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If there’s one micro-genre I love in this world, it’s the “mothers behaving badly,” from Steel Magnolias to Hustlers. (To quote Jennifer Lopez as stripper and single mom Ramona Vega in the latter: “Motherhood is a mental illness.”) I saw Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody’s film Tully in theaters six years ago, in which Charlize Theron plays a new mom so desperate for help that she hallucinated it in the form of Mackenzie Davis as a swingin’ nighttime nanny. I was a nanny myself then, meaning I had a front-row seat to plenty of exhausted moms and their (mostly) minimally helpful husbands trying to raise their kids with occasional $20-per-hour assistance. And while I didn’t yet have kids of my own, I learned that the smallest of humans can easily rob you of sleep, energy, and whatever other thin tether helps connect you to the outside world.
As I made the gradual switch from nanny to full-time journalist in my twenties, I never lost my interest in motherhood and childrearing, reading authors from Maggie Nelson to Alice Walker to Meaghan O’Connell to Michelle Tea about the uncanny bizarreness of creating another person from your own flesh and being expected to guide them for life. O’Connell describes her experience with postpartum depression during the first year of her older son’s life in her 2018 memoir And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready. Before that chapter, though, she sums up the pain of labor with singularly evocative prose: “Here was the soul-crushing pain again, like a monster who had mercifully passed me by only to catch my scent and come thrashing back down the hallway to come find me in some closet.”
Monstrosity is all over the motherhood canon, if you look for it. “The monster within” is the title applied to Barbara Almond’s 2010 book about maternal ambivalence, and there is, of course, the Jenny Offill–coined term “art monster,” which places mothers at odds between their families and their capital-A Art. ”I cannot hold the baby at the same time as I write," Nelson admits in The Argonauts, and writers like Rebecca Solnit have dug deep into the question of how working mothers “balance it all.” That insane prophecy feels distinctly suited to the paradox at the heart of Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel Nightbitch.
I hoped the film adaptation would be truly weird. The trailer, after all, was brief enough to suggest the film’s critique of what we ask of women in society might be innovative, communicated in some way other than mid CGI. But now that it’s out, I feel…underwhelmed. Nightbitch stars Amy Adams as the frequently struggling suburban mother of a toddler. “Happiness is a choice,” her useless husband tells her at one point when she complains about how much pressure she’s under, and can you really blame her for imagining slapping him? The slap is only one such fantastical scene, with Yoder’s fictive pack of dogs that eventually grows to absorb Adams looking cartoonish enough onscreen to raise question’s about what s actually happening.
Some of the most interesting moments of Nightbitch (the film) have nothing to do with the protagonist’s gradual shift into a literal dog; watching Adams’s barely held tension soar as her son cries feels like hearing a tea kettle reach its boiling point. When she heads to the library the day after a “transformation” to attempt to research on her “condition,” she situates her story squarely within the larger context of women and their mystical, sometimes-mythical maladies, like the bird women of Peru. Adams’s character isn t alone in the world, but she refuses to try to bond with the fellow mothers around her as The Feminine Mystique might have instructed her to, preferring instead to be alone. Not all mothers are pack animals.
Motherhood is one of the most bizarre topics in modern literature and film for a reason. Is there anything more, well, metal than giving birth? I’m in awe of the mothers I know who have performed literal miracles with their bodies and continue to perform them daily in the care and keeping of their small charges, and I think their story deserves a richer metaphor than simple cynanthropy. If you’ve ever waited desperately—hungrily, even—for a child under your watch to fall asleep, barely containing tears or fury while they babble and sing without a clue as to your real feelings, you’ve performed a miracle, too. Seeing it clumsily transmogrified onscreen into “going dog mode” doesn’t even touch the sides of what we ask of mothers in this world.
