"Female Nocturne" by Natalie Bisaro Rowland
I woke in the earliest morning hours. 1:18 a.m. 4:13 a.m. Pregnant with my first daughter. Hormones raced and shifted and dropped and rose, and I saw the dark as an inscrutable, enveloping bat.
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Twelve weeks to begin: Predatory queasiness. A fainting tendency. At worst I lay on cold bathroom tile after vomiting, lightheaded enough to float without leaving the floor. My skin flushed, birthed sweat.
At best I knew the miracle of what was happening inside me.
I slept poorly, though, roused from REM by nausea. 1:18 a.m. 4:13 a.m. If tired enough, I fell asleep again. Come daylight I tagged myself with Sea-Bands and hid them under sleeves. I faltered to work, sucked B-vitamin candies. Sometimes between meetings I hovered in airless bathrooms and landed, bent-kneed, before toilets.
I had known my body well. I didn’t anymore. I feared the unfamiliar that winged within my own female form.
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Years before I had children, I sometimes inexplicably woke and felt so alone that the threat of isolation became a presence, as though it hung there, in my bedroom, from the ceiling.
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Before I told my colleagues I was pregnant, I agreed to ferry and publicly introduce an admirable editor and imprint founder. She flew in from New York. In my car, the morning of her event, she told me, harrowed, her mother had died in the night.
Mid-introduction, in front of the crowd, I sat to avoid passing out. My boss stood and took over. For the rest of the day I bore the shameful questions from attendees wondering why I’d sat down, if I was alright, if I had gotten enough sleep.
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Time dipped by.
I told my boss, a mother, I was expecting. She told me the editor from New York had asked her if I was pregnant when I’d nearly fainted onstage.
The editor is a mother, too.
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I stopped feeling sick.
I kept waking up. At night I rose and raged at tiredness before she’d truly arrived: she’d descend upon me at work, a recurring afternoon meeting.
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One night, I surrendered to my insomnia.
I woke and dutifully rose. 1:18 a.m. 4:13 a.m. I hydrated Cheerios with cold milk. I let my anger leave me.
Over the next few weeks I tucked into the couch at 1:18 and 4:13 with scriptures or a pencil and sometimes I prayed. I began to familiarly greet the night. I met the nocturnal resident within me and gave it its awakening, some cereal and milk, and the dark.
In the final month, I did this every night, a standing appointment with darkness–the bat–and wondered what all of it was for.
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I wake now, 2:37 a.m., three-and-a-half years later.
There’s been another baby, another nine months with punch cards in bowls of cereal.
With both of my girls, I rose each night for a year after their births at the very times I woke before them. 1:18 a.m. 4:13 a.m. A nightly tea time with the tiniest ladies, where I breastfed warm milk to bodies too hungry to sleep.
Tonight I rise for no reason. The girls are older, asleep. Outside, bats roost under my front door’s awning. In spring, pregnant mother bats gather in nursery colonies where they give birth and breastfeed their young together.
Some women say that pregnant they never felt alone because their baby was always with them.
I don’t feel alone when I wake now. But my comfort didn’t come with the pregnancies, or the company of my children. My love for them now feels too intense for ease.
My solace arrived in the realization that in each darkness there are thousands of other women with me whom I cannot see. Awake now, rising in the night.
Natalie Bisaro Rowland is a graduate of the MFA at Florida Atlantic University, where she served as the founding managing editor of Swamp Ape Review, and the University of Michigan. Her work has appeared in Booth, Hobart, The Rumpus, Vestal Review, and Fiction Writers Review.
