Nightlife, noun: “the music entertainment, dancing, and other activities that happen in a city or town in the evening.”
From movies and television shows, and perhaps even from our own younger days, we can readily envision the sights, sounds, and tastes of this definition, from the Cambridge English Dictionary. And yet, it is incomplete. There is, you see, another kind of nightlife out there, one that mothers know well. This kind of nightlife, though, tends to fly under the radar. Perhaps this is because for most people, this nightlife is invisible. As a result, it tends to be much lonelier than the dictionary variety.
In 2019, Ruth Crilly, a former model-turned-blogger launched an app to bring together lonely moms who were up in the wee hours of the night, feeding the baby. Aptly named “The Night Feed,” the concept was born from its creator’s own experiences as a sleep-deprived mom, awake at night feeding her second baby, feeling very isolated and alone in the process. On her blog, she explained her aims: “A sanctuary for the sleep-deprived, The Night Feed is meant to be a comforting place to go when you’re feeding a baby in the small (lonely) hours. Articles to keep you amused, discussions to keep you connected, there’s just enough to keep you awake when you need to be without exciting you so much that you can’t drop back to sleep.”
While I do not generally recommend solving life’s problems with apps, Crilly was on to something significant here. Her app identified a real need for community among moms of newborns, and the obvious absence of such community in the nighttime hours. As the gothic fantasy fiction of Rachel Yoder’s bestselling novel—recently adapted into a film starring Amy Adams—Nightbitch reminds us, the extreme isolation and chronic sleep-deprivation of motherhood can bring about adverse consequences for mothers’ physical and mental health.
Yes, there lurks a darker side to maternal nightlife. The extreme exhaustion wrought by sleep disruptions reminds why sleep deprivation is recognized as a torture tactic by the Geneva Conventions. Thankfully, in real life, unlike in Yoder’s novel, no sleep-deprived mother has yet turned into a dog or any other species. But the sense of duty that drives mothers to do what they do by night weighs heavy at times. The newborn period is particularly intense, but the need for mothers to stay awake for some periods at night doesn’t fully go away once the baby starts sleeping through the night.
Motherhood inspires and organically creates a secret nightlife all its own—one that holds the power to transform us.
The Secret Nightlife of Moms
Most people measure life in days, for it is by day that most civilized, respectable activity takes place—school, work, chores, yardwork, shopping, sports, and more. Such has been the way since the advent of agriculture. While electricity now provides artificial “daylight” for us by night, our biological wiring remains aligned with the circadian rhythm that normally makes us sleepy after nightfall and helps us wake up in the morning. This is why the debates over “Sleep Training the American People” are so significant and acrimonious. We sense disruptions in our sleep schedules and justifiably resent them.
But many mothers (especially of infants) measure life in nights rather than in days, because they measure life according to the demands of others. Yes, babies nurse a lot at night, partly because they are born without a circadian rhythm. Most women go into labor or give birth at night—a reality that comes to the fore when reading, for instance, one historian’s analysis of an eighteenth-century midwife’s journals. But there is more. By some sort of unspoken law of the universe, stomach bugs and fevers always seem to hit kids at night. A child once quietly tiptoed into my room (so considerate!) and woke me up only to throw up all over me (less considerate!). I am not the only parent to whom this has happened. Indeed, you might retort: “This only happened to you once?”
Furthermore, older children occasionally have bad dreams and come to their parents’ bed in the middle of the night. Nearly always, the mother is the one to wake up when this happens; the father rarely will. (My husband told of a strange dream he had one recent night: a large dog was panting in his ear. He woke up to discover our six-year-old firmly cuddled up to his back, breathing in his ear.) Or a child might lose her favorite stuffed lovey without which she cannot sleep somewhere in her covers at night and will come to wake up mom to help her find said lovey.
