Brain Rest
On concussions, sleep regressions, Mercury in retrograde, and Nightbitch
“The full moon of June 29 was in Capricorn and lit your third house of short travel, so over the days from June 29 to July 4, you may have chosen to take a business or personal trip to a nearby setting. You may even find a way to take an extra day to unwind and relax.” - Susan Miller, Astrology Zone, “Scorpio Horoscope for July 2026”
In the wee hours of Monday, June 29th, just as Mercury moved into retrograde, my daughter yelled out for me. The sound reverberated, her screams rising up the stairs from her room a floor below ours, and a split second later echoing through the monitor on my husband’s nightstand. I paused for a few minutes, hoping she would settle. When she did not, I sat up to reach across my husband’s body for the glowing rectangle to evaluate her angst.
Unfortunately, at the precise moment that I sat up, Ben, by his account, startled. By my account, he moved to turn over and pull the blanket over his head, to signal his preemptive disapproval of any effort on my part to soothe her. (As I’ll get into, it had been a rough few nights.) Whatever the degree of intentionality behind his sudden jolting, my right temple and eyebrow ended up in the pathway of his left hook. THWACK.
My awareness of the monitor, of his apologies, of my daughter’s screams, fell away as my field of vision shimmered with stars. I leaned back against the headboard, dizzy. Tears flooded my eyes. “I need ice,” I said. I could tell he thought I was overreacting. He clomped down and up stairs, tossed an ice pack (which, to his credit, he had considerately wrapped in a dishtowel) at me and then crashed back into bed. At some point, my daughter must have stopped yelling. At some point, I couldn’t keep myself awake, and I fell asleep.
Two nights earlier, as I found myself strapping my almost three-year-old child into her carseat at 1 a.m. (“I need shoes, mama? Where we going, mama?”), I rehearsed what I would say to the police officer if I got pulled over, how I would convince him that I was of sound mind and had all my faculties in tact. A part of me wondered whether I was, in fact, of sound mind—what the fuck was I doing, in glasses and pajamas, putting my daughter in the car in the middle of the night to circle the streets of Evanston. I felt a very real fear that we were going to get hit by a drunk driver. I cranked up a lullaby playlist on Spotify and slowed to 20 miles per hour as I fiddled with the AC and the windows, struggling to combat the fogging windshield. Surely, I was endangering both of us. My child, who until this most recent phase went to bed at 7 p.m., was mesmerized by the lights. (“That my new school, mama? The sky is pink, mama?”) I ignored her questions, hoping that with my silence, she would get the hint. Instead, she repeated them over and over, her volume increasing until she was shrieking, until I was forced to deliver the incantation I had been repeating ad nauseam for the last few hours - “It’s not time to talk, my love, it’s time to sleep.”
If I got pulled over, how would I explain that this was, indeed, my child, that I was stone-cold sober—wired, in fact—and that I was simply desperate for my kid to sleep? That we had guests and I didn’t know what else to do? Would it be better or worse to explain that she wouldn’t let us zip up the Slumberpod? Better or worse to ask him if he had read Nightbitch, the 2021 magical realist novel by Rachel Yoder about a mother of a toddler who slowly finds herself turning into a dog as she feels her pre-maternal identity slipping away from her, or the 2024 film adaptation starring Amy Adams? Or would he call DCFS then and there?
“We go home soon, mama?” It occurred to me then that she was not a baby and that this had been a really dumb idea. The raging fire inside me started to smolder. “Let’s go home, lovey. It’s time to go to sleep.”