4 AM

The whole world is asleep except us.

The neighbors. The street. The people I follow online who seem to have it together — they're sleeping too. Even the dog is sleeping. It's just you and me and the particular silence of 4 AM, which is different from all other silences. Heavier. More honest.

I used to be afraid of the dark. Did you know that? There's a lot you don't know about me yet.

I'm thirty-something and I still check the locks twice. I cry at songs I've heard a hundred times. I never finished that book on the nightstand — the one that's been there so long it's just furniture now.

You don't know any of that yet. To you I am just warmth. Just food. Just the voice that comes when you call. Just safe.

I am so tired I could disappear and so present I could cry — both things at once, which is motherhood in a sentence.

You eat like it's the most important thing. Maybe it is. I watch your face go still and serious, the way you hold my shirt in your fist like you're making sure I stay, and I think: I made that.

The whole world is asleep. Lucky them.

Lucky me.

Author's Note:

There is a version of 4 AM that nobody warns you about — the one that is somehow the loneliest and the most full you have ever felt at the same time. I wrote this in that hour, for every mom sitting in the dark wondering if anyone else feels this exact thing. We do. You are not alone in the silence.