I recently stood on my porch, barefoot, an early-Spring wind tickling my cheeks and hair, talking to my friend Patricia. Besides owning my favorite local coffee shop, Patricia is a fellow homeschooler whose three children are friends with my children (she was standing in front of my porch, in fact, to pick up her daughter, who belongs to the weekly homeschool book club I host for eight 8-12 year old girls). She also happens to be someone who is continually, perpetually, impressively involved in mutual aid efforts; every time I talk to her she is making and distributing food at our local soup kitchen, hosting free English classes, collecting backpacks and school supplies for families who can’t afford them, or bringing coats and coffee to the migrants our city has indecorously decided to house in tents on an abandoned air field in the dead of winter. She’s also doing this while pursuing a graduate degree in theology.
Basically: she’s one of those people I’m in awe of, one of those people I aspire to be more like.
“I’m hosting an Iftar dinner tonight and I don’t really know what I’m doing,” she confided.
“Oh, that’s easy,” I said, “Lots of food and space to pray. Done.”
“Okay, that I can do,” she said.
“Patricia,” I said, “You’re always feeding someone. It’s really just so incredible.”
“Well, it’s a thing I can do,” she said, “you know? There’s so much that needs to be done, and for a while I wanted to do it all — I was trying to get involved in immigration reform, and learn as much as I could about law, but I don’t actually know how to do that the way I know how to feed people. And I’m starting to wonder if that’s just okay?”
I thought of her a few weeks earlier, when I had stopped into the coffee shop, and saw her disconsolately sitting at a table; it turned out she had been distributing food, coats, and cold medicines at Floyd Bennett field earlier that day and the cops had come and threatened to arrest her for “drug dealing.” And that wasn’t even the start of her troubles that morning. The group she had been organizing with, and who had more experience with distributions at this location, had been late; she’d started setting up alone, in the wrong place and eventually needed to move; the mood among the people searching through shoes and coats was chaotic and tense. She looked totally defeated. I knew that feeling well, that feeling of trying to do a little good in the world and instead having it just reveal how much more work there is to be done. I also knew, intimately, that feeling of people’s need being so much bigger and vital and urgent than what I can offer, knew the experience of filling community fridges and having people grab food out of hands faster than we could load it, my kids wide eyed, and offering cabbages to those who spoke to them in languages they didn’t understand. Patricia and I had talked, that day, of abolition; of feeling discouraged by how big the work was and how beyond reform all the systems and institutions of our lives are, how badly we wanted to build something new.
Now, I stood on my porch and widened my eyes at her. “It’s definitely okay. It’s your thread — the one you specifically can pull that destabilize the whole oppressive structure. And honestly, I’m starting to wonder if it’s the most important thread, tending to these immediate, real, tangible needs. Taking literal care of each other. I kind of wonder if it’s the only work to do because none of the structural stuff is actually going to change without a revolution, and leading one isn’t exactly my skill set, you know?”1
She laughed then. “Well, your skill set is enough. You do so much, helping babies be born, and your activism, and your writing! Your writing. It does so much.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said, feeling my cheeks flush with the color of someone who feels they have convinced people of something that isn’t true2, and quickly moving on to talk of scheduling logistics and birthdays.
There is so much to be said about that flush, and that change in topic. Because the truth is, while I so easily offered Patricia reassurances about the value of “small-scale, embodied” work, I am often lost in doubt about its value when it’s me who is doing it. Just that morning I had been texting with my sister Saadia, about how she and I have been mobilizing during the last six months of genocide; much of her efforts have been in local politics and organizing neighborhood events, and mine has been, in my words:
“swimming through various spaces recruiting for actions and putting people in touch with other people who can help them organize — I guess that [making connections] is just a skill I have, and I should feel good about it but I’m never in a meaningful organizing role myself. Which maybe is fine, but I always feel like I should be doing more.”
I continued, “I always bump into this feeling now, with midwifery — it’s so all encompassing and feels so deeply political and hard in an embodied way — so my time and energy for other work is limited…it also makes me money, so is it inherently corrupted by that? And then I wonder, too, ‘am I letting myself off the hook by using midwifery as an excuse for not doing more?”
“Are you feeling like it’s not ‘enough’ to be helping people bring their babies into the world in radically liberating ways?” Saadia responded. “Like, I want to be sure I’m understanding this 😅.”
The answer is yes. I do, quite perpetually, feel like it’s not enough.
I don’t think it’s a surprise Patricia and I would both doubt whether our contributions to the world are enough; for one, we are both women talking about traditionally feminized work. We have both been taught to devalue caregiving, caretaking, the work of nourishing and nurturing. For another, we are both swimming in a sea of white supremacy culture that literally capitalizes on us internalizing perfectionism, on focusing our inadequacies, on our fear that we are not enough.
And in its own weird way, knowing that doesn’t make it any easier for me. In fact, sometimes it makes it worse. Being aware of the insidiousness of white supremacy culture often traps me in a loop of inadequacy: because I am actively engaged in a constant unearthing of the ways in which that culture has inflected my midwifery practice and limits my ability to provide truly liberatory, decolonial care, I can sometimes fall into the perfectionistic trap white supremacy has also created when I don’t live up to the expectations I set for myself, or discover those limitations still exist. I find myself ignoring the truth of how much I’ve grown and divested knowing there will always be so much more internal work to do; my negative bias is in fact white supremacy in action, but even the intellectual knowledge of this does not quiet the creeping inner churning in my stomach, that chasm of but you’re still not good enough.
