Nightbitch

“Yeah, you’re definitely a dog.”

When Nightbitch tells her husband that she is worried that she might be becoming a dog, he responds in a sarcastic, mocking, way. His response suggests an inability to listen to or empathize with her concerns and frustrations.

“Where was the mother’s hymnal with songs of worship and praise?”

Nightbitch comments on the lactation room, where mothers can go to pump milk for their children, at her workplace. Rather than representing a celebration and veneration of mothers and motherhood, it is the smallest, ugliest room in the building. For Nightbitch, its state symbolizes the undervaluation of mothers in society.

“She had done the ultimate job of creation, and now she had nothing left. To keep him alive—that was the only artistic gesture she could muster.”

Nightbitch reflects on both how she has given up her job in a community gallery and her work as an artist to look after her son. On one hand, she left her career because she lacked time. On the other, her inability to artistically create is also the result, she feels, of pouring so much creative energy into the birthing and creation of her son. This question—of how to create artistically as a mother—is one of the central problems and questions of the text.