The best bit of parenting advice I ever read was from a woman who bought herself two chocolate advent calendars – one to eat at 4 o’clock in the morning under a screaming baby, and the other to eat at 8am, when the rest of the world had finally woken up to join her.
I had both of my children in winter – one on either side of the solstice – and at times it was brutal. To be forced awake every hour, when fifteen of them are dark, is not far from torture. To watch the sky turn black when you’re still trying to leave the house for the day, can make you feel insane. To wake up for the sixth time in the night and it only be 10pm almost breaks you. When they were newborns, I would stand with my forehead pressed against the window, begging the sun to rise.
Things are a little easier now. Which is just as well, because I am about as likely to move to the equatorial city of Nairobi as I am to take up line dancing, so seasonal changes are going to be a necessary part of my life.
What has helped? Firstly, my daughter does, on the whole, go to sleep in the evening. It might take an hour or two of full physical wrestling, topless cajoling and silent fury, but eventually she will relinquish her furious grip on consciousness. Which means that I am able to get something like seven hours of interrupted sleep most nights. Lying in the dark awake at bedtime is one thing; lying awake in the dark for three hours between 2 and 5am is quite another.
Candles help. Even saying this I feel like the sort of person who actually laughs at tea towels. But nevertheless, lighting a candle in the early morning, or in that unfathomable hour between getting home from school and starting to cook dinner, can help lift – ever so slightly – the despair of premature murkification.
Having a sleep mask with speakers helps. Yes, I might be lying in bed for 72 minutes trying to get a toddler to sleep, but at least I am learning about the myth of Prometheus, or being soothed by The Archers, or laughing at Peter Shamshiri taking down Atomic Habits while I do it. There is nothing noble about raw-dogging bedtime. I can’t think of a single benefit my child would receive from me hovering in a state of suspended fury, as I wait for them to fall asleep. And if my children have become reliant on the constant distraction of books, Yoto boxes, television, radio and comics, well, so be it.
Obviously going outside helps. Even the thin blue light of British winter will kick start our circadian rhythms, the production of melatonin, serotonin, vitamin D and cortisol, that will help our brains and bodies keep just the right side of threadbare. I have also started taking my children out in the dark, intentionally, to remind them that the world belongs to us all, even when the sun has gone down. Bat spotting, mushroom-hunting, bonfires, quiet bike rides and stick collecting can all happen at 5pm, but now with the added wonder of watching the sun set.
Finally, company helps. The only way any of us are going to get through this winter, this year, this flatulent period of history, is together. Sitting in someone else’s lit front room, meeting in pubs in the early evening, going to playgroups, attending free baby classes, enjoying the rumbling heating of a council-owned building, or play centre, or library are all going to lift your mood, even just temporarily.
Oh, and take vitamin D. And if you can get it down your children too, then you’re a better mother than me.
I do not go gentle into that good night. As summer ebbs away and we, as Dylan Thomas put it, have caught and sang the sun in flight, I indeed will rage, rage against the dying of the light. But I will not do so alone. And one day, surely, the light will return.