Sleep.

I keep telling myself that a consistent sleep schedule will help. I suppose it would. I had more consistency back when my parents worried about the cost of electricity and the inability to garden in the dark. Now I’m writing at all hours of the day and most night hours, on different days. I’m using bucket loads of electricity (is electricity measured in buckets? How much is that?).

My children enjoy spending time chatting and playing games online with friends, who are mostly available in the evening. Sometime between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. most of them retire. And then I do stuff and my children do stuff, make art, work on projects, sometimes until we literally fall over asleep.

And then I deal with headaches and constipation and a desire to stay up and keep doing things. I tell parents of young children that the children will do better and the parents will do better with consistent sleep and consistent meals, and then I discover as an older adult that teens can power through most of the night and then crash spectacularly. Teens have an adult’s ability to stay awake and a child’s ability to sleep through anything, and not enough discipline to do so intentionally yet.

It would be easier if I had morning commitments. I don’t have morning commitments, except for church services once a week, because it’s hard to reach them on time. It’s hard to reach them on time because I’m staying up way late most nights. How to get myself to want to sleep?