Monday

Monday is the day the husband leaves. It is the day Nightbitch stands in the driveway and watches him pull away, the day she directs a psychic fuck you at his retreating car, the day she collapses into a chair at the kitchen table with lukewarm coffee to collect herself. It is the day she is left alone with the boy, with the baking sheets and muffin tins he pulls from the cabinet, with the long hours stretching ahead. Monday is the recurring punctuation of her week, the marker of her abandonment, and the beginning of the transformation that will eventually consume her.

The Weekly Cycle of Abandonment

Monday is the day the husband departs for work, leaving Nightbitch alone with their son for the week. The evidence shows that he is away for a week at a time, returning home only on the weekends, and that each Monday he pulls out of the drive, leaving her to face the week ahead. The image of him leaving is one she returns to again and again, imagining him in a hotel room somewhere, reading a book or watching TV or playing video games, eating from a room-service tray laid out on the bed. Even when she imagines him working on spreadsheets or filling out service reports on his laptop, the image of him there, by himself, in a quiet space, seems luxurious and exotic to her. In her darkest moments, she imagines that her husband craves this time away from them, a wave of relief washing over him each Monday as he pulls out of the drive. She imagines him enjoying four whole uninterrupted nights of sleep, blackout curtains, a discrete, achievable task to accomplish that day, a paycheck to expect at the end of the week. The contrast between his Monday and her Monday is stark: he leaves for a quiet, solitary, productive week, while she is left with the boy, the house, and the endless labor of motherhood.

The Ritual of the Monday Morning

The Monday morning ritual is a specific and recurring scene. After the husband leaves, Nightbitch hugs him unenthusiastically and directs a psychic fuck you as he pulls from the driveway. She then collapses into a chair at the kitchen table with her lukewarm coffee to collect herself, watching the boy as he methodically pulls a baking sheet, a muffin tin, a skillet, the grater, from the cabinet next to the oven. This is the moment of her week's beginning, the moment she must gather herself to face the days ahead. She does not want to begin her week in her current state, in this sour anger, so mad she finds herself on the verge of tears. She knows this is not productive, no good for anyone, really, most of all herself. Yet the anger is there, a physical sensation of exertion that remains even when she tries to stop thinking, to stop her "toxic thinking" as her husband would call it. The Monday morning ritual is thus a moment of tension between her desire to be positive, to embrace her husband's advice about happiness and schedules, and the overwhelming reality of her situation.

The Long Monday with the Boy

One particular Monday, after the husband has left, Nightbitch and the boy spend the day together in a flurry of activity. They bake muffins and play with trains, play with Play-Doh, go for a walk to the train track, take out the hose and attach the sprinkler and have a go of that, play chase, play ball, play fetch inside and out. Their feet are dirty and their noses are dirty, and they eat peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches on the porch steps as the sun eases toward night. Their muscles are hot and tired and happy, and the boy stares with vacant exhaustion, mouth slathered with jelly. This is the idyllic version of motherhood, the version she is supposed to embrace, the version her husband imagines when he says he'd be ecstatic if this is what he got to do all day. Yet even on this day, the specter of night-nights looms. Nightbitch has with great folly believed that night-nights would be easy on this night, a breeze, just a smooch and snuggle, and then the boy would be gone. In fact, such a night-night has never once occurred in the boy's entire life, though Nightbitch refuses to acknowledge this and instead embraces that positive attitude and productive thinking. She tells herself it will be a wonderful Monday night-night as she washes the boy and slips on his little pajamas and then slips the whole boy bundle between the cool blue sheets of her bed. The Monday that begins with the husband's departure thus ends with the boy's resistance to sleep, the two bookends of her daily struggle.

The Origin of the Name and the Transformation

Monday is also the day the transformation begins to take hold. It is on a Monday, after a weekend spent abiding her husband, that Nightbitch finds herself collapsing into the chair, and it is in the days following the naming that she finds the patch of coarse black hair sprouting from the base of her neck. The name Nightbitch itself was meant as a good-natured self-deprecating joke, because that's the sort of lady she was, a good sport, able to poke fun at herself, definitely not uptight, not wound really tight, not so freakishly tight that she couldn't see the humor in a lighthearted not-meant-as-an-insult situation. But in the days following this new naming, she finds the patch of coarse black hair and is, like, What the fuck. She tells her husband when he arrives home after a week away for work that she thinks she's turning into a dog. He laughs and she doesn't. She had hoped he wouldn't laugh. She had hoped, that week as she lay in bed, wondering if she was turning into a dog, that when she said those words to her husband, he would tip his head to one side and ask for clarification. She had hoped he would take her concerns seriously. But as soon as she said the words, she saw this was impossible. The Monday departure and the week of solitude are thus the conditions under which the transformation can occur, the space in which she is free to become something other than what she was.

The Weight of Mother-Rage

Monday is also the day the mother-rage is most acute. It is the day she inflates with mother-rage and composes elaborate, emotional arguments against the system and capitalism and the patriarchy and then religion and gender roles and biology. It is the day she feels that society, adulthood, marriage, motherhood, all these things, were somehow masterfully designed to put a woman in her place and keep her there. This idea had begun to weigh on her, and after her son arrived it took on a new shape, an unwieldy heft, and then even more 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. The Monday departure is the trigger for this spiral, the moment when the anger that has been building all weekend finally has room to expand. It is the day she is left alone with her thoughts, with the grocery store as a locus of oppression, with the feeling that she is trapped, that it is all a plot. The rage is directed not only at her husband but at the entire structure of her life, at the fact that she had bought into the popular societal myth that if a young woman merely secured a top-notch education she could then free herself from the historical constraints of motherhood, that if she simply had a career she could easily return to work after having a baby and sidestep the drudgery of previous generations. Monday is the day this myth collapses, the day she is left with the reality of her situation.

The Reckoning with the Past

Monday is also the day she reckons with her own past, with the mother who was good and responsible and holy and always somewhere far away in her own head, or with a headache, or napping, or just, please, leave me alone. She remembers her grammy and her book, the skills she gathered during her quiet Appalachian upbringing, how to keep bees, dip candles, brush wool, use a spinning wheel and make yarn, dry onions and garlic, develop photographs with vegetable juices, bake absolutely anything, make every single sort of braid, sing every single sort of song, track an animal through the woods. She knew her cardinal directions, how to tell a fast pony from a slow one just from the look of its face. She knew enough to live inside an entire life all on her own, and yet her husband, with his electronics skills, his engineering, he was the one who made all the money, even though she could make a world, and then, too, make a person to live in that world. The Monday solitude is the space in which this reckoning can happen, the space in which she can see her mother's pushing her out the door not as abandonment but as her mother's best love. It is the space in which she can ask how many generations of women had delayed their greatness only to have time extinguish it completely, how many women had run out of time while the men didn't know what to do with theirs. Monday is thus not only the day of abandonment but the day of return, the day she begins to remember who she was before she became a mother, and who she might become again.