Weremother

nightbitch, yellowjacket

Give me an extended four-day weekend (Thanksgiving) and I’m most likely—as my former Home|body title here once alluded—to avoid extra-housal socialization, and shower as seldom as humanly allowable. I keep my house chilly this time of year to save on these insane delivery charges on the utility bills, so it’s best not to remove any PJs but just keep spackling furry/flannel layers on top. Flashback to my youth and my father’s response to our sub-temperature complaints—just put more clothes on. By day’s end, fulfilling my genetic duty, I am bound tightly in a papoose of indoor and outdoor clothes from thermal underwear to sweatpants, robe, hat, scarf, fingerless gloves—all the better to type here, my dear. I’m too involved in these layers to even attempt to extricate bare skin to bathe, plus any primal stenches would never be able to escape all this thick fabric.

A German woodcut of werewolf from 1722

I want to tell the truth

I want to hump legs

I want to never brush my hair ever again

I want to wear the same linen dress for a year

I want to stink

-from Nightbitch

On these breaks, we happily become feral, the kids and I (who follow my dirty lead), and start to roll around in the snack residue mixed in with books, Elmer’s glue, paint, games, threaded through with some addictive streaming show.

We Weremothers who may lack the wherewithal, who go privately wild in our safe houses and only sometimes run amok outside—when we feel the need to howl at the moon freely under cover of darkness and perimenopausal excuses—are having a moment in popular culture.

The best recommendations in life come from my reader-writer friends and especially those on this platform. First, Dana of Future Crone, where most of the items on my long reading wishlist comes from, suggested I have to read Nightbitch, Rachel Yoder’s stunning first novel from 2021, which just this week was released as a major motion picture starring Amy Adams. Then, interspersed with reading this crazy romp of a fantastical, yet ever-relatable and somehow realistic fiction, my girls and I are catching up on the first and second seasons of the fine and demented Yellowjackets series before the third season hits early next year—which Andrew of Goatfury Writes nudged me to see.

Nightbitch really sinks its sharp teeth into you, grabs on, and shakes you and all of whatever you thought organizes you into the idea of a self, before it releases you, bloody and muddy, on an unexpected suburban lawn in the middle of the night. The unnamed mom starring in this is struggling in the way so many of us lit nerds might—in her case, a once prolific and accomplished artist (likely very much named)—with experiencing how the postpartum brain turns into the pliable putty required to be a domestic servant of little ones. In her case, from page one, the mother of one ceaseless two-year-old boy notices how her body is getting hairier in odd places like the back of her neck and how her canines appear pointier. She indeed soon discovers she is turning into a dog, and realizes that being a dog, loyal and eager, will actually help her be the best possible mom, in fact it’s going to save her from the mundane Lego-and-train games of a “thousand artless afternoons” and the stoic suffering of someone who used to be entirely other than this.

Mom’s new dog tendencies make her better suited to enjoy the endless play hours with her son, who follows her lead with all the rolling and digging and chasing and even hunting squirrels she now feels compelled to do. She loses all motherly inhibitions as her metamorphosis progresses, eating in public with her face in her plate when she can no longer resist her animal urges, and soon—cover your vegan eyes—yearns for raw meat and has no problem cracking the necks of little local animals like bunnies, squirrels, raccoon, and, oh god no, eventually even the family cat.

She knew how to keep bees, dip candles, brush wool, use a spinning wheel and make yarn, dry onions and garlic, develop photographs with vegetable juices, bake absolutely anything, make every single sort of braid, sing every single sort of song, track an animal through the woods. She knew her cardinal directions, how to tell a fast pony from a slow one just from the look on its face. She knew enough to live inside an entire life all on her own, and yet her husband—with his electronics skills, his engineering—he was the one who made all the money, even though she could make a world, and then, too, make a person to live in that world.

And what of that person, her most beautiful boy? He opened his eyes each morning, and the first word from his mouth was Mama. He needed to be lifted from bed, for he was so tiny and so sleepy, then dressed, fed, bathed, played with, sung to, tickled, swung high in the air, chased. He needed her to watch me, Mama, nearly every second of his waking life. Sometimes he took his soft little hand and put it on her face, moved her head to where he wanted her to look. And it was in this gesture she saw an entire impending future, one in which all things of this world revolved around this boy: when she woke and when she slept, where they went and what they bought, the very direction of his mother’s gaze. If she was not careful, he would come to know the world as place that bent to his every whim, for she did indeed want to bend, because she loved him, but in the hardest moments—moments in which, for instance, she held the limp body of the cat in her bloody hands—she grew resentful of this innocent little soul, whose life would be one of ease, one of knowing that he was taken care of and could have whatever he wanted, that the world was in a very real way his. She didn’t want to deny him things, to make his life harder, but already she felt this pull inside her, to make him responsible in a fundamental way, to tell him no and no and no, and sure, she was trying to train him against what the entire world told him, and trying to say, Look, I am not all yours, I am not only here for you, but of course, ultimately, she was his, all of her.

