It is September.

On hunger and fulfillment.

It’s September, and seven months since I became a mother again. Hanif chirps and warbles like a baby bird, babbles ma ma and ba ba ba ba and pup pup pup. He raises his left arm, palm outstretched, and declares Blu, blabu as though imparting some deep wisdom. He raises his right arm, and says “haiiiiiiii haiiiiiiii.” He ooo ooo ooos insistently, like a chimp, for more bites of foods, and I, determined that my leanest baby should not get even leaner with this new phase of endless movement and solids, douse everything in fat: eggs cooked in ghee and tortillas pan-fried with avocado oil, buckwheat and oats with egg yolk and berries, zucchini and cauliflower and broccoli roasted with so much olive oil that his cheeks shine with it after he eats. We sit together on the porch in Vermont, where we have rushed only hours after a day one postpartum for a birth I had thought would happen two weeks before it did, and watch the wind endlessly rustle the trees and the rare car pass by. He turns from them to me, with his round inquisitive eyes, and trills, “mmmm-ghheeeee?” He nurses distractedly, popping off my nipples frequently with milk dribbling down his chin and a cartoonish, smacking sound, again and again investigating his surroundings. When Jo and I read together on the couch, he crawls over and, improbably, pulls up to a stand and peers at us. At night he cannot help himself from crawling while half asleep, then pathetically crying out “nyeh! nyeh!” as though someone has taken the breast from him rather than him crawling away from it on his own accord, though truly perhaps it is not his own accord at all but something in his body, in his brain, telling him to do these things when he doesn’t even want to. He does this over and over, many times a night, and probably hourly in the early morning, but I refuse to keep count or even look at the time, resolutely keeping my eyes shut as I drag him back down to the breast or roll him over with me to nurse on the other side, a pact I have made to myself and will keep, because not quantifying the sleep deprivation truly does help me feel it less.

It is September; my family has grown, and so has my appetite. Not in terms of hunger, although it is true that food has continued to taste exceptionally delicious after a pregnancy of endless nausea, and I have been getting a joy out of meal planning and cooking that I hadn’t in years. Each night I find myself delighted by my own efforts, astounded by the alchemy of throwing together simple ingredients into something greater than the sum of their parts. I cannot believe I can cook like this. Can you believe how good this is? I say aloud, watching my children and husband eat. Andy is amused by my amazement: I’ve spent the last two decades refining the art of nourishing us all well. This isn’t some new skill. Wren’s friends sit on the bench I have insisted we build for exactly this purpose - to cram as many children around the table as possible - and tell me they are having a spiritual experience while eating my chicken makhni and chole pulao, recipes I have made for nearly a decade now, recipes that are comfortable fallbacks, and I laugh, unable to believe I am the mother I am, the mother who feeds people so well even teenagers appreciate it.

When I was a teenager myself, I would lay in bed at night, unable to sleep despite the exhaustion inherent in my life — a life that involved getting up at 6am to go to a specialized, prestigious high school, staying there late into the afternoon so I could add as many extracurriculars as possible to my overachieving college applications, then coming home and doing homework until late into the night so that the grades on those applications were all As. I know now these lack of sleep was likely due to a lack of nourishment; insomnia is a symptom of lots of nutritional deficiencies, as it turns out, and also, simply, hunger. In those moments, I would attempt to will myself to sleep by thinking of dramatic ways that I could die, each more unlikely than the last. Almost all involved an audience. A common refrain in my head as a teenager was no one would notice if I died, a thought I know now to be utterly absurd: I was well, if imperfectly, loved by family and friends. These nightly stories, that narrative I told myself, about not mattering, or not being noticed, were not because I wanted to die. They were not even because I really believe no one would notice if I did. They were a symptom of something else, a symptom of carrying around a huge wound that was invisible to most. I wanted people to know how much I was hurting, how much I had I had been hurt, how depraved and fractured I felt because of the sexual abuse I had experienced, and also I did not want to have to tell anyone about the sexual abuse I had experienced. And so I daydreamed, instead, about a harm coming to me that everyone could see. I wanted people to know, and care for me as if, something terrible had happened to me, because it had; and yet I did not want anyone to know that something terrible had happened to me, wanted to defiantly insist on my own resilience, and so I made up for what I considered my inherent unworthiness by being as perfect as I possibly could. I wanted no one to suspect anything was wrong with me and yet I wanted everyone to know something was wrong with me. This was one of the many contradiction inherent in my existence and I lived with it, unable to recognize or name or understand it. Instead, I said this - no one would notice if I died, no one would care if I disappeared- to myself so often it wormed its way into my brain, and became something I believed, became a well worn path I still travel down when I am least resourced, only now I can call it out for what it is, which is a lie little Robina concocted to explain things she didn’t understand.

