A nest is best

Sometimes going to bed early – or even just at a reasonable time – feels like the best thing in the world.

I’ve been burning the candle at both ends for several weeks. Between blogjune, music practice, working on my SALA artwork and watching wind-down stuff, it’s rare that I’ve gone to bed before 12.30am of a schoolnight. I still wake up at 6am, though. And weekends are for staying up late with my husband who works nightshift, and I’ve never mastered the art of the sleep-in.

I can feel it catching up with me. Tucking my son in for bed following his bedtime story usually involves lying down next to him for a cuddle and dozing off. But each night it’s getting harder to revive the enthusiasm I felt earlier in the evening when I looked forward to having the house and computer all to myself to be productive. I love this time of night. But there are times it feels a cruelty to force myself awake to be productive all over again, especially after a long day being productive at work, followed by the train-bus-walk commute home and the hours trying to hold my shit together while trying to get my boy to get his together.

Tonight, while passing my bedroom as I blearily walked down the hall to the lounge room, my desire to go straight to bed was like pining for an absent love. I’d finished my workday feeling pissed off at a colleague’s comment that the school holiday events program I’d put together this time was rather uninteresting. Logically, I could put it into context – the factors in her life making her unusually flat that day compounded with the current factors at work that mean I haven’t managed to present as flash Harry a program as I have in the past – but it smarted. Logically, I could look at my program and know it is chockablock with really interesting free and low-cost things for families to do and know I’m on the right track, but it still smarted. Going to bed now would mean that I could bypass waking up and feeling indignant and doubtful and give myself over to the dreamland feeling instead. But by the time I walked into the lounge room and saw the screen and keyboard and mouse and warm blanket I would spread over my shoulders while I typed, the blog feeling was creeping in and I knew I’d feel better in myself in a few paragraphs time.

It’s currently 10.27pm but it feels like midnight. It will be soon if I’m not careful. That’s the seductive power of writing a bedtime/blogtime story. Creative productiveness naturally wants to lead on to further productiveness but it’s so easy to slip into bad sleep hygiene (“Yes, 11.30 is definitely the best time to learn to play the guitar”). So bedtime must be a reward in itself and not some barrier to…doing. There will be plenty of time for doing tomorrow.