expensive; it’s just not even a remote possibility.
But that absolutely crazy futility of thinking of planting blueberry seeds in a December snowstorm is going to lead to me eating fresh blueberries in eight weeks is sometimes the kind of wacky expectation I subconsciously held for writing and motherhood. If I had just tried hard enough, I could have found a way, even though it wasn’t the season.
So when I’d think about writing in motherhood and seasons, I’d tend to think of those expensive out-of-season store blueberries: it would be hard, and it cost a lot, but I could do it if I tried hard enough. And I do think that there are parts of motherhood that are like that. But there are also parts of motherhood that are like flinging blueberry seeds out on top of snowflakes.
How you discern the kind of barriers you are up against in the limits of your time and energy as a young mother is very challenging. I think it’s deeply personal. Every mother, every couple, every family has to look at what the needs are of body and soul of the people in their household and figure out a way to navigate them.
You can have it all when it comes to motherhood and vocational calling, but you can’t have it all at the same time.
For me, nursing my kids in the middle of the night until they were two and having my kids 2.5 years apart meant that there was not a lot of consistent time for writing. There just wasn’t. And I don’t regret it. They weren’t terribly good sleepers, and I needed as much sleep as I could get.
There were a stretches where we all got into a good rhythm, and I could write during naptime with some regularity. And then there were stretches where I was just so tired by the time I got both kids down for naptime, that it was hard to write more than once a week.
I’m grateful for the work that I was able to do these last five years. I was able to blog a bit about the experience, and to keep my novel writing alive, slowly working on a few chapters a year. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough.
Steady progress, not matter how slow, adds up over time.
I deeply believe that for me, long-term, steady creativity comes out of long-term steady health. I cannot build a writing carrier on adrenaline (or coffee) and its sisters stress and anxiety. I cannot write instead of sleep. I cannot write instead of exercise. I cannot write instead of eating good food.
First off, I’d be miserable. And secondly, my writing wouldn’t be very good. One of the strange gifts of dyslexia is that my tired writing is much more of a mess than my well-rested writing, so it’s much more efficient to write when I’m alert and fresh. So between that and my general sensitivity to stressors, I have a high threshold or tipping point I have to meet before I can be productive.
This is not true for everyone else. And that’s ok. Some people thrive under a deadline and a little acute stress. Some people can write fast and then rest. Some people stay up all night in a literary frenzy birthing a book like a full term baby. There are a bunch of these montage scenes in movies where in the course of four-minutes in the film and four nights of the movie the author writes and writes and writes and the book spills out. (Two movies I recently saw with these are Little Women and Guernsey.)
But that’s not me.
I willingly give most of my energy to my children. They are young, and we are blessed to live in a small cozy house, with one car, and can make it on my husband’s teacher salary.
This is a stewarded privilege.
We don’t have any debt outside of our mortgage, and we had a lot of family help to get through two undergraduate and three masters degrees to get to where we are. We got state health care for my pregnancies, and so far we haven’t had any major medical conditions or complications. I have been so blessed to be able to stay home with the kids and write here and there during naptime. But living here also means that we live far away from our parents, and the free childcare I know they’d love to offer if they could.
Other mothers have to work. They have to. They have to have childcare, and they have to work. It’s a necessity to put food on the table and a roof over their head.
Other families figure out a way to get their mothers (or fathers!) consistent writing time because it’s really important, and they are able to make it a priority, whether that’s outside childcare or spouses taking turns watching kids. For them that kind of writing time is an investment, perhaps one that makes it possible for that writing to be a source of income for the family. And of course, we’ve done as much of this as we can over the last five years. But now we are at a new stage.
Everyone moves through the seasons of motherhood at different rates. Some people have kids that are great sleepers, and with a few days of sleep training here or there they really can have sustained focus throughout the day. Other people have high needs children, who for years need the kind of night-time parenting that leaves no room for anything beyond basic survival.
It’s kind of like how strawberry season in Florida is in January and in Wisconsin it’s in June.
So it’s been slow in coming, but here I am. 4:30 in the morning: rested and writing.
Practically, what is working right now for my early morning writing are a couple of things, and I’ll share those below. We came to this schedule slowly through a lot of discussions and plans in the summer. This is so specific of a plan for us right now, that it might not be applicable or of interest to most people. It might not be applicable or of intertest to me in six months. This too shall pass is the bittersweet reality of young motherhood.
Here’s the nitty-gritty of how we’re making 4:30 writing work.