It is September; the six of us play Marco Polo in the pool, me holding the baby in my arms as I skitter quickly on my legs, unable to swim with him on me, giggling as Ilan flails closer and closer. I evade him, and Jo, and Andy, for many rounds. When I am finally tagged “It” I hand off Hanif to Andy and beeline toward Wren, following the endless giggles I recognize as my own, but are her’s. When I open my eyes I see people around the pool looking at us, smiling; we are sweet, we are unique, this family of 6, two of the children teenagers taller than their mother, one perky little girl in a strawberry printed bathing suit, one babe in arms whose furrowed eyebrows show he does not really understand this game we are playing or why it is so funny.

Andy and Wren play guitar and sing to the baby: I’m on Fire, Hallelujah, songs Andy wrote when he wasn’t much older than Wren is now. I listen as I chop vegetables and wonder at the marvel that is Wren’s voice, the way she makes each song her own effortlessly. Josie and I mix pancake batter together and when she asks if they can be chocolate chip pancakes and I say yes, her eyes light up, shining; Illy sits at the piano and plays and plays and plays, complex songs faster and faster, too fast. He explores his way down a riverbed, scampering along stones in his own world, the way he would on paths in Prospect Park when he was 2, becoming so tiny we can barely see him, and Andy says, he is going too far, and I say, he knows to only go as far as he can see us, and just before he disappears from sight he turns around again and returns. My sister comes to visit, a surprise, and when we drive up the road and Jo sees their car in the driveway she screams and demands “STOP THE CAR” before I fully pull in so she can run and throw her arms around her cousins’ neck. She is a spark of delight and joy and creativity sometimes; other times she screams with full fire at Illy for looking at her the wrong way or throws herself on the couch and huffs I wish things happened in real life the way they happen in books and I am at a loss of how to respond but I know exactly what she means, because I felt that way at 10 too.

It is September, and I want to drink up these moments and write of each, beautifully, words that will drip like honey. I want to write of the comments, the endless comments I see during World Breastfeeding Week, where people who celebrate breastfeeding are told they are shaming those who don’t. I want to write, people do not shame you just by existing and sharing that they exist and have joy in it. I want to write, why are women only shaming other women when they share a sense of satisfaction in their birthing and parenting but not when they have lost weight or gotten married or run a marathon? I want to write, how often do men tell other men they’ve shamed them on social media? I want to finish writing the chapter summaries for my book, want to write so many essays, and I jot down ideas and phrases and sentences, endlessly, in the margins of the planner where I compose to-do lists with little check boxes next to them, a habit I learned while documenting things on a Labor and Delivery white board, and kept. The to-dos like finish and launch new website (which itself is tantalizingly close to done thanks to my birth assistant and friend Sarah-Grace) get faithfully transposed from week to week because the others, like mail in PKU form and send out email about homeschool bookclub and call accountant get crossed off first. But I want to finish and launch my new website. I want to offer community circles and mentorship programs and host retreats that take birthworkers to hot springs where they will soak their sleep-deprived muscles or orient their eye gaze upward, away from the hypervigilance and focus of their days and toward a long open vista, to sit around a fire and sing together in community and connection when they spend our days feeling alone in the singularity, the beauty, and the trauma they witness that most don’t. I want to order a new couch for my office, start offering clients journals to write in, order a thermos to carry in my birth bag so I don’t have to search for quart jars to steep my postpartum tea in at every birth. I want to move: I want to do the Class four times a week as I have the last three years; I want to try out the Kettlebell class my client loves and the integrative postpartum rehab program my other client loves; I want to run, music pounding in my ears until it slows my thoughts; I want to return to Cross Fit and deadlift my own body weight again. I look at the website listing for my old CrossFit gym’s “Diapers and Dumbells” class frequently, wondering how I’d ever afford $35 a class, where Josie would go while I did it, and whether Hanif would truly put up with an hour crawling around a play area with other babies and a couple of caretakers.

I want all of it, everything, am hungry to create, to be, to experience, to feel my body’s strength. I have endless ambition to do more of what I love, to share more of what I’m good at, to have more of what I want. More more more more. My older children’s births gave me permission to love myself, wholly, with my contradictions, to be who I was and not who I thought I should be; Hanif’s, 15 years later, makes me hungry to integrate all the contradictions and many selves I have become since. I want to be midwife and teacher and researcher and writer and mother, at once, because I am all of those things at once.

It is not surprising to me that I feel this way, that I want to do everything, to be as alive as I humanly can, to devour everything in the world, after nine months where I felt as though someone had dimmed me, where I was lost in a haze of nausea. It is not surprising that in creating lifeI have re-learned my own fecundity and want to revel in it. I want to be a force because I know I am a force.

It is September, and I read memoirs in bed, nursing the baby down for one nap or another, and the plastic of the library dust jacket crinkles under my hand and I think, I want this to be my dust jacket I want to go on a writer’s retreat and write for 12 days straight I want to have a bad author’s picture two sisters look at and make fun of the way my sister and I do.

