One of the flaws in my plan to nap my blues away has to be the 3 a.m. perkiness. Maybe it’s not so much a flaw as an unfortunate but necessary annoyance. You see, I do my best work in the wee hours. I always have.
When TeenHer was ToddlerA’s age, I worked until 4 a.m., give or take. The babysitter would drop her off at 8 a.m. on her way to work, bright eyed and bushy tailed and ready to party. That’s when I taught her to work the VCR and make her own breakfast. Oh, there were a few ‘incidents’ here and there, like the time I woke up to find her on the couch with a spoon and a tub of butter and surrounded by candy wrappers. Somehow we both managed to survive her toddler years and my wonky work schedule.
For that reason I find myself wondering why it’s so hard to ease myself into a schedule that works well for me, given the differences in circumstance- I am older, I have a partner, we have free babysitting whenever we ask for it. Why, then, am I so hell-bent on contorting Who I Am into this person who works during naptime and goes to bed at a reasonable hour so that she can be alert and fun first thing in the morning? If I am to be totally honest I do enjoy the days when I find myself dressed and fed before noon, ready to go for walks or to the park. I crave normalcy. Those few weeks when I made coffee every morning and shared it with ToddlerA were really fun.
However. Here I am, working at the only time when my creative energy is worth a shit, my perkiness explained by the 3-hour nap this afternoon and the 20 oz coke I had with dinner. I sit down every day to work during naptime, I do. I have plans. I have lists and phone numbers and project outlines.
Inevitably I slink off to the bedroom instead of eating, or working, or working out, or doing all the things I wished I could do when I had a child that would not nap on her own. Today, I actually roused myself out of bed and rode the bike in the living room for 20 minutes. Even the crotch-aching sweat-fest wasn’t enough to infuse me with the energy to make it until bedtime.
While we cruised the grocery store this evening it occurred to me that perhaps this is more than just a mismatched lifestyle/work schedule/career choice issue. A living part of me died this week, and maybe I should give some weight to the hormonal impact of that. I knew I was onto something when Billy Joel came over the grocery-store speakers calling himself an Innocent Man and I started to cry.
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