A "fucking crazy decisions" redux
Featuring: summer reads! Having a baby when you have teens! Unrealized dreams! And how to survive in a world when you can't put your bare feet on it every morning.
Hi friends and comrades!
I write to you from the Adirondacks, where I have found myself on my third trip sine June 29th. It is one of only two months off-call for me this year, which given I gave birth on January 29th is pretty incredible (or depressing, depending on how you look at it). The first trip was a KB-only getaway to Vermont; the second an entire, extended-family (meaning my parents, sisters, and their kids and husbands: we roll 15 deep these days, with one more on the way) trip to the Poconos lakehouse we rent for a week each summer since 2017; and the third this one, where we are upstate for my cousin's1 wedding.
In the midst of all that I’ve been trying to find snippets of time to write (currently it’s sidelying in bed while Hanif nurses, asleep: truly so little has changed since this picture, even as Hanif himself is almost an entirely different baby). People often ask me — and oh, did they often ask me, at the wedding-adjacent welcome dinner last night — if it’s been hard to return to the newborn stage after having gotten to the independence of having tweens and teens, and the answer is, it hasn’t been, not really, not in the ways one would expect. For one, the perspective and DGAF-ness that comes with knowing your parenting has resulted in some very functional and incredibly cool people, regardless of the years of handwringing over every seemingly high stakes but not actually high stakes missteps along the way, gives this entire endeavor an ease and lightness that is quite pleasurable. Secondly, I don’t often feel like I lost anything because, for whatever reason, I never feel like I actually never left this version of me, even as there is objective proof that I did. The me who had built up to so much more independence, an independence I had even just six months ago — the me that could leave my kids home alone if I needed to go to a birth or wanted to go on a date; the me that had hobbies and did things like pick up and go to the beach to do a cold plunge with a friend in the morning without too much agonizing over what the kids would be doing while I did; the me who could get a massage without worrying if, between the commute and the actual massage, it was just two minutes too long for comfort and that someone would be screaming to nurse when I returned — seems like a dream self. I almost cannot believe she ever existed. The version of me who thinks in 2-hour increments and showers with another person in the bathtub and sits in the backseat with her face in a baby’s, kissing their little nose and singing soothingly in an (often failed) attempt to stop their grumbling from becoming a full on squall, seems more familiar than the other one, and it feels natural to be here again.
But there’s one small thing that feels like a palpably large absence:
Time alone in the morning.
For so much of my parenting life — probably since around 2011, really, when Illy was around 18 months and Wren was going on 4 — I had made it a practice to get up earlier than them to do whatever it was I needed to do2; to journal, to work on midwifery prerequisites or, later, midwifery school assignments; to wrap my brain around homeschooling projects or order books we needed from the library; and so on. Sometimes I used this time to work out; many years I used this time to get light on my eyes or grass on my bare feet (I became weirdly obsessed with circadian rhythms at some point before the summer of 2011, a marker of time that I remember because I chose to write about the pineal gland3 for a community college Biology course that summer and the professor remarked that no one else had ever chosen that particular topic in her many decades of teaching). Some years I’d wake up absurdly early and have many hours; some years (my MIC4 years of constant adrenal depletion and exhaustion, especially) I’d only get a half hour or so. But it was always something, a little piece of time that was mine.
But since he was born, Hanif’s schedule is on the later side, and while I probably have his rhythm to account for why I feel so rested despite nursing an infant all night every night, it also means I do not get any morning time to myself. And me truncating his morning sleep-ins by attempting to hand him off to Andy (whether awake or asleep) means a worse day for everyone. He needs to sleep in until 9 (truthfully, he probably needs to sleep until 10, but I can only take being awake in the morning but stuck in bed without losing my mind for so long, and so he and I compromise on 9) and he needs to do it with a boob in his mouth.
It’s fine, and part of the enjoyment of parenting this time around is knowing how fast this will all change, but when I do feel loss in this season of life, it is almost always the loss of that time. And I realized recently it’s not so much that I miss the productivity of that time (although it may sound like I was incredibly diligent with that time, and although I often was, just as often I wasn’t and would lose myself in coffee and a book, or chai and the internet, or whatever hot beverage/distraction combo I wiled away so many hours on over the course of years). It’s not even so much the solitude (though there is that too) or the elements of self-care that I miss ( though that is certainly true: in a life of so much caretaking and focusing on others’ needs, the rare moments of my life that are *just for me* mean a lot). It’s the control. It’s the form of self soothing knowing I had the morning had become. In other words, I miss what the morning time represented: a release valve whenever I spiraled into overwhelm. Whether or not it was true, I could always imagine I could just get up a little earlier to tend to the things that needed tending or to address the things that weren’t working or get out whatever feelings (physical or emotional, or both) that needed an outlet. Knowing I had the morning meant I could take care of whatever I needed or wanted to myself, without asking for anyone else to give up anything (i.e Andy his work time or the kids my attention). It was mine to take care of me with.
