In my old life, I liked mornings, but I wasn’t a “morning person.” I would routinely stay up late watching TV or reading in bed and say yes to dinners that started long after nightfall. My relationship with mornings was casual—I’d occasionally enjoy a sunrise but I certainly never set an alarm to see one. Then I had children, whose needs demanded an early start, and I spent years stumbling out of bed at their first sounds, making breakfast, and building block towers before I’d fully woken up. Now they’re older, which means they’re less likely to need me before dawn. And yet I’ve found that I can’t shake the early-rising routine.This is partly because my morning hours have come to feel sacred: They’re the only portion of the day reserved for just my own needs—and for a parent, that kind of time is hard to find. I also derive genuine satisfaction from my early productivity. As my wake-up time has inched earlier, I’ve written more, exercised more consistently, and been able to approach challenges with clarity, well before afternoon fatigue sets in.But every transformation comes with a price. And mine has been paid in evening hours—those crucial moments when families traditionally reconnect after a day apart, when teenagers may be more likely to open up, when friends gather and marriages deepen in the comfortable darkness after responsibilities have been met. I have become a person who gives the best of herself to the morning and offers only the dregs to the night.[Read: The false promise of morning routines]Gradually, my early-to-bed, early-to-rise nature has shaped our household’s rhythms. Mornings are my domain. I make breakfast, feed our three pets, and push everyone out the door. When my two daughters were younger, I’d make their lunch and walk them to school, my mug of coffee long drained. My husband prefers to stay up late, so he handles the evening-pickup runs, the printer problems that invariably surface the night before something is due, the random tidbits of adolescent info that seep out just as our kids are flagging. It’s an efficient arrangement, but it has created an unintended hierarchy in which I get our daughters’ foggy beginnings and he gets their vulnerable nighttime moments.The cost of this choice feels particularly steep as my girls, now 12 and 16, have gravitated toward a later bedtime. Teenagers, as many parents know, are nocturnal creatures by biological design: After puberty, an adolescent’s internal clock shifts by about two hours. So a teen who used to fall asleep at 9 p.m. may not feel tired until about 11. The urge to stay up late peaks at around age 16 for girls and 17 for boys.One reason teenagers stay up so late is that they develop more of a resistance to what’s known as “sleep pressure,” the body’s natural drive to sleep, than they had when they were younger. And right before teens finally do settle in for the night, many experience a period of heightened alertness called the “forbidden zone for sleep.” (I’ve seen—and heard—this up close; several times my eldest has suddenly decided to audit her entire bedroom closet at 11 p.m., usually while on FaceTime with a friend.) What I take away from this: Teens are primed for connection precisely when I am running on fumes.My daughters know I’m this way. It’s become something of a family joke, being the mom who turns into a pumpkin at 9:30. (Last year one of them gave me fuzzy socks that say In Bed by 9.) But that doesn’t ease the guilt I experience whenever one of my daughters shuffles into the living room at 10:30—ostensibly looking for a snack but actually testing whether I’m awake enough to care about whatever is on her mind—and I can’t help hurrying the conversation along. I nod at the right times, but I don’t always ask follow-up questions or lean in to the nuances of what she’s sharing.A version of this happened just last week. My youngest appeared in the doorway of my bedroom shortly after 10, wanting to sort out plans for the weekend. I tried to rally, propping myself up, pretending to follow all the details, but my brain was already shutting down. She could tell. After a brief pause, she gave up and said goodnight. I lay there, heavy with regret for having checked out just when she’d reached out.My fading evening energy has influenced my relationships with everyone: my husband, my friends, my extended family. By the time the house finally quiets and my husband and I can settle in for a show, I may already be half-asleep. When we go away with friends or other families for a weekend and are firing up a movie, I’m inevitably the one who dips out early, missing not just the end of the film but also the long conversations or games that come after.I wonder sometimes if this is simply a consequence of aging. Perhaps the trade-off between morning productivity and evening social capacity is as inevitable for someone like me as gray hair and reading glasses. But I suspect something more specific is at work—that in optimizing myself for the early hours, I have altered not just my sleep schedule but my emotional availability. The energy I pour into a.m. workouts and tackling a million emails before noon has to come from somewhere. That somewhere, it turns out, is everywhere else.[Read: The logic of the ‘9 to 5’ is creeping into the rest of the day]Perhaps a middle path would let me distribute energy more evenly across the day rather than front-loading it into the morning hours. I’ve started trying, in small ways, to align my routine with my family’s rhythms. My husband’s travel schedule over the past year or so has forced the issue, too. A few nights each week, I have to handle the “night shift” solo. At first, I focused on survival—white-knuckling my way through the late hours, counting down until I could finally escape to bed. But I’m trying to reframe it: These are hours I can be present in, not just endure.I know I’ll never be someone who comes alive at midnight, but I am learning to stretch the boundaries of my days to let a little of the night in. The balance, I suspect, isn’t about becoming less of a morning person, but about leaving space for connection even when it doesn’t align with my body’s clock.For instance: The other night, at nearly 11:30, I was half-asleep on the couch when I heard my older daughter strumming the guitar; she’s been teaching herself to play. Instead of just disappearing to my bedroom, I convinced her to bring the guitar upstairs and practice near me while I slipped under the covers. The interlude was brief, maybe 10 minutes, but it felt like a small victory—a moment of bonding, snuck in before I was fully conked out. It felt so good not to miss it.