The Night Feed

3am. The baby is screaming. He is sleeping. And I am sitting in the dark wondering when I became invisible.

The baby latches on and the pain shoots through me and I bite down on nothing because making noise would wake him and waking him would start something I don’t have the energy to finish.

He’s never done a night feed. Not one. Eight months. Not once.

I mentioned it once. Gently. The way you mention things when the cost of being direct is higher than the cost of being exhausted. I said something about how tired I was and he said something about how he had work in the morning and I said nothing after that because nothing was safer.

The baby drinks and I sit in the dark and I count the objects I can see by the light of my phone. Changing table. Muslins. The pile of washing I’ll do tomorrow. The wall. The door he’ll sleep through until his alarm goes off and he’ll come downstairs and say “did the baby sleep alright?” like he’d know if it hadn’t.

This is the loneliest hour. Not because I’m alone. Because I’m not alone. There’s a man in the next room. My partner. The father of this child. And his absence from this moment is a choice he makes every single night and calls it reasonable.

Women don’t talk about this enough. Not the tiredness. Everyone knows about the tiredness. The rage. The quiet, 3am rage that sits in your chest while you feed a baby in the dark and listen to someone snore through the wall.

I loved that baby with everything I had. I loved that baby so much it frightened me. But in that chair, in the dark, with my nipple cracked and my eyes burning and his snoring coming through the wall like a metronome of his indifference. I understood something.

He wasn’t going to change. This was the deal. I would do the invisible work and he would sleep through it and in the morning he would ask if the baby slept alright and I would say fine because fine was the only answer that didn’t cost more energy than I had.

3am teaches you things that daylight hides.

It taught me that I was already alone in this marriage.

I just hadn’t admitted it yet.