I was always a night owl. When I was in high school, it wasn’t at all unusual for me to stay up all night working on a drawing. When I’m engrossed in a project, time ceases to mean anything to me so it was easy. I had my own room, at the far end of the hall, so my nocturnal ways didn’t bother anyone else in the house. This of course, was decades before the age of personal sound systems; Sony hadn’t even invented the Walkman yet, so my room was quiet all night. Not like now, where we can plug our Ipods into earbuds and listen to music all night long without waking the person snoring next to us.
Unless we can’t help singing along.
Yes, with the advancement of entertainment technology has come the horror of being subjected to karaoke at odd and inopportune times.
Nothing is perfect; deal with it.
When you have kids, your schedule gets appropriated by their needs. For thirty years, I had to get up, get my kids to school and do all the other things moms have to do. I thought I’d put my nocturnal tendencies behind me.
Jay has been on sabbatical this year. He’s still coaching but he hasn’t had to teach since last summer. The upshot is that with all the kids gone and our schedules so wide open, its been very much like we’re both retired.
My job, working at home whenever and as little or often as I feel like it, is just like being retired without the boredom. For the record, artists don’t retire. Creating art is not a job, although if you’re fortunate enough to be able to sell your work, you’re very lucky indeed. Thanks to my sugar daddy husband and my lucky stars, I haven’t had a real job since I answered the phone at the St. Thomas rectory after hours back in ’77.
My point is simply that now that my kids are grown and on their own, I don’t have to get up in the morning till I feel like it.
Turns out with no start time to my day, I reverted to my old habits as quickly as water finds its own level. Since Josie went off to school, I have to make a point to get to bed before 1 a.m. The problem here is that I don’t like sleeping the morning away. I feel like I’ve wasted the day if I’m not out of bed by nine. That’s a problem when I apparently don’t like sleeping the night away, either. I need my sleep.
Jay has always been a morning guy.
This lead to some hilarious misunderstandings when we first got married. He kept trying to wake me up at the crack of dawn and I kept trying not to rip his throat out for it.
Good times!
For the next 30 years, we had kids to regulate our waking hours but Josie went off to school last year and now its just the two of us again.
I’ve heard that some couples, upon becoming empty nesters, find that they’ve grown apart or don’t have anything in common and don’t know or like each other anymore. That has not been the case with us. I didn’t think it would be; we’ve been in this together all these years, it’s been a blast. What we’ve found is that it’s GREAT being just the two of us again.
It’s just like the first year or so when we were married except that he knows better than to try to talk to me when I first get out of bed and I don’t mind that he would rather hang his towel on the doorknob than the towel bar. All those silly, microscopic things that bugged us about each other in the beginning, we’ve accepted and incorporated into life with each other and it’s all good.
Plus, we have more money now than we did then. Okay, we don’t have much more money but our credit is a lot better.
Now that it’s just the two of us, it seemed dumb to stay up three hours later than Jay and wake up long after he’d started his day so after Josie went back to school after Christmas break, I decided to adjust my schedule to Jay’s.
I didn’t go crazy; the man goes to bed at nine some nights. But I did make a point to get to bed around 11:00, thinking I did it for years, decades, while the kids were little.
It didn’t work.
Every night I tossed and turned until around 2:00, woke up again at 4:00, then finally fell into a deep sleep around dawn, only to sleep till 8:30 or 9:00.
What a waste of time!!
One of the down sides of being self-employed is that you really, really hate wasting time. I’m an adult, I don’t need to spend ten hours lying in bed.
I’ve never had trouble with sleeping. I usually fall asleep quickly and stay that way till I have to wake up. Part of problem these days is my feet; they wake me up with their aching and throbbing. I’ve never had trouble with my feet before either but last summer, the summer of weddings, wrecked my feet.
Turns out, if you’re going to spend every weekend dancing the night away on concrete floors, you’d better have shoes with supportive soles.
Once the aching in my feet woke me up, it was very hard to fall back asleep.
Then I caught this rotten cold. For three weeks now, I haven’t had the energy to do anything; no walks, no pilates, nothing. I didn’t even bother going to the grocery store since I didn’t have an appetite.
Staying off my feet for three weeks has been just what they needed.
I’ve been cold medicine free for over a week and I’ve slept better than I have since last spring. I go to bed around midnight and sleep soundly till seven or eight. No waking up, no throbbing feet, no hacking cough, no Nyquil hangover.
I’m still not 100% and I expect that when I am, I’ll start walking, exercising and living like a normal person and my feet will hurt again. But for now, I’m just enjoying being able to sleep again.