It’s 2:37 AM. I’ve crept into the living room for a feeding on the couch, flipping on a little light that I hope won’t be jarring enough to fully wake me. I hope to return to bed after eating my snack—I’m just feeding myself. There’s no baby yet. Just a very tiny bump, and relentless ruminating.
I have always associated this hour with some dark societal underbelly, populated only by weird people and weird, unsavory thoughts—definitely not squares like me. In high school, I hated being awake after everybody else in the house, so I tucked myself into bed by 10 PM each night to ensure that I wasn’t the one who had to turn out the lights. Sleeping people were transported to another world, in some liminal space between awake and dead, and I wanted to be firmly nestled in with them. I was unsettled by the eerie thoughts that might arise, the anxieties that would emerge without the noises and preoccupations of daylight, the misery of checking the clock and counting minute by excruciating minute of lost sleep, worrying about the impending grogginess tomorrow would bring.
Being up now still feels strange and wrong, even in adulthood. But I’ve wrestled with my pillows for an hour and needed to take a recess. I don’t want my bed to become my enemy, a place I dread for more of the same restlessness. Better to bring the thoughts out of the place where dreams are made, into the open, awake.
It’s kinda lonely out here. The fears crawl out of the dark in rapid succession, unchecked by the reassurances with which I feebly soothe them during daylight hours. I worry that this new city of ours will never feel like our community or the right place for us. I agonize over what will become of my work life and a non-linear career. (That word: career!) The corners of the mind argue amongst themselves, and the musings of Sinister Night Voice easily trump those of Trusty Day Voice.
Day Voice reassures me, “A child is not the end of a full life!” Night Voice insists, “It’s over!” Day voice insists, “This will be one of the hardest things ever, but you will mostly love it!” Night Voice chirps, reminding me, “You’ll probably resent your child.”
I stress that I’ll inadvertently socialize my child with highly gendered roles and stereotypes despite my most progressive intentions. Or that even if I don’t, society will do it for me: a girl is doomed to become an oversexed, second-class citizen and a boy, a violent-video-game-obsessed, emotionally repressed sociopath. The voices cannot reconcile this paradox: that I will have significant control over aspects my child’s (early) life, and that I will not have control over a whole lot of things.
During daylight, finding distractions is so easy: cooking, reading, various on-screen spectacles at the mere tap of a finger, a partner or a friend with whom to commiserate. Or, on really impressive days, there’s even mindfulness, meditation. But at this hour, I seem to relinquish any semblance of thought control. In this hour, there is nothing but the rawness of the thoughts bouncing around inside. They ricochet harder when there’s no one to share them with, and they’re harder to make settle. There is the most irritating urge to have them all resolved RIGHT NOW; tomorrow will somehow be too late. Even petty logistics: will we have the discipline (and stomachs) for cloth diapering?
The buzzing in the dark is uncomfortable like an itch, but I refrain from turning on the TV to pass the time. Maybe I just need to sit with this lateness and let it itch, let these thoughts ricochet until inertia slows them down. Maybe as this hour and I become intimate, the not knowing and the fears will become familiar thoughts that I can acknowledge for what they are—thoughts—that I can rob of their daunting power. I’ll pull the dark out of the dark and settle in to the inevitable uncertainty of this and every coming phase. And soon enough, this dark unfamiliar will no longer be a monster lurking in the closet, but a time of day when maybe I won’t lose all confidence. Instead, I’ll remember my agency while accepting the uncertainty of this crazy swirl of life. And there will be this tiny little person to connect with and love in the dark, even when we can’t see, needing and accepting each other as we figure it out. Maybe it’s time to get comfortable with being part of the underbelly, a community of people who boldly grapple with the fears that speak loudest at night.
