When my daughter was small, she’d sometimes struggle to get to sleep.
If you’ve ever lived with a small child you know what it’s like. There are so many reasons why they can have trouble falling asleep, from separation anxiety, an imagination on overdrive, not having the words to really articulate how they’re feeling, to simply being too tired to wind down.
Whatever the reason, it can result in one very tired little girl and two very tired parents.
After much trial and error—because children don’t come with an instruction manual, not yet!—like all parents we realised that structure and routine were the most likely to help.
And help not just her, but us, too.
Things like reading out loud, playing the same gentle music every night, not doing anything too stimulating just before bed, and so on, all designed to condition her brain into thinking, ‘Ah, it must be bedtime. I want to go to sleep now!’
And then, one night, I also found myself giving her a rundown of her day.
‘You had an egg on toast for breakfast, and then we went to the playgroup. We sang lots of songs and you made a hat out of coloured paper. After that we came home and had lunch…’
I could see straight away that this seemed to have a calming effect, so I kept doing it. And I realised it was having the same effect on me, too, anchoring us both to the day, I guess, but also making it easier to let go and move on.
‘We went to the park after lunch and you went on the big kid swing.’
Positioning this day and getting ready for the one to come
These days, my all-grown-up daughter usually goes to sleep much later than I do. But while our family customs have changed, this idea of thinking through what the day has held has stuck with me.
I often use my morning journal writing as way to process what I’ve been doing, the bigger things, for sure, but just as often the little things, too, and it still feels as grounding now as it was then.
It helps me position the day that was and get ready for the one to come. And it makes the mundane parts of each day, the bits I forget almost as soon as I do them, into steps that hold me up just as much as the more exciting bits.
‘You went to the aquarium with Daddy and saw a shark and a stingray and lots of fish.’
I find its musical equivalent just as powerful.
For me this might be playing through technical work and classical pieces that, combined, are like a first act, their familiarity so comforting and a way for me to prepare myself for tackling something new.
Then there are all the songs I do with my students, from classical, jazz, and pop, like The Killers and Billie Eilish, to Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious from the musical Mary Poppins. Even better is that many of these are songs I wouldn’t necessarily have chosen for myself.
Yet here they are, in my life, the unfamiliar now mixed in with the familiar, and very much influencing my own creative thinking and the next steps I could take.
‘You and I painted some pictures. You painted a huge blue whale and I painted an octopus. Then we read a book about fish and made up a song about the ocean.’
All of this building a base, something solid that makes me feel secure enough that I can comfortably leave it behind and take creative leaps into the unknown.
Just like my then-small daughter settling down for sleep after a big day of being a small child finding her way in the world and through each day into the next.