Or, as my husband calls it: puttering.
I love to sleep. Like, I really love to sleep. Once I’m out, I’m generally down for the count* and my mother and husband can both attest that I’m not the kindest riser in the world. I consider waking up and being able to get back in bed and go to sleep (or taking an afternoon nap) to be the height of luxury. This was true pre-parenthood, but is ESPECIALLY the case now. With all of this said, I will generally choose going to bed early over most other activities, but I do love a good late-night putter. As a kid, this manifested as reorganizing my room for no reason at 9 pm (anyone else? just me? OK.) – as an adult, it sometimes looks like deciding that the toilet paper needs to be restocked right. now. or that we’re long overdue for a floor mop.
Now, full disclosure: I originally started drafting this post in July 2021. My nightly reset routine was much more clearly defined and also significantly more manic than I find myself these days. For context, I would get home around 6 o’clock, generally. A quick dinner would be followed by bedtime routine for E and then a little bit of relaxation time before hopping back on my work computer to complete my nightly report. This work initially took me anywhere from 2-3 hours, but I eventually whittled it down to about 45 minutes, depending on how the day had gone. For a while, after finishing the report and sending it off (somewhere between 9 and midnight), I would just collapse into bed. At some point, I realized that this made me feel super shitty.
One night, I took 10 minutes to tidy up the house after I finished my report – start the dishwasher, put away toys that had been left out throughout the day. I went to bed later, but I found myself falling asleep faster and waking up more refreshed. Some nights the tidy (affectionately called “puttering” by my husband, a term he adopted from my mother) was minor – just a few things to tuck away before heading upstairs. Some nights, I blacked out and came to while organizing a cabinet (kidding… maybe). The intensity and amount of puttering could be related to how messy the house was, how good a day I had had, or whether I’d decided coffee at 6 pm was a good idea, but I found myself going through the same routine almost every night, and dearly regretting it when I didn’t.
Fast forward a year plus and I am acutely aware that the success of this process may have had to do with not going to bed immediately on the heels of dealing with a major stressor** every night, but I have found that the general principle still stands. Taking those few extra moments to reset my brain – literally and figuratively shelving things back in their spots – gives me the space that I need to wind down and feel like I won the day, even when the scoreboard says otherwise. These days, I typically find myself putting the same ten pieces of play kitchen bits back in their spots and putting coats back in the closet (seriously, you’d think we were a family of twelve for the number of coats we have). On a grumpy day, I’m just cranky as I put things back where I put them twelve, eighteen, or two hours before. On a better day, I remind myself that I am deeply, entirely thankful for the little girl who made this mess and for the husband who cooked the dinner that we ate off these dishes. In either case, I relish the quiet and the order and (let’s be honest) the control of those few minutes puttering around the house after dark. The reward is worth delaying my precious sleep, just a little bit.
*The exception here being if I wake up from some sort of anxiety dream in the middle of the night. Then I’m toast.
**Ask me about when I had COVID and was logging in to work every night while sweating profusely, having dragged myself out of bed for the first time all day. It was good times.
Hickmans at Home 