Engraving of the Beast of Gévaudan devouring a woman. Original caption states 'An exact Representation of the WILD BEAST now in France, in the Act of devouring a young Woman.' 1765

Throughout the book, there’s a book inside the story that has become the bad mother’s touchstone, the uncanny Field Guide to Magical Women: A Mythical Ethnography (1978). The momster intermittently opens to a random passage that happens to match her phases of transformation. In this faux book that feels like fiction but is role-playing as anthropological guide, we visit different types and tribes of magical women around the world, like these fascinating Flickering I really relate to.

In Wanda White’s book, she had read about a kind of mother who appeared and disappeared at will. Some were said to fade in and out, always there in the right light, and the right angle, but often translucent, whereas other took on more of a coyote quality, showing up unexpectedly in the corner of a room, or disappearing at the precise moment they were needed. Thee mothers, to whom White referred as the Flickering, where thought to be nearly extinct, yet there were still random reports of them around the world. A mother in Buffalo had been reported to fade away just after bedtime. Her children claimed they could find her nowhere when they rose from bed for a glass of water, or else could see only her shadow as it moved always one room ahead of them, flitting from wall to wall, eternally elusive. Their mother reported she did feel not “altogether there” in the evenings, after long days spent with her four children, cooking and cleaning and ironing and bathing and singing and dancing and hiking and romping. “Might the mind-body connection be so strong that these women are in fact able to disintegrate their physical selves via intense maternal ennui?”

She would never wish Nightbitch on another mother, certainly not, for while feral-mommy-time had its fun, its vitality and power and brazenness, at its core it was something very private and sad, those deeply held dreams that a mother had tucked into a cold, dark corner of herself. It was no good to go in and start checking on them, turning on the lights, and throwing back the sheets, because then you didn’t have sleep-dead dreams anymore. You had a raving, roaming bitch who wanted to kill animals with its mouth.

Which brings me to the nasty rabbit-killing tendencies of the heroine I found myself gravitating to most in the equally wild Yellowjackets. Perhaps because I was reading and bonding with this Nightbitch for hours on end, I couldn’t help but fall in most closely with Melanie Lynskey’s character in the series—the grown up mom version of the teen who was once among the New Jersey high school girls’ soccer team whose plane crashes in Western Nowhere (remote Canadian wilderness) en route to compete in the Nationals in Seattle. The show flits between past and present as the teenagers try to survive all kinds of lunacies—hormones, hauntings, huntings—and then as adults, it’s down to the smaller group of those who make it out alive after 19 months stranded, only to struggle with secrecy surrounding what happened “out there” and some serious unattended PTSD twenty-five years later. Shauna is now the unlikely stay-at-home mom, having an affair when she thinks her artless husband is doing the same, and you can tell every second from her wry pouty way that she never forgets she once took pride in being the smart one, the one who was meant to go to Brown. Now, look at her, sparring with her bitchy teen and, exhibiting such an uncanny way with knives and disjointing things. She was the one who once sliced the necks of the slaughtered prey they needed to survive, now—spoiler alert—she exudes extreme nonchalance while using an electric knife to butcher her former lover in a bathtub.

Mrs. Yellowjacket and Mrs. Nightbitch seem to share the same husband. Absent and/or oblivious in Nightbitch’s incredible era is her husband, who works away from home five nights a week, doesn’t seem the type to read, or notice, and only enjoys her revved up libido when he returns. To me, these marginal men tended to merge, as did these heroines of screen and book.

Lynskey as an actress was unknown to me before but apparently known by many in a nice indie way and now, can claim the Critics’ Choice Award for Best Actress in a Drama Series (2022) for, what Rolling Stone’s Alan Sepinwall describes as the “dark, messy, charismatic part she’s been waiting her whole career to play.”

Like Lynskey, the main mother figure of the cinematic Nightbitch is pleasantly full-figured, which is exciting to see in a oft-perfect but up-for-anything Amy Adams. I haven’t seen the film yet, but the trailer bodes well. Funny though, of course in my head I had Nightbitch pegged for a super-slim brunette, perhaps because I often looked at the author picture of Rachel Yoder in the back flap and wondered, as we readers can’t help but to do, about her own life with the son and husband mentioned in the bio, and the obvious writerly aspirations (which in her case seem to be manifesting just fine). It’s fiction, obviously, but we weremothers, we know these dirty secrets of our dark and stinky souls. The soft animal with teeth, the hunger to pad our bones with meat. (This has the makings of the final piece of a meat trilogy, with my recent mentions of Hotdogs, Cannibals, and now this, but I’ll resist.)

I have always understood this connection between woman and dog from the earliest elementary years when we were asked to make and illustrate a dictionary. With no humor, I presented the word “bitch” with my drawing of a female canine in complete innocence as to who my own mom, or my future self, might be or become.

“Motherhood, it changes you. It connects you to some primal urges,” says some eye-glassed woman in this trailer. The heroine, unnamed but not unknown, goes further than mere changed to full-on divinity and super-human Kegel power.

Do you ever feel like the big secret is that we are gods? We fucking create life. We are so powerful… I could crush a walnut with my vagina… I am a woman. I am an animal. I am Nightbitch.