Demanding Night-Nights

Demanding Night-Nights is the pivotal domestic action in which Nightbitch, exhausted and newly clear-eyed, hands her son to her husband at 6:00 p.m. and declares that he will perform all weekend bedtime duties from then on. It marks the first concrete renegotiation of the unequal division of labor in their marriage, transforming her accumulated mother-rage into a calm, stated claim rather than an eruption of bluster and heat.

The Weight of the Demand

The demand did not come from nowhere. It was the culmination of a long, weird day during which the old night-night rage ballooned inside her as she waited for her husband to return home that afternoon, the boy spooning buttons from a casserole dish into a metal bowl on the wooden floor. But instead of erupting into a great show of bluster and heat, she grew calm and clear. It was plain she was now owed years of night-nights, and it was also now clear her husband would make it his job to attend to night-nights each night he was home. It was as simple as that. She had been switching off on the weekends, her husband Friday and Nightbitch Saturday and so on, but, truly, every night he was home he should do them. She thought about this as she sipped a glass of white wine on the kitchen floor, cross-legged beside her son. Yes, night-nights were significantly easier now, given that the boy slept in his kennel, but still. There were books and stories and sometimes a great waiting before she could sneak from the room.

The Moment of Declaration

By the time her husband arrived home at 6:00 p.m., she was exhausted. She handed the boy to him and said, I'm done. You're doing night-nights every weekend night from now on. Thank you. Her husband tipped his head quizzically and tickled the boy beneath the chin to make him laugh. Sure, he said. Seems fair. There was no debate. The simplicity of his assent stood in stark contrast to the weeks of silent resentment that had preceded it, and to the elaborate, emotional arguments she had composed against the system and capitalism and the patriarchy and then religion and gender roles and biology. She had inflated with mother-rage, but here, in the actual moment of asking, she needed none of it.

The Reckoning with Self-Devaluation

Nightbitch resolved to demand things—all sorts of things. To ask. To not assume that she had to cook the dinner and do the night-nights and clean the house and pay the bills and buy the presents and send the cards and schedule the appointments and keep track of every last thing all by herself. This was, after all, a partnership, wasn't it? This was, after all, the modern era, empowerment and feminism and all that, and she had not been taking advantage of any of it because, she discovered as she thought further, she did not have a job. Or, rather, she did not have a job that paid any money whatsoever; in fact, it was a drain on money, represented negative money, this mothering job. Because her husband paid for their lives, paid for the privilege she had of staying home each and every day and devoting herself completely to motherhood and nothing else, she had felt, ever since she stepped down from her position at the gallery, that she was in no place to demand anything. He worked all week, and she felt it was too much to ask him to lift a finger on the weekend, because she had automatically devalued her work from the start. She had been, she saw now, inculcated by a culture that told her, Look, it's cute you're a mom, and go do your thing, but, honestly, it's not that hard; you're probably not all that smart or interesting, but good for you for feeling fulfilled by mothering.

The Aftermath and Its Meaning

That night, her husband put their son to bed, and the night after, and the next. There was no debate. Sure, perhaps in the future he would ask for a night off, but she was filled with such magnanimity, such brotherly love for this man who without objection did as she asked, that she would always take over a night for him, no problem, because he was lovely and she loved him, and Thank you, she said that evening as he came down the steps. She opened her arms and took him in and kissed his neck and then smelled him deeply. Thank you so much, she said. The action thus closed a loop that had begun with her self-deprecating joke of a name, Nightbitch, and with the coarse black hair sprouting from the base of her neck, and with her sense that society, adulthood, marriage, motherhood, all these things, were somehow masterfully designed to put a woman in her place and keep her there. That idea had begun to weigh on her before her son arrived, but it took on a new shape, an unwieldy heft, after she quit her job, as her body struggled to regain its equilibrium. Once she was stripped of all she had been, of her career, her comely figure, her ambition, her familiar hormones, an anti-feminist conspiracy seemed not only plausible but nearly inevitable. Demanding Night-Nights was her first practical, untheoretical blow against that conspiracy—a small, domestic reclamation of time and self, achieved not through rage but through the simple, astonishing act of asking.