Night, and Further Thoughts on Technology

A few hours ago, when I was putting Lily to bed, she commented en route to the bedroom after brushing her teeth, "I hate night."

"Why?" I asked, not paying close attention. I know full well why she hates night; she is onto me. Before Annika was born, I used to breathe a sigh of relief so immense that the neighbors probably heard it when I closed her bedroom door. Now, a little more time elapses before the sigh, but Annika is asleep by 9 these days, at the latest, so the sigh comes then. Lily knows, because at 4 she already knows me oh so well: Night is mine.

I love my waking hours with the girls. The evenings are ours in particular; lately, when Ben is away, Lily and I make dinner, something a little bit festive, like "breakfast for dinner," which we both enjoy. Then, we read together, in the reclining chair or in Lily's bed, unless Annika squawks too much, in which case she is relegated to the indignity of her bouncy seat with a pacifier. We talk, too, in a different way than we talk on the way to school, in the dark, which is always a different kind of talking, and when Lily falls asleep with Scout curled around her and the Mary Poppins soundtrack blasting, as she wants it to be, Annika and I sit for a while, back in the chair, and sink into the night, and although she does not know yet, is way too small, perhaps on some cellular level she can sense it too. Night.

The nights are mine, and I long for them all day, at least on some subconscious level, a place where a tiny part of me still remembers what it felt like to lie in bed in the morning and decide if I felt like getting up. There are no decisions, now, in the mornings. There is just getting up, before or just as it is getting light, and then there is no spare second in the day in which to breathe deeply enough to really feel it, no moments in which to ask myself, "Hmm. What should I do next?"

This is, I know, intrinsic to parenting young children. From the very first day, or at least the very first day home from the hospital, after which you spend every subsequent day wondering why nurses are so underpaid and undervalued, time shifts irrevocably, constantly but inconsistently, never again your own to own in the way you did before. Deciding when to get up is one example of a lost luxury, but there are so many more. The loss of daytime is the biggest one, I think, because no matter how much help you have, or who is helping, or even if you are not actually with a child of yours at any given time, if they are awake it is their time, not yours, and it is impossible to fully let that notion go.

I am not complaining. Really, I am not. In fact, I didn't mean to take this long to get to where I wanted, what I wanted to say, which is that my own relationship to night these days is growing complicated. As I said, I long for it, covet it, hoard it, try my best to stretch it out until it barely fits the definition, but it taunts me, slipping by with a haughty turned shoulder, knows it has the power and wields it like a knife.

At night, of course, I run as though on an escalator that is going down, chasing my old self. But there isn't really time in these snatched, furtive, even desperate hours to have the kind of conversation on the phone in which you end up trying to remember the lyrics to as many Christmas carols as you can, or to make caramel popcorn by hand, or to watch a real movie, even, or to really, really read: a book, a novel, not a magazine, and without any outward purpose but to lose yourself.

Those words are a cliche, I suppose, "to lose yourself," and funny, too, as what I am talking about is actually trying to find myself, and the fact is that although some would probably say the self itself has changed--that we change so over time (and becoming a mother would be only one of the myriad ways a person changes)--but I don't believe this, never have.

So it is night again, and because I have not been checking word counts (to my own surprise, I realize), just writing--tonight and every night for, I think, nine days--I have managed to lose myself for a little while again. And yes, I am tired, but in a way that feels manageable, surmountable, even a little bit exhilirating. It will be yours someday, too, Lily, and Annika, although that's harder to imagine still, but I know it's true. But for now, the nights are mine.

Not going to tackle the further thoughts on technology tonight in-depth, but I am interested in the question of how our modern technolgies both facilitate and break down closeness, the space between us. And I do think they do both. And I want to really think about this, and write about it, hard.