Last but not least, though, there is the creative side of maternal nightlife. When my first baby was an infant, I wrote my doctoral dissertation by night, during the baby’s sole window of uninterrupted sleep. Re-reading it later, I could not remember writing significant portions of it; the entire process felt like a fuzzy dream. Now that that baby is an adult and my youngest child is six, we have come full circle. Night has become again my creative window—a time of keeping an intellectual vigil with ideas while the rest of the house is asleep. Down the road, I can look forward to another reason for waking up at night: menopause hormones, which wreak their own sleep disruptions.
There is no denying it: Motherhood births a nightlife all its own. This nightlife contrasts with the glamorous nightlife of dictionary definitions, or even the nightlife that historian Roger Ekirch documents in his book, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past. A magnificent history of nighttime activity in the days before electricity, the stories Ekirch collects unveil the surprising level of social activity that people in Early Modern Europe carried on at times by night, visiting neighbors, catching a drink with a friend, hosting an impromptu block party of sorts.
For those unencumbered by children, nightlife is characterized by entertainment and freedom. It is the foil of daytime labors: for those who work hard and play hard, oftentimes the “play hard” part is the purview of nighttime. But such a nightlife is also the foil of the maternal nightlife.
The Productivity of Maternal Nightlife
The social nightlife is visible because it is communal and located outside the home. The maternal nightlife, by contrast, is confined to the private domestic space. As a result, it tends to be invisible. It is unseen, because everyone in the house is usually asleep at night—except that nursing baby or sick preschooler. Yet this work of invisible nighttime care is, of course, essential and irreplaceable. It is, after all, first and foremost a work of mercy and love.
In her recent essay, “Reclaiming Time: Why Women Should Challenge the Productivity Industry,” Abigail Wilkinson Miller highlights the problems of the productivity industry, which is mostly created by men and tends to reflect the biological rhythms of men’s lives, rendering it incompatible—and even harmful—for most women. Mothers, after all, cannot place work first the way productivity-obsessed men do. Even in Cal Newport’s well-reviewed book, Slow Productivity, which aims to encourage everyone to adopt healthier productivity rhythms, the advice seems incompatible with the typical lives of mothers—especially mothers of younger children, whose needs are more acute. Miller concludes her essay with this insight: “When women push back against the conventional time management wisdom and uphold the value of inefficiency for the sake of love, it not only helps them make peace with how they spend their days. It helps all of us to build a more human world.”
“Inefficiency for the sake of love” is a key description of maternal work of care, whether by day or by night. After all, so much of this work involves acts of comforting children who are distressed for reasons that may seem utterly incomprehensible for adults who are not parents—because these are reasons that would be considered unacceptable in adults. Why would a sick child run into my room just to throw up on me? Wouldn’t it be more efficient for her to use the bowl by her bed or run to the toilet and keep her germs to herself? It seems even more upsettingly inefficient and inconvenient for a child to wake up a parent just because she had a nightmare. But then, to be fair, we could also point out the inefficiency of the conventional nightlife. What’s the point of going dancing at night instead of sleeping? That’s terribly unproductive too.
Let’s face it: if we define productivity in terms of deliverables, everything human beings do by night is probably unproductive. Take sleep, for instance. What is it for? Just to restore our weary bodies and brains. What a horrible design flaw. And why are tiny humans especially so poorly designed as to require so much care, especially at night? What is the output of these nighttime tasks? Nothing that enhances the GDP, that’s for sure.
But there is another way to look at it. If we define productivity not in terms of products made but people served, considering maternal nightlife brings to light the beautiful yet invisible nature of maternal productivity. Many mothers end up having very productive nights, yet few people (including the mothers themselves) would use that term to describe getting up four times to nurse an infant or staying up much of the night with a sick child.
But maybe we should. Perhaps openly recognizing this nighttime labor of love as something real and beautiful that is worth celebrating may be a good way to push back on our profit and work-oriented culture. After all, these nighttime works of mercy—feeding, changing, caring, comforting, rocking children back to sleep—are free. But the fruit they are yielding is priceless.