I don’t have that release valve anymore, so when I get overwhelmed I don’t have that automatic solution, that sense that I can tend to my needs without taking something. And that part of the equation is more challenging than I thought it would be.
I must admit I didn't intend, when I sat down (laid down?) to write this, that I’d pen an entire newsletter about grieving the changes to my morning routine, but now that I’m here, I’m going to commit to it. Because there’s also this:
Morning time is also when I was writing, and then editing, my book proposal, so that I could sell and write my book, a process that had gained a lot of momentum for the year prior to pregnancy, when “morning” (all day) sickness derailed it.
If you know me at all, you know the one through line of my life has been writing. Publishing a book has been my one relentless dream, and an oddly unfulfilled one in a life where I have managed to manifest so many of the more fleeting ones. I completed my PhD being courted by a university press for my dissertation, and yet I stepped away from that offer and into midwifery without publishing it. Truthfully, I was exhausted from fighting so hard to exist in a system that wasn’t built for me,5 completely spent from years of trying to appear as clever and erudite as my colleagues (a not insubstantial mount of them white men who had been groomed for academia by their academic parents, even at a city university), and, quite frankly, traumatized from writing 60 hours a week in an unfinished basement (the only place in our apartment where my small children wouldn’t see, and therefore need, me — but oh goodness, my poor pineal gland!) while Andy asked me to come upstairs every two hours to nurse our literal newborn. I needed distance from that lifestyle, and I knew I would mourn the decision even as I made it, but there was no other choice to make. And so here I am, 43 and still without having published a book, (unless you count “The Collected Works of R.J. Khalid6,” a book of short stories I used Print Shop to design in 1990 and sold for something like 25 cents to my family members: self publishing in the pre-Amazon era!).
What this means is that in this last year since I got pregnant, I have reliably teared up every time I hear about a book deal or see an “unboxing video” or a publication date celebration on social media, especially given most of the time the videos are from influencers who are very much not writers, or are about topics I have more expertise in than the authors I’m seeing. It does feel a little like I traded a book for a baby, and though I wouldn't go back and choose the alternative, it is (apparently) a raw, exposed nerve.
I have to keep reminding myself, though, that there is no urgency. The book can be written any time, and I have to believe it will. On the other hand, this specific little person could have only come at the time he did. And if the only things I mourn having lost in the last year is a sooner publication date for a book I will write eventually anyway (right? right?), and an hour or so of alone time every morning, then I think I’m doing pretty well. The thing I know about parenting is that I’ve always gained more than I’ve lost. Not just in entire people that I love, but in versions of myself. The person I am now is because of the experience of mothering my children. Although I have always been someone who loved swimming, for example, I would not be the kind of person who swims in a mountain lake at dusk, post-thunderstorm, with no one else there, or in the ocean in January. Though I’ve always been someone who lived 20 minutes from the beach, I never got there every week until I had 3 children under 6.5 in whom I wanted to instill a sense of place (and who, it must be said, would all be happily engaged in sand and water for hours at a time, something hard to accomplish at home). I never would have ridden a dog sled in the Arctic Circle unless our family’s consensus-based decision making sent me there, or taken the time to learn how to run long distances by starting with exceedingly small ones, inspired by watching my kids’ persistence, or, in fact, become a midwife at all. Becoming a mother has made me braver, more curious, more open to be pushed out of my comfort zone, than I would have been otherwise.
And I probably wouldn’t have been an adult who read for pleasure, either, because that is one of the essential things about me that I had lost until my children gifted it back to me. I spent most of my childhood curled up with a book, but because I was so academically driven, by college and certainly during my PhD, reading represented work and so I was always doing it, but rarely enjoying it, not the way I had as a child. There was always another essay to read to inform my own paper or 19th century travel narrative to unearth, and I rarely “had time” to read unless it was in service to some larger project. But when I gave birth to Wren, in the pre-smartphone world in which I gave birth to her7, I realized very quickly that I was going to need something to do while I nursed — which was literally all the time — and in that first year of her life I read 56 novels for pleasure. Somehow, with a baby AND the very same amount of work responsibilities I had prior to giving birth to her, I was able to find the time to read for no reason at all except that I wanted to. She returned that joy to me, and it’s one I’ve never given up again. Although I don’t think Hanif’s first year is going to be a 56-book year, I’m 25 deep so far, and I thought I’d share some of my summer reads with you all in case you are also someone who loves nothing more than reading outside in summer, or someone who needs that pleasure returned to them.
