Goodnight Noises Everywhere

Margaret Wise Brown claimed that Goodnight Moon, the children’s bedtime story, came to her in a dream. The illustrations are garish yellows, oranges, and greens. There are no people—only rabbits inhabiting the space of humans. They appear on some pages and disappear on others. The tale is haunting because it is in the world but not of it.

Prior to having children, I had not anticipated how many kids’ stories fall into the genre of the bedtime story—the main conflict in the narrative created by the task of getting a child off to sleep by bedtime. Wise Brown’s focus on bedtime rituals was not based on personal experience. Though famous for her children’s literature, she never had children herself. 

When I first read Goodnight Moon to my son, Charlie, I just kept watching the book’s clocks. On each page that showcases the great green room, there is a clock on a bedside table. The narrative begins at seven o’clock, an aspirational bedtime. The room goes dark, and the story concludes at eight. This 30-page book does not actually take an hour to read aloud—minutes, merely, if that. The clock on each page moves forward by approximately 2.5 minutes.

In a book of fantastic color, with only a little old rabbit lady hushing the soon-to-be sleeper, the clock’s timing felt like an interesting detail to be exact about. This world feels removed from our reality—and yet, we still cannot escape time. 

In pregnancy and breastfeeding, my rounded body became its own kind of clock. My baby was, of course, the alarm. Before becoming a mom, I expected the sleepless nights, the aching back, the incessant crying, and the relentless worry. But I did not expect how obsessed I would become with time.

As a new mom, it was as if my life had shape-shifted from linear to cyclical. Before having a baby, my days seemed to move forward, with meetings at work, dinner with friends, and housework at night. After the births of my sons, I was on the forever merry-go-round of feeding, diapering, soothing, and sleeping. Feeding, diapering, soothing, and sleeping. Round and round we went.

But it wasn’t just my children’s births that contributed to my fixation with time. My husband suffered from a severe mood disorder that left him hospitalized right when I became pregnant with our second son, Charlie. At discharge, he was given a diagnosis that included the prescription, “sleep”—as if this were so simple. 

I believed that if I could control sleep, we could both have strong mental health. I rested my hopes in this linear equation. Because of what I’d read about lack of sleep contributing to postpartum depression, I was consumed with rituals after giving birth to Charlie, particularly those at bedtime. 

During the day, I woke Charlie to find more rest at night. Even if he was peacefully sleeping on my chest, if his nap exceeded the two hour mark, I startled him awake with movement and loud noises. I adhered to rigid schedules that stipulated the number of naps he could have each day, the number of minutes he was allowed to doze. My schedule was as exact as the 2.5 minute page progressions in Goodnight Moon. He was not allowed to sleep for more than two hours during the daytime or be awake for more than two hours, either. I dashed away early from parties and rushed quickly from the grocery store without crossing off the eggs and milk from my shopping list—all to stick to the nap schedule.

Bedtime was rigidly planned, too. I bathed Charlie, not because he was unclean, but because I believed the water and heat would make him drowsy. As I diapered and lotioned, I played the same song, a Japanese lullaby off Spotify. Afterwards, I massaged his neck and sang softly into his ear. I read the same books each night, one of which was Goodnight Moon. I swaddled. I rocked. I groaned at the thought of listening to that same lullaby night after night, but I feared any disruption or change to the routine would result in sleeplessness.

Eventually, Charlie began to sleep through the night. But even once he began to sleep, my life did not progress straight forward. I was caught in my own cycle of sleeplessness. 

As Charlie slumbered until morning, I woke at night, mind racing. I was not dreaming, but it was as if I’d entered another world. The light from the streetlamps crept in through the cracks of the blinds, casting shadows on the walls. My mind’s inner monologue recited looping stories of the past: birth, the hospital, and after. My husband, ill during my labor. His bloodshot eyes as I pushed Charlie into the world. His paranoia. The emergency room. My blood pressure, off the charts. The nights alone in the house while my husband received treatment. Just me, my blood pressure medication, my babies.  

