SLEEPLESS NIGHT BOOK SKIN
Once again I’m searching, furtively, for slight changes in his skin colour, his smell, his ability to focus. Just as I do with Lester, I’m worrying about Jimmy’s developmental charts, about how much food he’s eating and what its nutritional content is. There are sleepless nights, just as there were when Jimmy was a baby, and a strange new world to decode. Stroud is surprised to hear that her husband’s friend is struggling with the demands of family and work and that she also finds motherhood hard: Stroud also points to the negative role that social media highlight reels can play in the spiral of questioning: “Am I getting this right? Am I doing enough? Am I a good enough mother, or barely close? And is good enough good enough, anyway?” Stroud’s husband travels a lot for work and on one trip he meets with an old friend.
She feels guilty for wanting to escape from her children, but she is also often filled with a “dark reddish-blue despair” at the prospect of another day spent caring for her baby and preschooler.
In reality, as much as becoming a mother again has changed her, Stroud is also still the same person, still “irritable, detached, bored, impatient, frustrated.” Stroud is open about the negative emotions that come with motherhood and feels there is too much silence around these feelings. Those first days also seem to hold a kind of promise for Stroud they are a period in which she feels like a different person: “someone who can make the things I have gotten wrong as a mother all better and right.” But she also acknowledges that those weeks with each of her children were her most fulfilling as a mother the moments when her babies were brand new are the ones to which she most longs to return. She resists the idea that the newborn phase, and particularly the first few weeks, is the peak of motherhood. Stroud comes back to her desire for more children-a desire she refers to as an “addict’s hunger”-throughout the book. As Stroud puts it: “Nothing makes me as angry as motherhood does nothing makes me as happy.”įive children will probably seem like two or three too many to some, and Stroud addresses why she has ended up having five: because she was one of five, because on some level she likes the mess and the chaos, and, perhaps ultimately, because five seems to be the number that makes her feel complete, that has finally satisfied an insatiable hunger, “shaped exactly like a baby.”
Rather, My Wild and Sleepless Nights is a deeply personal exploration of the feelings that motherhood inspires, both the highs and the lows. Along the way, Stroud seeks to answer the question: what does motherhood feel like? She is not trying to answer this question for all mothers, though she does include conversations she’s had with friends throughout the book. While Lester pulls her into his newborn world, Jimmy is pushing himself away from his mother. At the same time, her oldest son, Jimmy, is a teenager who tests boundaries and questions the confines of life with a big, messy family in the middle of the British countryside. At forty-one, Clover Stroud finds herself pregnant with her fifth child, Lester, and the book takes place over his first year. My Wild and Sleepless Nights is part memoir of a year in the life of a mother of five and part exploration of the push and pull of motherhood.