The end of a season

Also known as the start of another

This is a story about the beach.

Once upon a time, when I was a young mother, I spent every night for several weeks reading the novel Brookland while nursing one of my infants to sleep. It was winter. The nights were long, and the book was too. I curled up around the baby at my breast and precariously perched the heft of the novel, with a book light attached to it, on the bed just past her head.

A different baby, and a different book, but the same idea.

I had grown up with a strong sense of place: the gulleys and rooftops of Lahore, the bridges and brick of Brooklyn. Of course I knew, intellectually, that New York was New York because of its water, because of its proximity to the ocean, to its estuaries and rivers. Of course I knew, intellectually, that it was because of its harbors that I myself — a child of immigrants in a city of immigrants — even existed, understood the paradoxical reality that it was because these waterways had been violently colonized that my family could leave their also-colonized home to make one here. And yet, I could not stop myself from looking up in surprise every time a seagull flew overhead instead of a sparrow or robin or pigeon. I had never thought of myself, despite living 4 blocks from the tidal strait that was once one of the busiest channels in the world, as being someone who lived on an island. But I lived on an island.

On those windy, dark nights, reading that book, I made a resolution: my kids would know that water was part of their story. They would know we lived on an island. That summer, I would take them to the beach every week.

It was an ambitious resolution, possibly made over-ambitious by the fact that summer was still months away and seemingly distant from the constraints of having a nine month old, an almost 4 year old, and a just turned 6 year old. They would be older then, right? Anything would be possible with a 1 year old, 4 year old, and a 6.5 year old, of course. But as the days lengthened, I recognized that I, who am not a regimented temperament by nature, would have to be regimented. I would have to make it easy, and more importantly would have to be strictly dedicated to the systems I put in place for ease, if I were to sustain this as a practice and not a one-off. I had not myself grown up going to the beach regularly; though there were pictures of me as a baby in a little bikini on the beach with my mother and aunts, my most prominent memory of the beach as a child was being a sixth grader at a Coney Island birthday party with my Latinx friends and being asked by Japanese tourists to take a picture with them. My beach day memories were scattered throughout the years, but were united by being special: all-day, giant coolers filled with watermelons, umbrella- and beach chair- productions or long train rides out to Riis or the Rockaways with other twenty-somethingers and juice boxes of wine in our backpacks. I did not, in other words, have much of a map for how it was feasible to do the beach as one young mother with 3 kids under 6 week in week out. So I strategized.

First, location: for me to be 1 on 3, it had to be a small-scale beach with low chance of riptides and easy parking. Then, timing: coordinated with alternate side parking so that we’d only have to walk a block, and right after the baby's morning nap so she would be cheerful. Next, food: sandwiches we'd eat in the car on the way since we’d be leaving at lunchtime, a bag of chips and some fruit we'd carry to the beach, and temperature-stable snacks (no granola bars with melty chocolate, we learned quickly) to leave in the car for us to eat as we drove home, starving from an afternoon of swimming. Third, packing: we’d bring only what could fit in one single backpack so I could also wear the baby on the walk from the car, a bag of beach toys light enough for the 6 year old to carry, and the 4 year old’s tiny backpack that could barely even fit the bag of chips but could carry the beach blanket — made out of parachute material that folded into a pouch roughly the size of a small loaf of bread — that I had invested in precisely so it would fit in said tiny backpack. We would have to put on our bathing suits before getting in the car, and drive home in them too. This brought me back to location: I realized an attached (but sand-less) playground would be key to allowing us to rinse and dry off before getting back in the car.

My strategizing worked. We did this week after week that whole summer. Then we did the same the next year, and every one following. Friends knew our routine, and a rotating cast joined us. Year after year, we kept to our weekly beach. We eventually migrated to beaches with bigger waves. We eventually went places where Ilan could surf and sail and the season lengthened. I built a practice of cold dips. It took me nearly 7 years of strict adherence to my packing policy, but I eventually realized we could upgrade and carry more things, like chairs (heaven!!) or boogie boards or a change of clothes.

My success in “weekly beach,” as we called it, eventually inspired its fall, winter, and spring equivalent: “Friday Field Days.” For nearly five years, we managed to hike once a week, driving out of the city either upstate or into Long Island, or out to New Jersey, to hike for a few hours. These hikes started out as glorified walks since they were, after all, with very small children, but eventually we were hiking 6 or 7 miles of varied terrain together each Friday, often returning to the same parks once a season to see how the landscape changed.

