Nightbitch

by Rachel Yoder

You light a fire early in your girlhood. You stoke it and tend it. You protect it at all costs. You don’t let it rage into a mountain of light, because that’s not becoming of a girl. You keep it secret. You let it burn. You look into the eyes of other girls and see their fires flickering there, offer conspiratorial nods, never speak aloud of a near-unbearable heat, a growing conflagration. You tend the flame because if you don’t you’re stuck, in the cold, on your own, doomed to seasonal layers, doomed to practicality, doomed to this is just the way things are, doomed to settling and understanding and reasoning and agreeing and seeing it another way and seeing it his way and seeing it from all the other ways but your own.

She wanted to think she had become another person altogether the night before, but she knew the horrible truth, that Nightbitch had always been there, not even that far below the surface.

Who ever thought a mother would need to sanitize a counter of the milk meant for her baby? The milk should be sopped up using a ceremonial rag that’s then set at the foot of a towering, infinitely beautiful sculpture carved to honor the Eternal Mother, Giver of Life and Maker of All Things.

She told herself to be a detached observer of her emotional landscape. In her mind, she repeated the phrase emotional landscape and then saw it there, a gray silhouette against a gray sky.

THE NEXT MORNING, SHE did what any reasonable person would do and went to the library.

She is becoming a better mother because she is becoming a better dog! Dogs don’t need to work. Dogs don’t care about art. Why had this never occurred to her before? She likes the idea of being a dog, because she can bark and snarl and not have to justify it. She can run free if she wants. She can be a body and instinct and urge. She can be hunger and rage, thirst and fear, nothing more.

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? And what a mean trick to call such things holy or selfless. How evil to praise women for giving up each and every dream.

At times she terrified herself, wondering if she was a god, if being a mother was one way of being a god. Of course, she couldn’t strike anyone down with a lightning bolt, but she could bring a person into being using little more than a handful of clay. Way less, in fact. How were mothers even a thing? How had they not been outlawed? They were divine, beyond horrifying.

And this performance is meant to underscore the brutality and power and darkness of motherhood, for modern motherhood has been neutered and sanitized. We are at base animals, and to deny us either our animal nature or our dignity as humans is a crime against existence. Womanhood and motherhood are perhaps the most potent forces in human society, which of course men have been hasty to quash, for they are right to fear these forces.