THE BEST TIME

VERSUS THE ONLY TIME TO WRITE. I’ve figured it out. If I had my way (ha!) I would roll out of my bed shortly after dawn, stagger over to my computer and plunge in. No coffee, perhaps a few essential morning ablutions, but nothing to distract my brain from entering writer mode. My computer is five steps from the bed.
I promise this is the last time I will bore anyone including myself with this ridiculous rant. (The rant of parents with young children everywhere.)
The one thought I have constantly in my head besides Feltus and my YA WIP (young adult work in progress) is sleep.
Sleep.
Are you like me a light sleeper? Plagued perhaps by bouts of insomnia? And this is compounded by motherhood. It seems that I sleep now with one ear pricked, listening for the hollow cough, the plaintive nightmare cry, the 2 am bathroom visit. I am primed for instant action, trained to navigate furniture in darkness and locate thermometers and ibuprofen by touch alone.
Instead of rolling onto the computer and waking up gradually while wrestling adjectives and short descriptive phrases I do mom things in the morning. Breakfast, diaper changing, dressing, tooth brushing, lunch packing, bus waiting that’s all for the kids if my meaning was unclear. And then the daily hike which is wonderful for clearing the fogs of non-sleep from my aging and warty brain.
But by the time I get home, it’s almost lunch time and then nap time and then meet the bus time, then homework and dinner and bedtime for 6 year olds and then relax with a movie in front of the TV.
I could give this all up- well not the looking-after-the kids stuff. I’m locked into that for another decade at least, but the hike, the occasional afternoon nap, the vegging in front of television but I can’t. I need the things I do for myself. The little things, and after both the kids are asleep and the husband is reading with the dog in front of the fire and the house is blessedly quiet, I need the ‘all me’ time at my computer doing meaningless things (ie. surfing) instead of getting back to my work because by the end of the day I am fried. Getting into the ring with the female middleweight boxing champion was never as hard as getting into my writing work twelve hours later than my optimum time, but I’ll take what I can get and pray that one day it doesn’t feel like digging out a mountain with a small spoon.
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