I dreaded nights. The sense of another day having slipped away under the hamster wheel of feeding, diapers, and naps without having seen the sun or another adult affected me deeply. The witching hour, as so many new parents know, occurs between 5 and 7 p.m., when the baby, seemingly also tired of the monotony of another day spent laboring to keep it alive, screams and cries and cannot be pacified.