Sarah Nigbor

Every night I swear I’m going to go to bed early, but when that early bedtime rolls around, my eyes are wide open, my brain is clipping along a mile a minute and even though I feel mentally and physically drained, I just can’t bring myself to go to bed. There are so many other things I’d rather be doing than sleeping. I wish we didn’t need to sleep so much because it’s a giant waste of time.

Why is it I stay up night after night, burning the midnight oil when I know the alarm clock will go off in a few hours and I’ll regret staying up late yet again? Well, on Mondays it’s because it’s newspaper deadline day. I consider myself extremely lucky if I get four hours of sleep. Usually it’s less.

The other days are entirely my own fault. During the day, I get absolutely no time that’s my own. Each and every second is booked or accounted for. If it’s not work, it’s a meeting, or it’s running the kids to one of their seemingly hundreds of activities. In five years, I’ve put 190,000 miles on my vehicle. Or it’s trying to keep up with mountains of housework (no, I don’t have the money for a cleaning person) and laundry. Sometimes it’s scheduling appointments, paying bills, running kids to the doctor, grocery shopping (the thing I hate most in the world) or the 500 other things on the to-do list such as answering the interminable question “What’s for dinner?” Or it’s something that crops up at my mother’s house that she needs help with. 

I stay up late because those late-night hours are MINE. No one is texting me, emailing me, calling me, or asking me for anything. I can get caught up on writing or I can read a book. I can play a game on my phone or stare at the ceiling and do nothing at all. The night is quiet. There are no distractions. The frenzy of the daylight hours is quelled and the crickets chirping outside are my only company. Even the dog is asleep at my feet. The world is right, another day is done, hopefully everything I needed to accomplish that day is taken care of, and I can rest easy for at least a little while that something doesn’t need my immediate attention.

I used to spend those late hours worrying about the things I had to do the next day. It’s taken years, but I’ve trained myself to take each day and its challenges as it comes. We were not meant to take on the burdens of multiple days in one. One task, one day at a time has kept me sane.

In the nighttime hours I can remember who I used to be before I was a wife and mother with endless responsibilities. I hope it doesn’t sound like I don’t love being those things, because I do. But I also love spending time by myself and remembering that I am a whole person on my own, and that’s OK. I can recharge so that I can be all the things that everyone needs me to be. I used to feel so guilty about that, but I no longer do. I can’t keep giving from an empty cup; it has to be filled sometimes.

My kids are shocked sometimes, I think, to realize that I was a person before I was “Mom.” I wasn’t born doing laundry, nagging kids to do homework, typing on a computer or attending a meeting. Sometimes I think my husband forgets that too. I never wanted a “Mom” van or SUV to haul kids around to sports. The thought abhorred me, yet here I am, because I love them. The thought of cooking a full-blown meal every night made me want to cry. But here I am, because I love them. The idea of never living anywhere but Wisconsin made me sad. But here I am, because I love them.

But in the hours of the night, I am not Mom, or Wife, or Dutiful Daughter, or Editor. I am just ME again. The girl who loves to read, who is quick with a snappy comeback, who loves to travel. The woman who one day hopes to see Europe, write a book, and live on a secluded lake deep in the woods. The person who never shies from a challenge, who jumped out of a plane skydiving on a dare, the little girl with the wind in my hair as I flew down Laurel Hill on my bike with no hands.

I might have bags under my eyes and I might need to drink a lot of coffee, but those late-night hours remind me who I am, who I was and who I will be, for myself and for those I love.