Sometimes, seven or eight months pregnant, I would wake in the night to use the bathroom and would peer through the slats in the blinds to the black sky outside, the stars sharp and cold through the trees. When the baby was born, those trees would be bare. When the baby was born, that blackness would be colder. I felt a terrible anticipatory loneliness in those moments. I knew what it was like to be isolated in my own head.
What would it be like in winter, awake in that dark silent house, holding a baby I couldn’t even imagine? I’d always thought of the deepest part of night as the witching hour, a time, my childhood books had taught me, that was not for humans. In a month or so, I’d see the witching hour again and again. And the cockroaches would know my human self had no place there.
Then my son was born, and what shocked me most — more than the surprising goriness of my body’s healing, more than the strange sounds newborns make, more than the ferocity of my nursing-mother appetite — were the nights. Those long, dark, cold winter nights I had feared more than childbirth itself. They became something I hadn’t known a night could be: a haven. A shelter.
When our son finally fell asleep, my husband and I would go to bed ourselves, the silence of our house suddenly sacred, fragile as blown glass. And when, after an hour or two, our son would wake again and cry, I’d hold him in his soft rocking chair, nurse him there in the nightlight’s glow. Sometimes I’d surf the internet on my phone, feeling a companionable affection for anyone posting on Facebook at 3 a.m.; sometimes I’d just sit there, half in dreams. My son would fall asleep, and I’d know I should try to get some more sleep myself, but often I’d hold him a little longer, the heavy sleeping weight of him, the warmth of him in his soft flannel zippered pajamas against the chill of the January night. The silence a globe around us.
I stopped minding when the sun dropped below the trees at 5 p.m. I was exhausted by then, and it felt right that the day should be ending. And when the full dark came and wrapped itself around our house, it felt like a cave, safe and ancient. I felt my animal self stir and settle. The night let me burrow deep in my new life. The night unthreaded me from human time, human brain.
Source : Nytimes