- My husband Evan is completely in charge of nighttime kids. As in he sleeps in their room, and takes care of them if they wake in the night. I get Lily to sleep (ie. nurse her) and then I go directly to bed; hopefully, by 8:15. If Jackson hasn’t napped, he’s usually asleep, but if he has napped he’s still up. Evan sits on the floor reading with a red lamp next to the full-size twin bed he and Jackson share.
- To make that bedtime work for everyone, a couple of things needed to get moved earlier, the most important of which was naptime. Lily has to be down for a nap by 12:30 and woken up from her nap by 2:30 if she’s going to sleep by 8:15 pm. If Jackson naps, he needs to be up by 2:15 . Also, the kids really need to be getting into the bathtub by 7:30 pm.
- So I need to be completely ready for bedtime by 7:30 pm, meaning the kitchen is cleaned up, the dishwasher is loaded and set on a delayed start, I have taken a shower, brushed my teeth and done all my other night time routines (skin care, magnesium, flossing, put water in my CPAP machine, netti pot etc.) so I can be filling the tub at 7:30.
- For all that clean up to happen, dinner needs to be pretty early. Ideally, we are all done eating dinner by 6:00 although 6:30 is not unusual. So I’m always aiming at having us start to eat dinner by 5:00 although 5:30 is probably more accurate. This means on the days Evan has late meetings at school, we start to eat dinner without him. (This is especially true in COVID times when there are extra steps for him to shower and disinfect things as soon as he comes in before he enters into family life.) Then after dinner, Evan takes the kids while I clean up. (Of course, he’d be happy to clean up. But I’m happy at that point to be listening to a podcast by myself and doing the dishes.)
- Also while I’m cleaning up, I make myself a thermos of tea for the morning. I put some organic black tea in a stainless steel tea diffuser and it steeps the tea overnight in a wide mouth thermos. I have a wide mouth large yeti tumbler that I set next to the thermos that has a scoop of collagen powder in it. (Our thermos wasn’t super expensive, so to keep it really warm I have a make-shift system of winter coat hoods that I put over the top to keep the heat in the top.) Then I put the thermos and the Yeti and a mason jar of water on the nightstand. Then, in the morning I poor the tea into the Yeti with the collagen powder. This is enough protein to help get me started before breakfast, but not so much food or caffeine that it really throws everything off.
- I only have 30 minutes in the morning from when I wake up at 4:30 and when Evan gets up at 5:00, and the kids often get up then too. Sometimes they sleep more, but more mornings than not I have kids in my room by 5:05 or 5:10. So I do not have a moment to spare doing anything I could have done the night before.
- So I get up (to an alarm of piano music on an old phone now dedicated to being my alarm clock) and I use the toilet and take out my retainers. I turn on the lamps in my bedroom. I put on a bathrobe, get my laptop and laptop tray out. I get back into bed, arrange the covers, open the laptop, drink some water, and then pour myself a cup of tea. And I’m writing by 4:37.
- In an ideal world I’d probably eat breakfast, get dressed for the day, be using a treadmill desk, and be writing for four hours. But that is not the season I’m in (yet). I’ve got a solid, reliable 30 minutes in the morning, and writing in bed on a laptop tray before breakfast in my bathrobe under the covers is what works for now.
- This works also because Evan is in the other room, otherwise I’d be waking him up. But staying in my room with the door (nearly) closed –It’s super noisy to open if it’s been closed all the way, so I have a washcloth folded in thirds under the door which lets me nearly close it.–means on the mornings when the kids sleep through Evan getting up I can write more.
In writing all this up, I see both the grace of the season, especially that of Evan, alongside the work and discipline to make it happen. It’s such a grace that I didn’t earn to have a husband willing to take over nighttime duties so I can write. It’s such a grace to have kids sleeping well at night. And my response to that grace and privilege and gift is to value it and tend it with disciplined work.
Not only the disciplined work of actually writing in the mornings, but also the disciplined work throughout the day to keep the kids on the schedule, to leave in the morning for the park and come home from the park on time, in order to eat lunch, and be ready for a 12:30 nap. Sometimes that means I don’t get to chat with a friend at the park, or I don’t get to do anything but clean up and dinner prep during naptime.
But I’m deeply grateful to be in this season and to be able to do the work. I’m trying to savor the ripe berries, even while being responsible to harvest and care for them.
I love sitting in my lamplit bedroom, with hot tea, cozy blankets, a new basic laptop, and 30 minutes of my freshest mental time to write. It’s so incredibly precious, and the long journey to get here and the ways my family bends and flexes to make that happen are such a gift.
How have seasons of your life meant you have to wait to do work you’ve wanted to do, or finally gotten to do it?