Kate's Big Ideas

I can’t remember the first time I read Goodnight Moon — probably because my parents started reading it to me before my infant brain could really catalog memory. Chances are, you had a similar experience. The book turns 75 this year, and over that time, it’s sold over 48 million copies, touching at least that many lives, time and time over.

Part of the book’s staying power is that its charms touch grown ups and children alike. “The first 25 times I read ‘Goodnight Moon,’ I cried,” writes Elisabeth Egan in her beautiful tribute in the New York Times.

”For the uninitiated, ‘Goodnight Moon’ tells the story of a rabbit getting ready for bed, bidding adieu to a series of items in his bedroom: a little toy house and a young mouse, ‘a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush and a quiet old lady who was whispering ‘hush.’’”

At first glance, that series of little goodbyes struck Egan as devastating. “‘Goodnight nobody?’ It was a knife to the heart. By the time I arrived at ‘Goodnight noises everywhere,’ I was mopping my face with the teddy bear blanket.”

When her kids started to like it, Egan’s view on the book began to soften. “I saw the bunnies in a new light. The little one wasn’t sad; he was calm. The big one wasn’t cold or negligent; she was a reassuring presence. Together they were at peace, enjoying their view of the moon and the deepening shadows over a well-organized, thoughtfully-arranged room.” Her ultimate realization? “It’s a blueprint for peace in a time of chaos, and it reminds us how independence can be another kind of oxygen, one that’s necessary for humans and bunnies of all ages.”

What a wallop of a line. Children’s book gathers up parental attachment anxieties and squeezes them dry; hands back neat little paper package. That is emotional acuity if there ever was any.

And where does such intuition come from?

Maria Popova wrote a much different tribute to the book’s author, Margaret Wise Brown, focused on her fraught love with a masc-presenting woman named Michael Strange (née Blanche Oelrichs), a fellow artist.

Brown produced a prodigious amount of poetry about Strange during their time together, marveling at their connection; reveling in the rightness of Strange’s gender identity; and cradling the wounds incurred by Strange’s fickle affection.

Read this one:

When first we met

I never, never, never knew

That I was meeting you

Then something hit me suddenly

Sudden as a shooting star

I felt things beating 8 to the bar

And that’s the way things are

[…]

You may be wild, you may be witty

And you can’t even drive a car

I’ll never let you drive my car

But you’re my only girl and mighty pretty

And that’s the way things are.

This poem holds the feeling where you’re midway into a relationship, looking back at the time when you met your person and thinking how totally oblivious you were to the wonders inside them, and how lucky you are to have gotten to unfold this being.

If gems like this were Brown’s daily practice, then of course she could nail us on parenting. Before, during, and after the time she was crafting the icon that feels like it belongs to each of us, Brown was LIVING — with the courage to make authentic choices, and to process them, for herself and others, extracting universal truths from her lived experience.

So why do we know nothing of the rest of her life? Sure, there’s some queerness in there, and people historically prefer to look away. But more pointedly, we don’t tend to acknowledge that emotional training is a job credential. It’s easier to just think that this nice lady wrote a nice book and call it a day.

I call that a disservice.

From the managers in the room to the salespeople or anyone who simply has colleagues, how many of us rely on emotional adroitness to do our jobs well? And how many of us get professionally tasked with extra emotional management simply because we’re good at it (er, we’re female)?

To me, Brown’s affair with Strange sits just as well on a resumé as Hemingway’s time at war. It’s courageous, transformative work that she was then able to pass along to the rest of us in the form of universal lessons.

The work of feeling deserves value, my friends. That value is yours.

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