Dear Brain:

It’s been too long, really, since I’ve needed to address this concern.  I don’t believe you will be surprised by what I have to say and I hope we can come to some mutually-beneficial agreement.

Remember, oh, forever? How we’ve always been a morning person? Up and at it early, ready to go, functional even before the magic brown elixir? And we both loved that, admit it, you like being an obnoxious morning person as much as I. Be honest.

And before I go further, please allow me to once again apologize for the late teen years, and all the early twenties before I got pregnant with Charlotte. I really was terrible to you, I admit, but we can’t get those cells back so we must accept things as they are and move on, but I want you to know how sincerely I regret the pain and loss I repeatedly caused you.

Lately, you’ve been doing that thing again, that thing I had thought we’d put behind us: the revving up and spinning around and wildly flailing at anything at all in the tiny, wee hours of the night. It wouldn’t be so bad if anything of substance came of it: the Great American Novel, a cure for cancer, certainly, or the answer to World Peace. Contemplating why the cat’s wheeze or nose whistle sounds differently while he’s, you know SLEEPING right next to me is not helpful. And I had thought that if any of the three of us under this roof was meant to be nocturnal, surely it was the evil cat. But said evil cat sleeps peacefully through the night, disturbed only by my tossings and turnings when for whatever reason you have me thinking about why the woman in the produce section gave me the stink-eye yesterday, or if even a hurricane force wind could dislodge Donald Trump’s hair.

We have a three-day weekend coming up and I am hoping to give you some good input from which to draw entertaining and hopefully, helpful thoughts. Maybe a couple of movies, a museum, a new recipe. We’re going to have some Sleepytime tea in the evenings, though not so late I blow the agreement already in place with Bladder. I promise to eat extra fish, reparations for the afore-mentioned damages.  I will exercise. So please, for old time’s sake, let me sleep tonight?