I wake early most mornings. The cat bites my ankles as I stumble to the bathroom. The dog shakes and stretches and then sprints to her outdoor pen. After I feed them, one curls up, guarding the closed bedroom door behind which my husband sleeps on, and the other sits in a windowsill, tail flicking as he focuses on a tiny movement in the blackness of our yard. Everything is once again quiet.

We don’t have children so the house, in activity terms anyway, is never chaotic. But when my husband gets up the TV comes on. And we have our own business which, for seven months, is a needy, unmedicated ADHD child. So it is early or nothing.

Once season winds down, my husband says, “Why don’t you sleep in one morning? You need to take a day off. From writing, too.”

He sees my frustrations. How I struggle with a paragraph, a sentence, a word. So of course it looks like work. Unpaid, unnoticed – really, what’s the point?

But when I don’t write, or at least sit for an hour or so staring at a blank page or a mean-spirited blinking cursor, the day feels incomplete, wasted. Why in the world does this type of torture make me feel hopeful? I have absolutely no idea. But if I keep writing, I’ll find the answer.