I Stood in the Dark Hallway and Listened to Everyone Else Sleep

Dear Delyara, Tonight, after everyone had gone to bed, I stood in the hallway for a minute and listened. My husband turning once in bed. One child breathing heavily. The other making a small sleep sound from behind a half-closed door. The soft clicking of the heating. The whole house finally becoming still after a day of voices, doors, requests, movement, television, cooking, messages, and the thousand little practical sounds that make up family life. I don’t know why that moment reached me so deeply. Maybe because it was the first time all day that no one needed anything. Maybe because tiredness makes quiet feel almost holy. Maybe because love feels strangest at night — when you are full of gratitude and irritation, devotion and depletion, tenderness and the need to be left entirely alone, all at once. That’s what motherhood and family life feel like in me lately. Not one emotion. Never one emotion. I stood there and felt lucky. Then tired. Then a little lonely. Then guilty for the loneliness. Then full of love again. It is hard to explain how many women live inside these contradictions without anyone ever really asking them to describe the texture of it honestly. The house was peaceful. I was not fully peaceful. Still, I was there. And sometimes that feels like the truest kind of diary entry: nothing dramatic happened, but everything in me was alive.