About

“Goodnight nobody, goodnight mush.”

Allyson Darakjian // Performance, sound, costume, 2022

“A mother is a continuous separation, a division of the very flesh. And consequently a division of language — and it has always been so.”
— Julia Kristeva

I remember reading the book Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown to my first child when he was only a few months old. Even though he couldn’t yet understand the words, the pressure to constantly engage him in meaningful ways, like reading books aloud, was ever present. One evening, exhausted and lonely, I reached the line “goodnight nobody, goodnight mush,” and cried. It expressed exactly how I felt in that moment: isolated, untethered, and hovering between sense and nonsense. This performance began there.

This work reflects the experience of maternity as a shifting of the self, a kind of disembodiment, and the sense that motherhood always teeters on the edge of meaning. The character Goodnight Mother is composed of elements drawn directly from Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. The costume components act as metaphors for the physical restrictions and emotional limits of my pregnant and postpartum body. I use humor, absurdity, and dissonance to mirror the book’s repetitive, rhythmic pattern, creating a space that feels both familiar and strange.

The work exists between painting and performance, between form and language, between what can be expressed and what remains wordless. Using my body as a tool for exploring these boundaries, I created a multisensory retelling of my relationship to Goodnight Moon, translating the story through the lens of motherhood and transforming it into a living, embodied response.