Behind the garage door

A detour into power

A couple of weeks ago, I returned home from a birth on a frigid, overcast Sunday afternoon. I had been at this particular birth — on and off, but largely on — for the better part of the prior fifty two hours. My time cocooned with this family while they awaited the arrival of their son had been punctuated by cab rides and walks (as, blessedly, they lived less than a mile from me): home to nurse, around the corner to the pasta joint where my nibling was celebrating her eighth birthday feast (the second year in a row an STG baby decided to have a birth story that coincided with her’s), back again to soothe and normalize, home to sleep and shower and nurse some more, back again to witness her baby finally make his way. The final time I returned to her house, in the middle of the night on Saturday, was by cab, and so my final return home was also by cab, this time with five bags — my birth bag, the newborn resuscitation cradle, the birth pool, the pumps for said birth pool, and a backpack with a change of clothes and various other sundry supplies I had brought one or other time I’d arrived. “Just pull in at that driveway, please,” I’d instructed the cab driver, who helped me unload all of my unwieldy luggage onto the sidewalk. And then I blearily stuck my key into the lock of the garage door, turned it, and lifted the door.

Now, this garage door — a luxury in my area of Brooklyn, where most folks would easily be compelled to sacrifice many a goat to the street parking gods and the alternate side parking gods and whatever other gods might be convinced to give them a reliable spot where they could park without circling for many hours — technically is part of my sister Tahira’s house.¹ Her building, built like mine at the turn of the century, contains a drive-through garage (in place of part of the first floor) that once served, as lore has it, as an entryway for horses to get from the churchyard across the street from stables behind the house; this was originally, we have been told, an undertaker’s residence (and, if the lore holds, I suppose place of work).

On this particular cold December day, what was behind the door was siblings, playing: the three of them building a fire under the supervision of my brother in law as part of whatever fantasy they were enacting (I think it involved being explorers, but I was too sleep deprived to really digest what was happening).

The scene brought to mind another a few months earlier, when I drove to LaGuardia airport to pick up my my daughter Wren’s girlfriend, who’d flown in from Cleveland Ohio to visit us for a long weekend in October. According to Wren, Kelly had been to New York City before at least once for a concert, but had only ever set foot in Brooklyn “quickly, to see the Beastie Boys mural” (which, unless I’m mistaken, is actually in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, so it’s possible she’d actually never been to Brooklyn at all). That warm sunny day in two months ago, as we crawled our way from Queens to Brooklyn on the very trafficky Brooklyn-Queens-Expressway, I assumed that, beyond the brief glimpse of the Manhattan skyline, there was nothing particularly noteworthy to capture her attention; a highway bisecting a major metropolitan area is equally unpicturesque in all settings. But as we pulled off the BQE, I began to take in my own neighborhood from the eyes of someone who had never been there. What did she make of that little bright blue row house I thought, or that restaurant’s Halloween decorations? Was it greener or less green than she expected? Was she surprised by the parrots in those trees? As I would do again a hundred times between that day in October and the day I returned from that birth in December, I slid my key in the garage door, turned the bulky lock, and squatted down to lift up the door. Then I got back in the car and drove us through the tunnel. As in December, there was a child on the other side, and this time, too, my sister, putting out laundry with a baby on her hip. The girls got out of the car with Hanif. Wren introduced Kelly to my sister. Then they climbed through the fence between our yards that Andy had constructed so my sister’s family has access to the green space of our yard and we have easy access to our car. And it struck me, so powerfully in that moment, how utterly foreign the whole scene must have been to someone who lives in a big house in the suburbs of Cleveland in a typical nuclear family, how homespun: the 1900s wood-frame, crooked houses teetering on our sloped street; the creaky behemoth of the garage door and the long, not particularly well maintained tunnel behind it; the trembling of the car as we drove through said bumpy tunnel; family putting out laundry to dry in the sun rather than in a machine; climbing up a rickety ladder leaning against a stone wall to get into our yard rather than entering through the front door. It was not just foreign, I realized suddenly, taking in this scene I take for granted with new eyes: it was distinctly Pakistani. I saw, in that moment, just how much that tunnel and laundry and stone wall and creaky homemade gate reminded me of a place I’d often felt so far away from. As someone who often mourns and grieves the distance between the two continents on which she’d grown up, I was astonished to realize, we had built something that breached the gap in ways I hadn’t even appreciated.

Sometimes witnessing a birth feels like that, too: a sudden realization that you had missed some vital element about something that you thought you knew.

Don’t get me wrong. As someone who has been attending births for longer than a decade, I still nonetheless remain in wonderment of it as a general rule. It never becomes less magical, less miraculous, less astounding. It’s not hard for me to appreciate that while this might be the 230th or 381st or 500th birth I have seen , it is the one and only time I will ever witness that singular human being birth that particular, irreplaceable baby. But it’s also only fair to say that as someone who has been around that many births, it never feels foreign or esoteric to me. It’s something with which I am intimately acquainted, from the thousands of hours I’ve sat at a woman or birthing person’s feet, from the days and nights I have spent listening to it — really listening to it, with curiosity and without intent to control. The sounds, the smells, the intensity and the rest, the physicality and liminality of it, are spaces I inhabit comfortably. Even as birth is always the same and yet always different. Even as birth is sometimes scary or stressful. Even as it sometimes require thinking through puzzles and quick action. Even when the waters are uncharted, the currents feel familiar.

But once in a while, something will happen during a birth and it will jar my perspective, as if knocking me askance — as if I’m welcoming a teenager to my home and am suddenly gifted with the ability to see the place I know so well with fresh eyes. This birth earlier in December was like that for me. Not because of the birth itself, which followed a pattern unequivocally familiar to me — in fact, I think I was able to hold my client through all those long hours she labored (82 hours and 32 minutes if my electronic medical record can be trusted) precisely because I find these long circuitous births familiar and, therefore, can normalize them. What knocked my perspective askew, what had me looking at this birth from a different lens, was the fact that another homebirth was happening just a few miles away simultaneously, and I had a window into the way that one unfolded, because my client’s doula was the doula for that one too, and was communicating with her backup the whole time.