Most of my favorite unschooling memories involve weekly beach or Friday field days. If you were to rifle through the coffee table book of my brain, some of the most vivid images in it would moments in those landscapes, or in transit to and from them — a friend watching the toddlers play in the sand so I could swim with our older kids, giggling and floating and pretending to be a shark; my kids scampering down a trail covered in orange and red and yellow leaves, involved in some elaborate imaginary world together; the three of them sleepy and sunkissed and sandy and listening to Dan Zanes as we hit every light on Ocean Parkway, or singing loudly to System of a Down together on the New Jersey turnpike on the way to a hike.

In the last couple of years, though, both weekly beach and weekly hike have become harder to maintain. A consistent day off from activities and classes and appointments for every teen, tween, and working adult in our family has become more impossible to pull off. Our summers are now often spent moving between the oceans of New York and the lakes and swimming holes of Vermont. The truth is, my kids have the sense of place I longed to give them, and I needn’t work so hard at it anymore. The truth is, I am no longer as desperate for the spaciousness and graciousness of nature to relieve some of the pressure I felt to entertain them when we were home. The truth is, my kids are older and so much has changed. The truth is, I am older and so much has changed. But I am more close to the adult who punctuated my weeks with those routines than my teens are to the very small children who did, and I really, deep-down-to-my-bones miss them.

Last year, around this time, I wrote a post on Instagram about our first beach day with a new baby. It began:

When I found out I was pregnant, at 42 years old and already a mom to 14, 12, and 9 year olds, all my first thoughts were “how will I” thoughts.

• How will I help Wren with her college applications with a baby?
• How will I bring Illy to his long days of sailing and surfing classes with a baby?
• How will I lead the book club Jo wants me to lead with a baby?
• How will I attend births with a baby?
• How will I stop things that we don’t want to change from changing…with a baby?

The “how will I”s haven’t stopped postpartum; postpartum is always a song of utter impossibility until slowly things become possible almost without you realizing.

Hanif is 4 months old now, and I still don’t have the answers to all or even most of these questions. The me I had become without a baby seems like a mythical creature now, the relative ease and independence I had re-grown into over 15 years of parenting a dream. I may not see her again for a long time, or ever. But…today I packed us up and brought Illy to surf. It looks a bit different. I can’t swim. I can’t relax and read while the bigs walk to the coffee shop. But it’s one more “how will I” answered, at least for now: I will like this, in this new and old version of me. And if I know anything from the last 15 years, it’s that soon this time will feel like a dream too.

All those questions I had when I stared at that positive pregnancy test were really one: how would we stay the family we’d built and loved and gotten used to? And of course the answer was we wouldn’t. We are always becoming something new, baby or not. Everything we love is because we got through some other “how will I?” And sometimes the answers are delightful and sometimes they are hard. But we love them anyway. Because they’re ours.

This past Thursday was the summer solstice, the first day of summer, the halfway point of the year, the longest day but also, paradoxically, the marker of when sunlight begins to become shorter, a corner you turn, an uneasy reminder that even as you are celebrating the beginning of summer, you are also always-already counting it down. The young homeschooling mother who vowed to instill a sense of place, an understanding that we lived on an island, that we were also surrounded by mountains and glacial rocks and spring ephemerals like trout lily and bloodroot, in her children, took every solstice and equinox equally seriously. At the start of each season, we’d hang different banners, put different natural materials and cute little wooden figures on our shelves. The kids would wake up to a new seasonal book. We’d do special activities or make food we only did on that one day a year. Some of these traditions have remained, but many have receded into the stuff of memory.

A piece of art inspired by that mother, made by the lovely Catie Atkinson.