A few weeks ago, in Tideshifts, my midwifery mentorship group, one of the participants - a comrade I deeply respect and love - said, in a tone tinged with both anger and defeat, “I just don’t think midwifery is the liberatory path I hoped it would be.” In the moment, I didn’t respond to it specifically; I let the comment resound and settle, speak for itself, and the conversation went in whatever other direction it continued from there. The truth was, I wasn’t sure what to say. So much of our conversations in our group revolve around the fact that most Western midwifery is overdetermined by colonial capitalist violence, so structurally stymied, and the discouraging truth that most Western midwives simply accept this as a matter of course, perpetuating the abuses of these systems on the bodies of those they serve while reassuring themselves that at least their abuse was at least a little warmer and friendlier than the alternative. In the moments after her comment, I wasn’t sure how to comfort or reassure. Was it even my job to do so? Is it completely irresponsible to offer a midwifery mentorship group and leave everyone feeling defeated before they’ve even begun? And: was she right? The comment sat with me for days, for weeks even. I chewed on it and chewed on it, and finally it began to digest in that inner soup in my stomach, that creeping, cavernous you’re not enough place. Not good enough as a mentor, to leave your mentees feeling hopeless; not good enough as a midwife because she’s probably right and you are delusional when you think you might be approximating something liberatory with your midwifery for the twenty-something people you serve each year in your tiny practice.
Ah, there it is again.
Being self-conscious about the way in which her statement, which had nothing to do with me, triggered my own inadequacy helped me get over myself a little, but I still couldn’t stop returning to her statement. Because the truth is, I do think midwifery has liberatory potential. And her words made me think about why.
It finally came to me one day, one day after the conversations with Patricia and Saadia, when I was watching yet another video of yet another massacre in Gaza on my phone. I suddenly had the thought, imagine if I were watching 6 months of genocide doing a job that felt pointless? I imagined myself in my first job, trapped in a windowless room as an editorial assistant in a children’s book imprint in a big-7 publisher3, and seeing images of babies being left to decompose alone in incubators or children strung up on a wall like meat at a butcher shop. Showing up making money for someone else, pushing paper along.
Because say what you want about this work of nourishing and nurturing, of how small scale it might be, but it matters.
And maybe in a world where we are told, in so many ways, at so many times, that our lives don’t matter, maybe doing something that feels like it matters — maybe doing the work that tells someone else they matter — is, in fact, enough.
This work of nourishing and nurturing, this small scale work, this “interpersonal” work, this care taking and giving work: it may be undervalued. We may fetishize the structural work more, we may fetishize the organizing work more, we may fetishize the traditionally “masculine” work more. But it is real in a way that I’m not even sure the structural work we fetishize — the work of trying to get the systems that were designed to oppress and exploit us to in any way acknowledge our humanity — is real. It is small scale, but it deeply, vitally matters to that small scale. It is the stuff of bodies, of blood and tears and hunger and desperation, but also, of love. Of survival. Of the belief that that individual blood and tears and hunger and desperation matter. It is the stuff that humans have always needed to do for each other, before the structures that harm and exploit us were built, and it will still need to be done after those structures come toppling down. It is in these efforts, even in its imperfections, that we put into real, tangible practice a belief that it is possible we can build something new.
Because, truly, in Palestine we have nothing but proof that when the systems we have wrought come for us, we will have only each other to ensure our survival. What is making a palpable difference to the lives being decimated as I type this? It is not actually the work we in the West fetishize as being “legitimate.” The ICJ ruling has done virtually nothing, the various figureheads we have put pressure on finally calling for ceasefire doing even less. It has been the work Palestinians have done for each other. While those in power have sat in offices, their suits buttoned up and clean, and pontificated on the definition of whether what is happening meets the official criteria of a genocide as if what we are all witnessing with our own eyes and ears is not enough for us to know, it is the work of feeding each other, of tending to wounds, of caring for each other in birth, of giving each other clothes to avoid being targeted, of digging each other out of the rubble by hand that has kept those Palestinians who are still alive, alive.
So, I wonder, dear reader, what is the thread you are pulling at, that you devalue? And can you reframe it as something that not only helps us survive, but embodies a hope that there’s something worth surviving for?
In love and solidarity,
Robina
I remember once, many years ago, coming home from work, to talk with my babysitter, Maya, about what roles we’d play in an armed revolution (a natural choice for a conversation with your babysitter). “Well, the obvious choice for me is medic,” I offered. “No way! Are you kidding? That’s one of the most dangerous roles, and we need you alive for when the babies come afterward,” Maya replied. “Anyway, I think you’d make a better sniper.” I laughed out loud at this, not being someone who thinks of myself as having particularly good aim, but she continued, “No, really, think about: it requires staying patient and observant, steady under pressure, and still and quiet as fuck. Don’t you think that’s exactly your skill set?” I had to give it to her.
It is a flush that particularly comes whenever anyone points to my writing, which — despite two hour long conversations where my literary agent tries to convince me of otherwise — I often devalue the most of all my efforts.
There is plenty to be said of the importance of literature for liberation, obviously, but I wasn’t contributing meaningfully to any kind of liberatory project by writing placating emails to authors whose “literature” involved dressing up babies as various animals and making huge sums of money for it.
Get as red as you want. But your writing is liberatory and life changing.
This is vital.
And it reminds me of what adrienne maree brown says, “small is all.” The small stuff—that is it. That is what matters.
In response to your question, I’m about to get small. For a decade I thought my work with the federal courts on death penalty cases was the thread. And maybe it was. But that thread ain’t unraveling any more, not from the courts. And it’s now feeling like complicity to me. So tomorrow I am giving the news that I’m leaving. To focus on my kids and my community. To find other threads. Small ones, because small is all.