Dear Nightbitch,
You probably don't know this about me, but I am not a book re-reader. Beyond childhood picture books and those that I've taught in my classroom, I don't believe I have ever re-read a book. So, perhaps the greatest proclamation of my love is this:
I reread you.
A friend introduced us. She mentioned you to me but warned me that you wouldn't be any good for me. Not right then. Not in the depths of postpartum with all the joy, fear, and rage swirling around and bubbling up at seemingly random moments. "Wait until he's a little older," she said, indicating my newborn and giving me a sidelong look, I'm sure taking in my wild and bedraggled appearance. I heeded her advice, worried that she meant you'd done something awful to the son in your pages (spoilers: that was not the case).
So I didn't read you for another six months. What wasted time those months were. In that time, I felt so alone and crazy, hysterical if you will. I was a bitch (though my particular brand of bitchiness was not nocturnal but perpetual). You, Nightbitch, made me feel seen. I wasn't worried about my mix of feelings being unhinged because I knew they were. I was afraid of them being insolated from every other person's, every other woman's, experience. Those fears dissolved when I read the mother's truly unhinged experiences in your pages.
While you inspired the idea of writing love letters to books I truly and deeply loved, that fell away like all my other creative endeavors as a baby consumed my days hungrily. Still, you were a comfort that I was not alone and that I would come through the other side. But I still had to get there.
So nearly two years later when I saw you in a book store, having read you from the library the first time, and once more trying to pull my head above the waters of the postpartum of my second son, I bought you. I remembered that feeling I had. I opened you again, afraid you wouldn't be the same as me anymore.
But it was even better. Your mother had a two-year-old just like my first is now. While I'd started again with a second baby, you told me it was still okay. I was like so many other women piecing themselves together anew, and that I would get there. I held you tight.
You described it perfect: "As if the book itself was her most cherished friend. As if its pages knew her heart. She kept reading."
Love always,
Chelsea
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