Here are the books I’ve read since Memorial Day, so far:
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: okay, folks, the hype is real. I devoured this book in a long weekend, starting at my sister’s house in Copake, NY, where because I had brought my copy and she already had a copy, I had “upstairs” and “downstairs” books to take me through every bedroom nap and porch sit. If you need something to bring you back to the most delicious type of childhood immersion in a book’s world, this is it. Even if you think you’re not interested in video games, pick this one up, because the characters and the relationships are so compelling.
Roses, in the Mouth of Lion: It’s rare I get to see any elements of my childhood in a novel, but this one — about a queer Pakistani child growing up in Corona, Queens — gave me that experience. I read this one in an afternoon while Hanif and a sick Jo napped beside me and my two other kids were busy. It ends a little too abruptly for how slowly it starts, but I still recommend it.
Mika in Real Life — this one is for you if you’re looking for a charming beach read that isn’t a romance about financially stable white people. It’s a cotton candy of a read, with a predictable arc, and yet has enough to say about motherhood and race and trauma to stay interesting and keep you invested in the characters.
Yellowface — this was a book I was hype to read, and it started off strong, but I quickly found myself frustrated with it. I could not get over the sense that the author really thought herself exceptionally clever and her readers all morons. Many people are billing this as a “classic unreliable narrator” tale but all I can say about that is I don’t think that phrase means what people think it means. This narrator is reliable. There is no point of the novel in which you are doubting the (racist) truth of what she’s telling, and honestly, the truth is tiresome; to compare Kuang to Faulkner or Marquez (who have written truly unreliable narrators) is kind of ridiculous. Here’s a review from the Cleveland Review of Books that says it better than I can.
Carrie Soto is Back — I also happen to find tennis (and really all sports) tiresome, so the technical elements of this book were a slog to get through, but I loved The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo so much I picked it up. I really appreciated that the protagonist was purposefully unlikeable (which ultimately kind of made her likable) and that, at heart, this was basically a love story between a father and daughter (which I also appreciated about This Time Tomorrow, the last book I read before Hanif was born).
Everything I Never Told You — this was a re-read for me, because it’s part of Wren’s “Contemporary Asian-American Women’s Voices” lit seminar this year (which I am teaching, of course) and it’s a good summer read though it was interesting to return to Ng’s debut after she really hit her stride with Little Fires Everywhere. It’s slower than I remember, but it’s been great fun hearing Wren’s take on it.
Our Wives Under the Sea — this book left me in a terrible mood. The pacing was onerous, the only thing that kept me reading was trying to uncover a mystery that is never actually resolved, and yes I got All The Metaphors about the unknowability of other people and the mysteries of the deep ocean (how could you not?) but with characters as uncompelling of these, I’d have been happy to keep them unknown.
The People we Keep — this was borrowed from my sister at the lakehouse, because I needed something warm and fuzzy and easy after Our Wives Under the Sea. It was indeed warm and fuzzy and easy and although I found the protagonist a bit exasperating, I loved the community around her. It’s the kind of book I can’t recommend as Great Literature, but loved reading anyway. Perfect hammock read (which is where I read most of it, with a baby on me).
Natural Beauty — okay, so maybe the lesson is that I just don’t like Sapphic horror because this book left me angrier than Our Wives Under the Sea. Like the former, it was trying hard to be deep and insightful (in this case, about white supremacy and beauty culture) but it was basically a book about cartoony Gwyenth Paltrow and Elon Musk supervillain characters, maggots/worms/octopus torture porn, and the harpy attack from The Last Unicorn (IYKYK). Do not recommend.
For bedtime read alouds with Illy and Jo this summer I finished the 4th Vanderbeekers book and moved on to the fifth, and the Giver (which was my very first dystopian read as a child, and which was both way more problematic and unnerving than I remembered: I haven’t read any of the rest of the quartet and am wondering if I should? Do weigh in on that if you have.)
Have you read any of these books, dear readers? What did you think of them? I’d love to know. And what are you reading now? Tell me here:
I’m hoping to pick up Banyan Moon at my favorite Vermont Bookstore today (since I am, predictably, finishing writing this newsletter several days after I began it, and am therefore in an entirely different place), and I have my eagerly awaited copy of Hijab Butch Blues awaiting me in Brooklyn, but I am someone who is always looking for my next read after my next read, so do share.
