By Mary Ann Zehr
Reading in the Burg is a monthly column in 2025 by a local teacher and reader about connecting with books and taking in Harrisonburg’s literary scene.
~Yoder, Rachel. Nightbitch. Doubleday, 2021~
A story illustrates what motherhood was like for my mother–a Mennonite woman–in her generation: In the mid-1960s, my family made a move from Syracuse, New York, where my father was in graduate school, to New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, so that my father could begin his first position in higher education. He was hired for a tenure-track job as a physics professor at a small private liberal arts college. Right up until the move, my father was collecting data around the clock from an apparatus in a laboratory. He was sleeping on a cot in the lab. Meanwhile, my mother managed the home–and also took meals to my father–with four children underfoot. We children were ages one, three, five, and seven. We were active and strong-willed (and still are). Mom packed the household up for the move by herself. And then, soon after the move, she typed my father’s dissertation. If she made an error on a page, she had to retype the whole page. It was not acceptable to use correction tape or fluid, or perhaps they had not been invented yet.
I never had children. If I had become a mother, I could not have been the kind of mother–unflappable despite daunting challenges–that my mother was and is. She had dreams and ambitions and eventually became a nursing professor at a state university. But for six years when we were young, she put her nursing career on hold to care for us.
The young mother in the novel Nightbitch, by Rachel Yoder, also has dreams and ambitions and has become a stay-at-home mom. She has one child: a two-year old. She loves that child. But this young mother is not unflappable. Increasingly, she is angry. She rages against the night when “the boy” will not let her sleep. She is resentful that she doesn’t have more time to herself.
Her husband, an engineer, is gone during the week to do work that sufficiently provides for the family’s material needs. Meanwhile, the young mother–who doesn’t have a name in the book until she becomes Nightbitch–cannot find her people. Her people certainly aren’t other young mothers who take their wee ones to the Book Babies gatherings at the local library. Neither can she connect with the creative types she interacted with in her job as the manager of a gallery before she became a mother and decided to stay home with her boy.
Childcare is monotonous. Every morning the mother uses the same skillet to heat up hash browns that have been frozen and serves them to her son on his “tractor plate” because he won’t accept them on any other kind of plate.
She feels alone and rage is overtaking her. She fears she is turning into a dog, particularly at night. She’s convinced that fur is growing on the back of her neck, her teeth are sharpening, and a stub of a tail is forming at the base of her spine.
I didn’t initially seek to read this novel because I don’t gravitate toward reading fantasy, and the title struck me as harsh and off-putting. However, I decided to read it because the author, who grew up in a Mennonite intentional community in eastern Ohio, was scheduled to speak at Eastern Mennonite University (my department is hosting her, but I wasn’t involved in the decision making or arrangements). I wanted to attend Yoder’s book talk, and I knew I would be able to absorb what the author had to say better if I read her book.
I was raised Mennonite, became “Mennonite distant” in my 30s and 40s (I identified as an ecumenical Christian rather than a Mennonite spiritually), and I’m back to calling myself a Mennonite again (after all, I attend a Mennonite church and teach at a Mennonite university). I have followed sporadically the evolution of literature written by Mennonite writers or those who identify as “secular Mennonites” or “Mennonite adjacent.” I don’t know how Yoder speaks of herself in relation to her Mennonite upbringing other than what has been published in online bios. I recognize that Nightbitch is a novel written by a writer who grew up in a Mennonite community that has gone mainstream, something that first happened with a novel written in 1962 by a Mennonite writer named Rudy Wiebe in Canada. Novels written by people nurtured in Mennonite communities going mainstream in the United States is a newer phenomenon than in Canada. Nightbitch has been made into a 2024 movie starring Amy Adams.
I was reading Nightbitch when my 92-year-old mother was visiting me. She asked what I was reading. I gave a synopsis of the book, and I added that I didn’t think she would want to read it. My mother doesn’t read much fiction and the book has a lot of swearing, which is startling if you haven’t been exposed much to it. However, I read excerpts aloud. For instance, I read a section about how the protagonist’s husband gives the boy a bath: “She was grateful he was bathing the boy, though during said bath he had asked that she put the boy’s towel in the dryer to warm it, that she bring in a piece of toast for the boy to eat, that she fetch the boy’s pajamas from his room, all as the man sat on the closed lid of the toilet, next to the tub, reading something on his phone.”
“I told your father that I would return to work,” my mother said in response to the excerpt. Mom had been a full-time nurse even after having children and worked part-time up until the move to Pennsylvania. Then she quit nursing but consistently took graduate courses in the evenings. When my father took a sabbatical to the Chicago area when the youngest child was 6-years-old, Mom seized the chance to return to full-time nursing in a hospital near where we lived. “It was hard to update my skills when I had been away from nursing for so long,” she said when we were discussing the novel.
More than a decade later, when my father took another sabbatical, my mother took advantage of how they were living near a comprehensive university to earn a master’s degree in nursing. Then she successfully landed a job teaching nursing at a state university after our family returned to Pennsylvania (just as I left home for college).
The young mother in Nightbitch also eventually seizes opportunities. She figures out how to create art in the home. She becomes more assertive in expressing her needs to her husband. For example, she tells him that on the weekends, he is in charge of putting their toddler to bed by himself while she takes some time to be alone. He complies because, after all, he loves her and wants to be supportive, as was also true of my father in relation to my mother.
The writing in the novel is raw, authentic, and compelling. Some of the descriptions of how the mother’s emotions and disorientation are transforming her into an animal seem almost believable and other descriptions are absurd and disturbing.
I’m richer for gaining insights from the novel into the feelings of a young mother. I’m grateful that the novel facilitated a conversation about motherhood between my mother and me.
In a February 2024 podcast interview with Yoder, she said that the novel was autobiographical, and she wrote it without thinking of an audience. She noted she had grown up in a patriarchal culture; at the same time she said that it was wonderful as a child to receive attention from a lot of adults in an intentional community.
For two years after her son was born, Yoder said that she did not write. Her husband urged her to write and this is the novel that came out. Now, she said, “part of me feels overexposed.”
Rachel Yoder will be speaking about Nightbitch 7:30 pm-8:30 pm on Friday, February 28, in Martin Chapel at Eastern Mennonite University.
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