crazed reflections

i was thinking of stephenie meyer, how she has talked about how she was able to write Twilight as a mother of three young children--basically staying up all night writing instead of sleeping. i have always been a more nocturnal person--it was not easy for me to work in a school system, arriving at work and functional by 7am, or to be in classes by 8am when i was a student. or really to exist in a world that operates 9-5. i would much rather stay up late and then sleep a few early morning hours as the sun is coming up. but to really have pretty much no sleep all night and then have to attend to others in those early morning hours?

at first i thought “scoff! the youngest could not have still been a baby.” as a mother of newborn twins (and a four-year-old), any moment that i am up when i should be sleeping is because two babies need to eat. they need to eat frequently, not always at the same time, and even more frequently when you are trying to work jaundice out of their systems. breastfeeding = no one else can do this.

then i thought “well, maybe the youngest was no longer an infant and the author was able to take that now indifference to sleep deprivation and figure that instead of learning to go back to sleep, she would write.” sadly, that makes sense to me. when you’re awake all the time, you realize what you could do with all that time. when i was in high school and college and not sleeping, i felt extremely productive. in recent years, i have realized the detrimental effects, at least on an older non-twenties body, of inadequate sleep.

and then i breastfed simultaneously a few times and either read things online or texted on my iphone with one hand while doing so. i came to the conclusion that it was just all about multi-tasking. but that requires a very precarious balance to be struck and for nothing to tip it out of whack, which of course it shall be tipped, so you’re just holding your breath till the topple.

so these are my admittedly senseless and non-coherent thoughts on the possibility of fitting writing in. how did i manage this rambling blogpost? magic.