Sending love and wishes for all the best hammock swings, lake swims, and sticky S’mores moments for you til next week,
Robina
A note on the title of this post: I want to acknowledge the word “crazy” can be perceived as ableist; the term “fucking crazy decisions” is taken directly from my journal in 2011 to refer to my decision to leave academia and pursue midwifery, and the title of this post comes from that quote, which I referred to in a prior essay here. I mean no offense and hope people can read it as the anachronism it is meant to be.
I call her my cousin, but really she’s my second cousin, I think? She’s the daughter of my mother’s cousin, with whom my mother grew up virtually siblings. Shannon and my youngest sister, Tahira, were born only a few months apart and, like my mother and her cousin, exceedingly close; we spent much of our childhoods visiting and spending time with this family, especially in the summers when we’d escape NYC to borrow their small town Adirondack life for a few weeks. Fun fact: Shannon’s grandmother and my grandmother were sisters to married brothers, probably part of why we grew up so close to this particular family more than any of my grandmother’s other 6 sisters. The All of a Kind family nature of my grandmother’s life, where she grew up a Brooklyn Italian with a fruit-selling father and bathing in a public bath that is now a hipster art space, has always been a source of fascination to me.
I need to be clear here: this does not, except very briefly in those early years, mean that I was getting up at the butt crack of dawn. I do not wake naturally and stretch my arms above my head and blithely bounce out of bed at 6am. I do not want YOU to feel like you need to wake up naturally and stretch your arms above your head and blithely bounce out of bed an hour before whatever ungodly time your children may wake up. No, this has only been a possible practice for me because the KB children, from infancy, tend to sleep in; and because they are homeschooled we have had the luxury to, as much as possible, avoid early activities to avoid starting every day with a fight— at least until they have become old enough to get themselves up and out in the mornings. Even when I had multiple babies, toddlers, and preschoolers all at once none of my children ever made it a habit to wake up before 8:30 or so. Wren set this pattern as a newborn, and somehow all of her siblings have complied, even Illy who, in the first weeks of his life, tried to wake up for the day before 7 once, but was blearily told (by me) “we don’t do that here,” and had a breast shoved in his face so he would nurse back to sleep.
Footnote to a footnote is that part of what makes me love homeschooling is that my children have not yet gotten indoctrinated into overriding their need for sleep because they are overscheduled on a schedule that doesn’t make sense for their circadian rhythms (something I’m sure damaged me as an overachieving high schooler who would get home from after school activities at 6p or later, do homework until 2a, and wake at 6a to do it all over again day in and day out). They understand, in a way I probably never will, that rest is important.
I tried to find a good synopsis of what I find so interesting about the pineal gland - our literal third eye — for you, but I couldn’t really do better than the Wikipedia article, so check that out if you’re interested!
Medical Industrial Complex
It took me a while to realize that the truth was that none are, including modern midwifery, but that’s a whole separate blog post.
Can you guess which favorite childhood author I modeled that pen name after?
Actually, I saw an iPhone for the very first time *at* her birth, when the backup midwife showed up and had one, another little detail about her that seemed unreal and awe-inspiring at that time.
So grateful to hear about the parts of your pre-baby life you are grieving as well as the career moves that you have had to put off. Its helping me have compassion for the parts of my pre-baby life I am grieving and how I have had to put off finishing my PhD. Thank you! Funny enough, I have no energy or brain juice these days to work on my actual dissertation, but somehow I have found myself able to write about parenthood in a journal-y kind of way and wonder if one day I will be able to publish it as a book. What will come first, defending my thesis or publishing a memoir or maybe none of the above? Parenthood has certainly blown up the tidy little career path I had envisioned for myself, now full of twists and turns and maybe with an unexpected destination.
I really liked Yellowface in the beginning (and read Babel just before Yellowface and LOVED IT, so had very high hopes) but the end was so lackluster and anticlimactic it kind of ruined the whole book. I could see what the author was getting at, but she did not deliver. And lord the protagonist just did not have a SINGLE redeeming quality- there were multiple times reading the book that I just felt like what is the point here! Our Wives Under the Sea was a friend's FAVORITE book last year but I didn't love it. I did think it was funny when the Titan exploded that it was basically the plot of the book.
The best thing I've read this summer was Still Life by Sarah Winman. Perfect book, highly recommend- fantastic characters, brilliant writing, funny and poignant and so damn beautiful.