This year, I spent most of the summer solstice in bed, with a feverish toddler . I’m not actually sure what my big kids did, but know it involved playing with cousins (Jo), reading in the hammock with the napping toddler on his chest so I could have a break (Illy), and thrifting with a friend (Wren). There were no special activities. There was no special food. Dinner was going to be leftovers until a client surprised us with an exquisite homemade dinner of falafel, burek, and grape leaves. There was little acknowledgement that it was the solstice at all. Although I had long stopped buying seasonal books for the older kids (a much harder endeavor once you’ve aged out of picture books), not even Hanif got one. I’m not the idealistic young mother anymore. I see the fruits of my efforts with the older kids and I feel satisfied. But I still have a young child. I have a map now, because I made it. And yet, I am not the same person. It is a strange thing to be your own point of comparison, because the aspiration is tantalizingly in reach. Yet it is an illusion: that version of me is in the past. She doesn’t exist, not exactly in the same way, anymore. That version of me wasn’t even a midwife. That version of me was a decade younger. That version of me hadn’t lived through a lockdown during a global pandemic or a live-streamed genocide. That version of me had seen significantly less death. The thing on my mind the most, as the light of summer reaches it peak on the same day it begins, as Hanif becomes more of a person every day, is do I have it in me to do for him what I did for his siblings? Will I ever get it together to make strawberry ice cream on the first day of summer and stay out in the yard past dark to catch fireflies? Will Hanif open books in fall and find pressed leaves from the year before? Can I give him the magic of weekly beach when the community I had so patiently and consistently and assiduously built over the years to do that with me has moved on into the world of teens? Are Friday hikes as valuable with just one kid? Can I create him a world that is new, and magical, and full of wonder, when I am more challenged to believe in it myself?

Summer solstice this year marked the end of a season that began with us returning from my fatherland, which I visited for the first time since having children, a wondrous and bittersweet experience. It also marks the end of my run of spring births, a season I had purposefully booked quite intensely to compensate for Andy not working, and in the hopes I could do what I had tried to do in 2022 and had not, waylaid by the unrelenting nausea of an unexpected pregnancy — take off a whole summer to finish my book proposal. Still, the season had been more compressed and busier than I expected; in 11 of Spring’s 13 weeks, I attended 12 births, each of them representing due dates that had spanned a window of over 16.

The babies may have clambered to be born in a much shorter span of time than I expected them to be, but they also gifted me with 8 daytime births, blessedly. At one, the father’s employee — a young, blond, cap-wearing mechanic who was the last person you’d expect at a homebirth — brought me a bagel and coffee as I watched my client labor in the pool. Later, that client’s 6 year old put on gloves without any of us noticing and then sat down next to me and enthusiastically participated in my placental exam. At another, a 3 year old asked several times if she could join her mother in the pool. When none of us immediately answered, all preoccupied by the fact that her sister was already crowning, she surreptitiously began taking off her clothes, assuming tacit approval.

I gently placed an IV on a bathroom floor and thought of Gaza. I raced over to a birth, leaving 4 children and a baby (some of my own, others my nibings) home alone, quickly unplugging the waffle maker and leaving a pile of waffles and still uncooked batter on the table, to await my mother’s arrival since Andy was in a meeting and I couldn’t reach him. (She didn’t have the baby for 5.5 hours.) I sat on the floor of a Bronx apartment and listened to Qu’ranic recitation. I stared deep into 12 people’s eyes and saw the whole universe. I giggled as a client art directed photos with a baby half out of her. I ate babaganoush after a birth with clients who were having their second daughter with me and discussed where to get the best hummus in New York. I murmured “you are doing it” to a client who said she couldn’t. I murmured “you are doing it” to a client who said she could. I waited for placentas who took their time. I waited for babies who took their time. I circled for parking. I leaked breastmilk while performing a newborn exam. I held water to thirsty lips. I sat in supplication at someone’s feet. I bent my head in prayer close to someone else’s. I watched the sun rise driving through Brooklyn. I watched the sun set over it from another, my mind’s eye imagining what it would be like to see it all destroyed. I could not see the sea where I spent so many weekly beaches, but I almost could. I thought this is my place. I loved. I loved.

Last week, I brought my newest baby to the beach. He watched his sister and cousins wade down into the shore, and with full abandon and at full speed, raced down the beach after them. In all my years spending time at the beach with kids of all ages, I’ve never seen any baby approach the ocean with so little hesitation. With me at his heels, he ran straight into an approaching (but gentle - we were, after all, at the beach I had all those years ago chosen because it felt the least susceptible to intense tides) wave. The water hit him in the face. He fell down. I scooped him up. He spit out the water, gagging. And then he wiggled out of my arms to get back in, to try to swim.