Amy Adams plays an unnamed mother, a formerly successful artist who has ditched her career to look after her son in the forthcoming film Nightbitch. Her husband works away, so she’s mostly home alone. It’s a perfectly horrible – and, for me, eerily accurate – depiction of how it feels to have a baby. One moment, you’re the blooming centre of everything, being offered a seat on public transport. The next, you’re a bleeding, heaving husk and your unbrushed hair is snagged in the wheels of the bus going round and round all day long.
Adams’ repressed rage and resentment is palpable. Her repertoire of indignant fury facial expressions is delicious, directed at the vacant library mums, the smug, childfree ex-friends and, most of all, at her maddening but perfectly nice husband.
Adams stays just the right side of believable, even likeable, as she feels herself turning into a dog when the sun goes down. Hence “nightbitch”. The metaphor is slightly clumsy, but we’re all familiar with storylines about angry men becoming werewolves, so why not?
Delusional and increasingly desperate, there is heartbreaking tenderness in how she keeps on battling teatime, bath time, story time, bedtime, kissing and cuddling her way through the peculiar exhaustion that only mothers of still-awake-after-9pm toddlers experience. That must be why they call it dog-tired.
I was diagnosed with postnatal depression after my eldest child was born. My episiotomy (a surgical cut made during labour) hadn’t healed properly, so sitting down was agony, and going to the toilet was agony, and breastfeeding was agony, and expressing milk with the stupid, yellow breast pump was agony, so I thought, “You know what? I think I might eliminate one of these agonies.”
So, I stopped breastfeeding and when the health visitor told me off, I cried. She referred me to a helpline because I was having “an irrational response to becoming a parent”. I explained to the person on the helpline that I wasn’t sad; I was absolutely livid. Would it not be more irrational to be delighted to find oneself in that much pain, and never able to go to sleep or have a shower or go outside?
And even this is hard to say, because there are women who want to have children and can’t, and worse still, women who have lost children. The mother who says, “This isn’t actually that good,” is worse than ungrateful – she’s unnatural.
I remember the nice lady from the NCT offering me the cloying reassurance that “your body will know what to do when the time comes”. It was her way of saying that giving birth is raw and savage, so good luck. There is nothing like having another living thing squeezed, wrenched or sliced out of your nether regions to remind you of your mortality and your power.
The paradox at the heart of Nightbitch is that childbearing takes us closest to our base animalism, but motherhood is meant to elevate us to our prettiest, most civilised humanity. And we get less than a minute to transition between the two. Wouldn’t it be easier if we could ditch the niceties, the routines and nutrition, the eye and skin contact, the tummy time and creative play, and just raise our kids like dogs?
The movie is a primal howl. Because for all the many books, articles, podcasts and movies about motherhood, nothing can prepare you for the shock. And swaddled inside the shock, the unfairness. Not only because of the ludicrous cost of childcare that compels us to jack in our jobs just to keep the baby alive, or the stubbornly persistent gender norms that compel us to pretend we like it when we don’t. The cruel truth is this: a woman can only discover too late what she will lose when she gains a child. No wonder we want to scream.
