Why I get up at 4am

This morning I got up at 3:45am. Yup, let’s just check that: 3:45 AM. My neighbour thinks it might be peri-menopausal, let’s not rule that out. I haven’t just read Atomic Habits or 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, or any other self help book. I know about the 5 AM Club but I’m well ahead of them ;) I just NEEDED time for myself and this is the only way I can get it.

I go to bed around 830 / 9pm and set the intention of getting up at 4. Turns out my internal clock (as long as I haven’t woken up earlier in the night) is pretty reliable. No alarm and I wake up pre-sunset. And the house is silent. Other than a few ravens and a seagull, and the cat asking to go out, it’s just me and the possibility of the morning. And that possibility, as the main carer of two young kids, is an absolute luxury. And an essential.

I write or I read. Or I meditate. But I always make tea in a pot first. It’s a ritual I can’t shake and one handed down to me from my parents who always made tea when they woke up in the night. I say ‘they’ but it was mum who woke dad up with something on her mind. Towards the end of his life, Dad came to accept this and would make a cup for each of them and listen. I always found that very touching.

I light a candle in the dark and the amber flame picks out black shapes of objects and wobbles them gently against the walls. I get out a couple of stones, agate and ruby, and I burn a stick of palo santo (not sage as that set off the fire alarms the other morning. I now associate the cleansing and ritualistic properties of sage with sheer and utter panic!). Sometimes I sit and breathe, stretch and breathe, or just sit and nudge thoughts out of my head for 10 minutes or so. Sometimes I find something on Insight Timer, other times it annoys me. The only way I can describe the effect of meditation is of a cold shower on the brain — like I’ve cleaned out some of the crap in there.

Then I’ll write — sometimes a page or two of journalling — whatever comes up. Sometimes I wake with a line of poetry in my head, the title or the first line and write it out. I then edit throughout the day. Hoovering seems to work well: hoover, edit, hoover edit. Repeat. But a poem’s never really done, you just have to get to a point of acceptance that it’s ready to fly, out of your meddling hands and stand on its own two wobbling legs in the great wide open. And stand it will. In whatever way you willed it.

By 6am I often go back to sleep for an hour, depending when The Youngest and The Eldest wake up. I always have vivid dreams then and wake up fully rested, especially if one of the kids is next to me. Then it’s more tea, a vow to give up caffeine and we’re into the day and I’m feeing like I’ve already done something, been somewhere, as the usual battle to put socks on begins at the back door …