I Became a Feminist at 3 AM

Those long, lonely nights with my baby were my first clue

There is something about 3 a.m. It’s the loneliest hour of the night — after last call but before even the earliest risers stumble out of bed. The streets are empty and quiet, the sky thick and black.

Nine years ago, after having my first baby, I became intimately acquainted with every hour of the night. In fact, I developed an utterly useless new skill: upon being roused from sleep, I was able to predict, with stunning accuracy, exactly what time it was. I knew by the weight of the air.

At 3 a.m., the air was at its heaviest. My husband, by this point of the night, had usually been exiled to the living room couch, his snores uninterrupted by our baby’s cries. Our baby was either having herself a nighttime snack, or wriggling in my arms as I paced the hallway, or wriggling in my bed as I gave up, yet again, on putting her back in her crib.

When my daughter had first wormed her way into our bed, nudging my husband out onto the couch, I shared my nighttime adventures with another new mom over coffee.

She said brightly: “Oh, we co-sleep, too!”

“You what?” I asked.

“We co-sleep, too!” she said with the same exclamation mark, thrilled to have found a co-co-sleeper.

“Does co-sleeping just mean that the baby is in your goddamn bed?” I wanted to know.

Her face fell slightly. Clearly, I hadn’t read up on all the latest research on the benefits of co-sleeping, given that I hadn’t even known it was a thing. I hadn’t even known the term to Google to find testimonials from bright-eyed parents who seemed suspiciously enthusiastic about having a baby in their bed.

I joined the co-sleeping movement unwittingly and out of desperation. Later, I unwittingly joined the baby-led-weaning movement because I didn’t feel like making or buying baby food.

I had also unwittingly signed up for night duty. Like so many mothers, I had fallen into the role of default nighttime caregiver because my body provided the midnight snacks. My baby also had a nurse-every-hour-on-the-hour kind of appetite.

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