When my son was two years old and my stepson was twelve, my husband and I decided to let my stepson move his bedroom to the finished basement. It gave him a lot more privacy, a much bigger room, and meant that my son’s occasional recurrence of midnight screaming didn’t wake him up on school nights anymore. A nice side effect was that my husband and I could move our son into my stepson’s old room, which was about twice as large as the nursery. That had a nice side effect of its own. We turned the nursery into what I referred to as “my writing office” and what my husband referred to as “the creativity room” because he intended to paint miniatures and plan D&D campaigns there (both of those wound up falling through pretty quickly and the room was effectively my writing office, but I let him call it whatever he wanted).
At that time, my son was sleeping until seven or eight every morning. This is the latest he’s ever habitually slept in his entire life and I foolishly thought it was going to be the new normal, so I decided to start waking up at six every morning to write.
Not three days after I made that decision, my son started waking up between five and six every morning. I’ve been trying to break him of that habit for four and a half years. I didn’t jump into #5amwritersclub right then, though, at first because I was hoping he’d revert back to the later wakeup time and later because I still managed to find time to write back then. At that time I didn’t draft in my laptop, that was a switch I made after the great big writer’s block incident (which was, unbeknownst to me, looming on the horizon, and which I have written about here), I wrote by pen in a notebook. It was easy, then, to buckle my son into his booster seat with a snack or a meal and sneak away (often outside to have a cigarette, another factor which directly contributed to the great big writer’s block incident) to write for a few stolen minutes at a time.
Then, when my son was a month shy of his third birthday, I found out I was pregnant with my daughter. My “writing office” was converted back into a nursery and I quit smoking and felt sick all the time and entered the great big writer’s block incident and, really, you can read about that and how I dug myself out of it after two years here.
When I finally found my writing groove again I’d changed everything about my habitual writing, including finally forcing myself to get up at five o’clock every morning to write. I did NaNoWriMo, but I also started using the NaNoWriMo website’s stat tracking tools in other months. And at the time, it was all there in charts and graphs and a little cartoon bird with a worm in its beak declaring me an “early bird,” making it clear that the five a.m. writing time was my best—almost my only—productive writing time. I’ve been getting up at five o’clock in the morning almost every single day since then, for a little more than the past two years.
I wrote a bunch of short stories that way, I wrote the novel that got me into Pitch Wars and I did all the Pitch Wars work that way, I drafted and revised the next novel that way, and I’m drafting my current novel that way, and I’m not sure, actually, when getting up at 5 am every day stopped being super helpful for me, personally.
The panini started, we moved and moved my husband’s grandmother in with us, I got into Pitch Wars, we did remote kindergarten with my son, my kids got bigger, my son started in-person school, we moved again but this time nearly 800 miles away, and at some point I fell out of the habit of using NaNoWriMo’s stat tracker and only started again recently.
And at first I was annoyed, honestly, to see that the early bird cartoon telling me I did most of my writing between 5 and 6 in the morning had changed first to a flamingo telling me I’m a midday writer and then to a night owl telling me I get most of my work done in the hour between putting my daughter to bed and putting my son to bed.
Writing at five o’clock every morning isn’t productive for me anymore. I haven’t lost my writing time—I’m still getting the work done at the same rate I have for the last few years. It’s just that making myself get up at five o’clock in the morning every day isn’t helping anymore. The nature of my and my family’s day to day life has changed.
And I’m tired. I’m so tired, all the time. We all are, right? There’s so much more going on than just the writing and the stuff we see on Twitter, there’s the state of the world and there’s everyone’s personal worlds and we’re tired and I’m so, so tired.
I resolved this year to rest more, take better care of myself.
So why is it so hard to give up waking up at five every morning? I mean, okay, the cats and the children waking up before six every day doesn’t help. But I still have the alarm set in my phone, I still get up and make my coffee at five every morning—sometimes earlier and sometimes later, but let me tell you, the “sometimes later” happens a lot less than anything else—even though I can see that it’s not necessary anymore.
I wonder a little bit if it’s a low-key martyr complex. “Look at how I suffer for my art” type shit. I don’t think I see that in myself but what if that’s what I’m doing on a subconscious level. I don’t think so. But maybe. But probably not.
It’s more likely that I’m just having a hard time letting go of the habits that saved my ability to write back when my daughter was a tiny baby. I built these behaviors up as Absolutely Necessary (for me, personally, not for everyone), and now I’m afraid of letting them go.
Even if it means I’m not sleeping enough any night ever in my entire life.
I sighed deeply writing that.
I think it would be easier to tell myself I should sleep in more if my kids would oblige by also sleeping in more. Still, letting go of life habits that were bad for me was so integral to getting my writing back on track, it’s hard to make myself feel in my guts that letting go of habits that were good at the time will help me get my well-being back on track without also messing my writing up at all.
But it’s true. So I guess I better work on it.