Academic

Goodnight Moon

By Gordon Smith, Christine, Hurt, Vic Fleischer, Fred Tung, Lisa Fairfax, David Zaring

For months following her birth, silent acid reflux (or, as my husband insists, "heartburn") made it difficult to get Baby Cara to sleep. It turned out, however, that a reading of Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown would magically lull my little one to sleep. I hadn't grown up with Goodnight Moon and, for those of you unfamiliar with it, an unseen narrator tells us about objects in the ?great green room?: a telephone, a red balloon, a picture of the cow jumping over the moon. Then we say goodnight to many of the same things.

There are wonderful images: the moon rises, the light dims, the clock moves forward as the bunny says his (her?) litany of goodnights. The pictures alternate between black and white and color. A soothing symmetry to the "goodnights" lulls both baby and tired momma off to sleep.

And yet, by chance, two of the pages were stuck together the first 30 odd times I read the book. One night, I blearily unstuck them, to reveal lines that I hadn't seen before: "Goodnight nobody, goodnight mush."

Goodnight NOBODY?!?! Margaret hadn't told us nobody was in the room before! WAS nobody in the room before? Where did nobody come from? In fact, the last bit of the poem says goodnight to things we haven't been introduced to: stars, air, noises everywhere. Forgotten and unmentioned are the telephone and the red balloon. To sleep-deprived, exhausted me, this was profoundly unsettling, and I made up a blogpost about it even before the good folks at the Conglomerate asked me back.

It's a good thing my maternity leave only lasted three months and then I was back safe at my job, where overthinking isn't a big danger.

Goodnight Glom. Thanks for having me.

Full post as published by Conglomerate on July 13, 2008 (boomark / email).