It might be a day to celebrate Queen Victoria’s birthday, but we’re celebrating another fine lady around here. Today is the birthday of Margaret Wise Brown – queen of the bedtime story, and small rabbits everywhere.
Our copy of Goodnight Moon is held together with black duct tape. Third child in, you could say we have put it through the paces. It has become for us an unnecessary, necessary book. Unnecessary because the Spouse and I have both stitched every word into our memories. Necessary because there are those nights…
Because those nights happen to everyone, this book has become our go-to baby gift. Every family needs a little liturgy.
I remember kneeling beside our Plum’s little bed, stroking his soft yellow hair with my fingers and chanting the magic words.
In the great green room
There was a telephone
And a red balloon
And a picture of
A cow jumping over the moon….
Some nights, it would take many times through. Some nights, I walked that hallway many times, to whisper those words at him like prayer. I suppose they were prayer. Can you pray a children’s book? Is tone and effort enough? Or maybe there is something in the quality of time shared, the soft practice of pacing a story together, the sliver of timeless night held and blessed until the child finally finds sleep and you can, too.
We’re now at an easier stage with Plum. At night, we sleep (mostly) and we find pockets of together time during the day. I say find, but he creates. When I’m writing in the morning, he scrambles up to occupy the space at the back of my office chair while I perch at the front. (I’m sure it gives a useful urgency to my work.) He likes to bring books with him and can be very persuasive with his requests to have bits read out loud. This morning, he brought Awesome Man and Goodnight Moon, which proved a strange and beautiful combination. There is a good surreal quality to both of them.
The pictures in the book are strange – the room vast and proportions change as the pages turn. The rhyme structure changes, too, but it comes smoothly off the tongue.
Good night comb and good night brush
Good night nobody
Good night mush
And goodnight to the old lady whispering “hush.”
I like the quiet progression of this story. First, the world is described and then released to the night, each element gently put to sleep. It is an odd little world. Clement Hurd’s pictures are gentle but strange, their bright colours compelling. Plum and I spend a long time looking together. He likes the fireplace. I like the tiger-skin rug and the old-fashioned black telephone. All these things are out of place in a toddler’s bedroom, which gives us something to notice and wonder about. together.
The pictures on the green room’s walls are equally strange. The three bears look quarrelsome. The leaping cow appears to have only one horn, like some sort of strange uni-bovid. A rabbit in hip waders casts out a carrot-baited line into the river to catch a young bunny. This last image is only an echo of another of Margaret Wise Brown’s stories. And that’s how this world works – it folds back on itself and there are echoes everywhere. On the table beside the little bunny’s bed, there is a copy of Goodnight Moon. The bears sit in chairs under another copy of the cow painting of the cow. Mmittens, kittens, socks, socks – so many things come in pairs, but the best doubled object is the moon.
Just outside the window, the full moon rises to sit among the stars, while in the painting on the wall, an older moon sinks down, making space for that crazy leaping cow. It is a strange thing to see the moon doubled. I know the moon shines with reflected light and I’ve been mesmerized so many times by the image of the moon reflected on water. Yet, the moon is made beautiful by its singularity. Two moons and then that red balloon get me every time. In a room like that, I’m halfway to dreaming already.
But these are all the reflections of a sleepy mama brain who has spent so many nights with these words doubling in her brain. I suppose I write these thoughts down as a way of remembering them. My smallest one is getting big. He’s sleeping now, after yet another reading of Awesome Man, this time with the Spouse, and the bigger ones should be home from their choir practice soon. Then it will be time for tooth-brushing and pyjamas and then into our bed for another slice of our epic bedtime novel. The days are getting long and the evenings staying bright, but we’ll close the curtains and speak softly to help relax tired bodies and tired hearts. Here’s hoping for a peaceful night for all of us, full of beautiful and funny wonder about the worlds we can dream together.
