A Night Person

By Malkie Hirsch-Magence

I’ve always been a morning person. If you ask whether I need time to acclimate to my day in those early hours, the answer has always been a firm no. I’ve always had the gift of jumping out of bed and diving straight into the nitty gritty of whatever the day brings.

But ask me to attend an event at night—or, worse, ask me to change out of what I lovingly refer to as my “house clothes,” the outfits that should never see the light of day (or the dark of night)—and I will always find a very valid excuse for why I absolutely cannot make it.

Of course, all bets are off when it’s a school event and your kids know how to read.

Because then… there’s no way out.

Such was the case last week. It was already my fourth consecutive night of mandatory commitments, and I was clinging to the tiniest hope of staying home. My daughter innocently asked if I had booked our annual Shulamith Challah Bake reservations—assuming, of course, that I had secured our spots for a four-hour event where sweatpants and hoodies were strictly prohibited.

“We’ve got tickets, Mommy, right?”

Shoot.

Shoot, shoot, shoot.

“Oh sweetie, I didn’t know you wanted to go to that!” I replied, knowing full well she had no intention of missing it. So I did what I always do in these parental quandaries: I messaged Rosie’s friend’s mother, Sarah—my personal voice of reason. She’s the one who tells me what’s okay to skip and what is absolutely non-negotiable.

“You have to,” she wrote back immediately. “Don’t worry, we’ll go together and sit at the same table.”

She knows me too well. She knows the second I walk into a room full of moms who actually want to be there, I regress into a cringey 15-year-old trapped in my middle aged 45-year-old body.

Her message brought me back to last year, when we took the kids to Israel for their first trip. We found out that Rosie’s Chumash play had been scheduled for the day before we landed back home.

Her reaction was nothing like mine would have been at seven.

“Oh, I’ll miss a chance to perform on stage and awkwardly whisper into the mic while my parents take a thousand pictures of me? Bummer,” my childhood self would’ve said—with a healthy dose of sarcasm.

But to Rosie, missing it simply wasn’t an option.

And then the school did something extraordinary.

They asked the parents if anyone objected to postponing the play an extra week—just so one child could be there for her two minutes of fame.

That was the moment I fully realized: my kid is nothing like me. And I needed to respect that. And also, that this school deserved 100% of my attendance for every event since that Chumash play because they clearly felt that each little girl mattered.

She has plenty of time later in life to develop social anxiety. For now, she’s still at the stage where she enjoys things like this. So I rallied. I changed out of my beloved house clothes, chose a table so far in the back it might as well have been outside, and sat with my people—like-minded moms who also couldn’t understand why a school event needed to be on a weeknight past our daughters’ bedtimes.

Or how we’ll stay awake to bake out the terribly overproofed challah dough that each child-parent duo received upon entry to the event.

Or how we’d convince our overtired children that they should go to sleep instead of staying up to watch their challah come out of the oven at midnight.

Or how many months it would be between this event and the next one.

We sat there wondering what was happening at home, while watching our girls dance and sing and—simply—be kids.

And honestly? This is why we do it.

For the memories.

For the good moments that happen despite our initial discomfort.

For the universal parental choice of putting our children’s happiness before our own.

I’ll keep asking Sarah whether I really have to attend these events. She’ll keep saying yes.

I’ll keep going with Rosie, and she’ll keep thinking I’m the best mommy ever.

And maybe… that’s enough to make even a night person out of me. n

Malkie Gordon Hirsch Magence is a native of the Five Towns community, a mom of five, a writer, and a social media influencer.