Up all night? Maybe you’re better for it.
By Susan Anspach • Illustration by Matt Mignanelli
On a walk home from dinner with my son last week, I pointed up to the sky and showed him the moon. To say he was excited about it is like saying Tysons has a traffic problem. He’d heard of the moon, seen pictures of it on flashcards and in books, but couldn’t remember having seen it for himself, which he probably hadn’t in close to a year. My son is a toddler; most nights he’s asleep at 7:30 p.m. He thrashed against the straps of his stroller, fighting restraint every step back to the house, where he knew bedtime awaited him.
I understood completely.
I’m a thoroughbred night owl. I’ve always felt my best self after the sun sets. I sleep well, but better between the hours of 2 and 10 a.m. In college, all-nighters were no problem so long as I squeezed in an eight-hour nap the next day. My husband did basic training, which he loved, and I listen to his stories about it the way some people listen to ghost stories. I make him go over the same details each time—the bad food, the exhaustion, the near-constant belittling and criticisms—then decide the worst part would be lights out at 9 o’clock every night. But it’s not. The worst part comes later. Twelve years later, my husband can’t sleep in past 7 a.m. Basic training ruined him for life, even if some people, like my husband, might take issue with wordage.
Only, staying up past the witching hour is too gratifying to imagine having to give it up forever. The rules concerning what we know to be wholesome, what we know to be true, relax some at night. The Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus: all creatures of night. My parents used to tell me animals could talk on New Year’s, and I was allowed to stay up for it. It never mattered that they didn’t. I always held out for it anyway.
The night is when we eat our worst food, watch our worst television, buy our worst products off QVC. Our impulses grow stronger at night, under the blanket of darkness and semi-anonymity. We indulge. Bad people do bad things. Good people do bad things, on a tamer but no less meaningful scale. There’s a diet tip that suggests if you want to lose weight, you should go to bed earlier since you can’t eat when you’re asleep. Whoever came up with that came up with it at 8 in the morning because if you’re awake long enough, its absurdity dawns on you in time to think, stuff it and have the third slice of pizza. Adopting a geriatric sleep schedule to save yourself 400 calories is not the stuff of night, and thank God for it.
Nighttime is an unleashing of our inner third-graders. At my school, that was the age when sleepovers started. It was also the time when “best” friendships formed, as well as cliques, gossips and enemies. Staying up late unlocked secrets, loosened lips, wired an electrical charge to our ids. We revealed to each other, if not our dark sides, the sides dark enough to play Truth or Dare with no opt-outs.
Late night hours lend themselves to extremes. Our sensibilities are heightened after dark. We fall in love at night and feel so much worse when we’re sick, with love or otherwise. Midnight snacks taste better than a regular cheese stick at 2 p.m. We have access that we don’t have in the day. The roads clear; to slice up I-95 over the speed limit, something you can do on exceptional nights but never in the day, is an invigorating shock to the senses.
When I was a kid, I didn’t fall in love much—not in the nice, reciprocated way—though I’m sure I very much wanted to. I did have my share of snacks. And my dad and I walked our dog every night, across every inch of Manassas. We knew that town in a way we only could at night, when we could peer inside windows lit against a dim sky. We tracked the rotation of constellations overhead, knew under which house a litter of foxes was living. In the summer months, we heard our neighbors laughing outside over bonfires and the pop of a new bottle of wine. There isn’t much foot traffic in Manassas after dark, so the people we did sometimes meet we got to know by their own dogs or strollers they were pushing home from the park.
My dad still walks the dog every evening, though I’ve made the change over to the stroller. Inconveniently, the only time I’ve ever struggled at night was before and after my son was born, something I could have seen coming from listening to anyone who’s had a baby. The worst I’ve ever felt was the month of insomnia at the tail end of my pregnancy; I’d done a terrible thing and accepted an enormous work project with a deadline set one week after my due date. At night, I’d sit up with it in our home office until my husband pulled out of our driveway for work.
With a new baby, you’re up nights whether you like it or not. It’s hard, but I wondered what was so hard, besides the obvious tiredness and conviction you’re screwing everything up. I settled on loneliness: I was lonelier at night with a baby than I’d ever been before by myself. So I resolved to think about all the other new parents whom I knew had to be living a few blocks from my house and cornered a friend at a party whose job sometimes entailed working at night. This was about two months in; my eyes were always a little wild and red-rimmed. She asked me if I liked the hors d’oeuvres. I asked her if she ever got lonely at night. “Because I do, Alex. I get really lonely and something that helps me sometimes is thinking about you.”
When we got older, Truth or Dare fell away to another game, Body-Body. Body-Body calls for a large group of players, including two secretly selected murderers, who roam about an abandoned building trying to ID the killers while averting their own death, a misfortune doled out with two hard taps to the shoulder. It’s a game that requires allies, real and false, and a good hiding place. It is most certainly best played at night when instincts are strongest, when abettors and assailants naturally materialize.
My newborn son wasn’t my sworn opponent, but he threw me successive curveballs for months. With him, I was lonely at night because the night underscored the complications of our relationship. He was a person I loved and a person I battled—to eat, sleep and just generally chill the hell out—to the limits of my own sanity. These days it’s better, now that he’s on a sleep schedule, and now that I am, too. I fought it a long time, but I’m not ashamed to tell you that most nights I’m tucked in bed at 9:30 to wake up the next morning at 6. It is very much temporary, I assure you. My son’s not a drill sergeant. I am not ruined for life.
And please, let the record show I have not lost a pound.
@CitySprawlNVMag is up all night on Twitter.
(June 2015)