And I also think, trapped there in a side lie, if this baby cannot sleep alone, cannot sleep without being on or near a body, and we are dyad, does that mean I should just be resting this much too? And then I linger and read the books instead of write them, because I know I do not want to rush this time, even as I want to rush this time; because I do not want to fight Hanif’s instincts, because someone always loses in that fight, and that someone is both of us, because we may as well be one, and I am experienced enough to know better.

But I’m experienced enough to know better because of the three others who I am not with when I linger in bed with Hanif. It is easier to have three older kids and an infant than it was to have two small children and an infant. And also it is harder. That is, again, another contradiction. When I had three children under 5.5, life was chaos, my own needs subsumed, washed away in the current of small mammals who relied upon me to survive. But we were all in the current together. An impromptu dance party in the kitchen served the 5 year old as much as the baby in the sling. Laying on the floor together meant the 3 year old could line up his dinosaurs and the baby could scoot and knock them over and the 6 year old could dictate a story to me all at once. A day at the zoo was stimulating enough for everyone. Now I carry a baby on my back while I go to get my 15 year old’s certificate of residency forms notarized so she can take community college courses, after saying goodbye to the 13 year old who is going on a walk with his friend and setting up the 10 year old on her computer where she can animate her drawings or write her “novel,” the third one she has started this month because she is asked to occupy herself this way a lot. When people tell me you must have so much help no one thinks of the kind of grief I feel when I see my 13 year old son pace the yard with the baby in a carrier and a podcast in his ears because I needed just a minute break from the baby so I could eat, and also to respond to the constant stream of text messages that come and I must respond to even as I tell myself I will practice boundaries, because how do you practice boundaries when there are always people to reassure, nausea to troubleshoot, coughs that won’t go away, vaginas that look different than they did before the last baby? And so he has taken it upon himself to get the baby to sleep, this 13 year old of mine, and I do not think he should have to, and yet he has, and I don’t know what to do with that.

Some of my contradictions are the same as they were when I laid in bed at night and dreamed of my own death; some are different. I did not even think I’d become a mother then. I thought I was too broken. I would have laughed aloud at the thought of my being a midwife; birth was something that interested me not at all. These days, I do not know how to be a mother again, newly, and yet also be the wise, experienced mother, do not know how to straddle being the mother others have come to look at for reassurance and wisdom and perspective while also being the mother whose friends have moved on to the next stage of parenting while she once again thinks in two hour intervals and obsesses over whether it is the yogurt that made her baby cranky today. I do not know how to be the mother of teenagers and the mother of a baby, and yet here I am. Living in these peculiar, uncommon places is not foreign to me. The Venn diagrams of my life have often felt singular: not the only midwife, not the only homebirth midwife, not the only homeschooler, not the only one with two full-time working parents, not the only one without regular childcare, but the only homebirth midwife homeschooler with two full time working parents without regular childcare. Now I’ve entered a new one, a Venn diagram of teens and infants and full time work and an unemployed husband and an appetite to change everything and do everything and change nothing and do nothing, to lie in a bed with a baby all day and stare as the sunlight changes from August’s to September’s. A Venn diagram where I am surrounded by mothers and also feel isolated, a Venn diagram that is singularly mine and yet every mother’s.

We are all brand new. We are all ancient.

It is September, and my favorite sentence, my most precious sentence is I have four children. I thrill to hear myself say it. It was me, who brought them here. I made the big family I didn’t even know I wanted, until I knew I wanted it, and then I wanted it insistently, fiercely into existence. Or perhaps this hunger for that family was just a reflection of their inevitability: perhaps they wanted to be here, had to be here, and I was the context necessary for them to exist. Perhaps they willed me into existence. Whichever it is, who I am and who my children are is inseparable. I drop this most precious sentence casually into conversations where it doesn’t belong, because it is something about me I need people to see, even when it is invisible, and I know it. The gorgeousness and the pleasure of it; the effort and negotiation of it. August was my busiest midwifery month since I had Hanif and I went from home to home and said what you are doing is perfect and pumped breastmilk in stolen moments at kitchen tables and on bedroom floors and steeped postpartum tea (cracking a mason jar with boiling water once and thinking of the item of “order thermos” on my to-do list) and I placed a hand, gently, almost imperceptibly on someone’s back when she started to panic as her baby sat, suspended between worlds, the head out and the body still in. My hand said, easy easy. My hand said, I’m here with you. My hand said, this baby will come into a world of sticky ice cream on summer days and ocean waves that make you feel like you are flying and and wishing for things to happen like they do in books and the feeling of someone gently brushing their hands through your hair as you fall asleep and this baby will know what it means to be hungry for all of it, but right now they just need a minute to be ready for it.