My son may have been sleeping through the night, but this milestone had not brought relief. I soon realized that motherhood had birthed in me a fear of rest. A day that felt too smooth, health that seemed too stable, felt like a tease—like leaning into it too fully would shift something dangerous and knock me out entirely. Margaret Wise Brown’s life, after all, was cut short because she celebrated too soon after a difficult medical event. Following surgery to remove her appendix, she performed a cancan kick into the air. Immediately, she fell unconscious. The kick dislodged a blood clot in her leg which traveled to her brain. Within an hour, she was dead, at 42 years old. 

At night, I obsessed about my postpartum experience, thrown sharply off course, my husband becoming ill again right at the time of my delivery.  Everything was fine, until it was not. Similar to Margaret Wise Brown’s death: a perfect example of someone caught blindsided by disaster. Her demise was uncanny, illogical—as illogical as some of my fears about my own health postpartum. If I had worried about something as outlandish as Wise Brown’s death, my therapist would have called the fear illogical and advised me to let it float away like a balloon. 

Wise Brown struggled deeply with depression earlier in life. She once said that, to combat depression, she developed a gratitude practice. Each morning, she looked around her apartment and made a note of items that gave her pleasure. She coped by taking stock of the physical items in her room—a ritual that mirrors the narrative of Goodnight Moon. 

A comb. A brush. A bowl full of mush.

I learned about Wise Brown’s ritual as I did research for a course I was teaching. I read Bruce Handy’s Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult. It was in his chapter about Wise Brown that I learned about her depression and coping mechanisms. In reading this, I realized that Goodnight Moon is essentially a fictionalized narrative that acknowledges items in the physical world as a means to help one rest. 

Inspired by Wise Brown, I, too, tried to occupy myself with the physical world. For relief from rumination about my husband’s health, I considered the sturdy porcelain of my coffee mug. The softness of Charlie’s swaddle blanket. The sun shining outside. My son nestled in my arms. It was grounding to focus on objects, to find something physical to bring me back to the present moment, my reality, which was not actually a windowless hospital room far away, as it had previously been. 

In Goodnight Moon, the narrator says good night to objects in the room, all items one could physically see and touch—except for in the last line. The book concludes with “goodnight noises everywhere.”

I wanted to say “goodnight” to my own noise, too. And so, I began ritually meditating before bed. I tried to stay present in my physical space. I wanted to remain in the world rather than in my own head. After reading and rocking and tucking my baby, I went to my own bedroom to meditate. I laid in bed listening to a soothing woman’s voice walk me through a nighttime meditation. 

Still, I continued to wake. At 3:00 a.m., my mind raced. I did not worry about my son, nor did I cycle through my list of to-dos. I mentally rehearsed the story of Charlie’s birth. I imagined telling someone the story, all of it, the parts I felt compelled to keep secret about my own health and my husband’s. I felt shame about the deep unhappiness that colored that first year with my son. I told the same story in my mind, in different ways, night after night after night. I did this for about a year. I wanted to figure out how to tell my birth story without it sounding fictional. I think I believed that if I could tell the story just right, with just the right words that would fully capture my experience, I might be able to move past it and finally rest again. Something about my son’s birth felt wrong, and I kept trying to get it right in my mind. But I could never get to that place. Eventually, I gave myself permission to write it all down. To take the narrative out of my head and give it space in the physical world. 

It was around this time that I fully came back to earth. After a day with my sons—hiking through the woods, picking flowers along the trail, skipping a nap, and trading bedtime activities for dessert on the porch at sunset—I forgot to engage in my own rituals. I did not take my warm shower, nor did I open my meditation app. I forgot about completing my evening stretches or applying moisturizer to my newly-lined forehead. It was as if my routine had floated away like a balloon, out of my head and up to the sky. 

After a day where I’d released my routines, I, too, finally slept through the night. It was freedom, not ritual, that ultimately allowed me to rest. In the same way that Charlie had learned to sleep without exacting routine, I, too, outgrew my need for the crutch of ritual. Once I healed enough to give up control, I outgrew the repetition of a bedtime story. I could finally say “goodnight” to Goodnight Moon.