Dear Substack readers,
Forgive me, as it’s been a minute since I wrote you last.
It’s not that there hasn’t been time, though time has certainly has played a role: I’ve attended 7 births since I wrote you last, cared for countless people not only in pregnancy and birth and postpartum but also in well body visits and birth processing sessions1, launched an entire midwifery mentorship program, cared for my three unschooled children and a baby and participated in numerous actions and protests.
But it’s not for lack of time, not really, that I haven’t been in touch.
It’s more that, for the first time in my life, I struggle to find words, or that the words I do have fail, miserably. I do not know how to go on with life “as usual” — to write newsletters about birth and carework and the structures that overdetermine what that looks like in our culture — during a genocide we are all watching live-streamed on our phones. What is there to say? Or what is it that is still important to say? How do I sit in Brooklyn, and write about birth, while abject violence is happening in Palestine, and my tax dollars pay for it? What words could I possibly offer as a birthworker, here, that are worthwhile? 50,000 people are pregnant in Gaza right now, and 180 births are happening per day, without any medical infrastructure, without basic supplies, without anesthesia or other medications, while just a few miles down the road, a child is slaughtered every 10 minutes in targeted and calculated killings. This is, in fact, and despite all of its lip service to “terrorism,” a war on children. In early November, Al-Jazeera compared the killing of children in Gaza to other “conflict zones,” based on UNICEF data. They found 136 Palestinian children were killed per day, as compared to .6-3 children/day in other “conflict zones” (Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan) in the 21st century. Another study suggests that compared to every other site of “battle” in 2022 (I quibble with this language, but it is the language used in the study), where children make up 6% of all deaths, in Gaza children make up 40% of all deaths.2
To be a war on children is to be a war on hope. Both literally and figuratively children are our collective future, and it is no coincidence that they are being murdered in Gaza. They are not “collateral damage;” they are incidental or unavoidable deaths. They are purposeful in the same way wiping out the infrastructure of Gaza is purposeful: it is an attempt to foreclose on the possibility of a future.
I can see this so clearly because the numbers have clarity, and I can see this so clearly because the words of Israeli media — both that of government officials who blatantly share genocidal intent and the social media of Israeli civilians and soldiers themselves who celebrate the deaths of children — have clarity. And I also can see it so clearly because, as someone who is intimately acquainted with what children mean to people, I have clarity.
I’m writing this on New Year’s Eve, which has always been, since I was a very small child, my favorite holiday. I don’t know why, exactly, though I have my guesses: it was, after all, the only holiday both my families — the Pakistani and the Italian — celebrated together, growing up. It was a secular holiday, but not based on a mythic history that erased violence or celebrated war, a holiday not limited to the United States but one people around the world celebrated. It is, at its most basic premise, a celebration of something universal, which is hope. In my family, this was embodied by the fact that at midnight, everyone would give everyone a hug and a kiss: the ball would drop, we’d all drink Martinelli’s, and then the embracing would begin. I’d weave my way among dozens and dozens of people — sisters, parents, cousins, aunties, uncles, sometimes friends — hugging and kissing everyone (or being gently patted on the head by my Pakistani uncles) by turn. It would take forever, but you had to get everyone. Everyone was included. And everyone was united, in that goal. There was a collectivity and belonging in this new beginning that I didn’t often feel in other contexts, when my differences and inability to quite “fit” into any one narrative was, in fact, the dominant narrative of what it meant to be me. And ultimately, maybe that’s why New Year’s Eve has always resonated with me: because it’s a celebration of the in-between, the neither-nor, the liminal. It’s both an end and a beginning at once. A bittersweet farewell and a fresh start.
My family’s New Year’s Eve celebration got smaller and smaller through the years, as cousins on both sides grew up and formed their own families: first fewer of my Italian side joined us, then only my Pakistani family, then less and less of them as well. COVID of course accelerated this dissolution. Still, my sisters and parents and I have continued our traditions, and now sometimes Wren’s teenage friends join us. It’s a much quieter night, but still, probably, one of my consistent favorites.
New Year’s Eve and Day also are a day of writing for me, typically. As is appropriate to the days themselves, I do a lot of reflective writing on the year that has past and what it has meant to me (for years and years and years, even after I stopped posting to LiveJournal, I would dutifully log on and answer the long year-end questionnaire I had started answering in 2003) as well as a lot of intentional writing about what I want from the year to come. Last year, I ended the year 36 weeks pregnant, and wrote this on Instagram:
It's New Years Eve, my favorite holiday. On January 1st 2022, when I was tending to a client in early labor in between swims in the ocean and prepping our traditional New Years' Hoppin Jon risotto, I had no idea I'd end the year 36 weeks pregnant.
It's surreal, really.
Here I am, a mom of big kids: kids who take the subway by themselves and spontaneously leave the house with friends to go to the bodega, who go upstate with their cousins and only call me to say goodnight one night of 3.
And somehow I'm about to have another who will be totally dependent on me again.
When I first got pregnant my sister Tahira said, "you got to the top of chutes and ladders and went down the long slide."
But as I've moved through this pregnancy one thing I've realized more and more is that I'm not going down the big slide. There's no returning to the beginning. I'm not returning anywhere. I'm moving in one direction: forward. This baby doesn't bring me back. It doesn't deposit me back at the start, to where I was when Wren, or Illy, or Jo were babies. This is a different baby. I am a different person.
The chapter I'm moving into is new. I don't know what I'll find there.
But I'm starting to get excited to find out.
My kids may not be as dependent on me as they once were. But Wren still curls up close to me when we watch TV at night and wants to chatter about her day as she always has; and Illy's face lights up like the sun when I hand him a stuffed animal octopus that seemed ridiculous to buy a 12 year old boy and yet I knew; and Jo asks me to slice her apples and wants nothing but to be held - no soothing words, no questions, just warm arms - when she hurts herself or is hurt, just like when she was 2.
Here's something I do know: parenting is constant alternation between recognition and surprise.
I look forward to the moment where I meet the baby and feel like I've known them forever. And I look forward to all they'll show me that I don't know: transcendent and terrible, joy and grief, boredom and fascination. We will all change. We will all be okay. The six of us are just going to march right off the game board and onto what's next, together.
I had a baby in 2023. A whole entire complete human. The sort of “multiple timeline” feeling I articulated in my writing on New Year’s Eve 2022 has only been exacerbated throughout the course of the year: I live a life where I help one child with college classes while nursing another one all night, a life where one of my sons makes his own plans for the day that involve me not seeing him again for 29 hours, while another shrieks behind the door I’ve closed to get some work done, so distressed to be separated for even a few moments. Sometimes I will turn around and see my baby and be struck with complete surprise and disbelief that he exists, even now, almost a year later. I was in one narrative, a narrative where I had three kids, for so long, and this new narrative, the one where I have three kids and a baby, is both absolutely real in its primal, messy bodily-ness, and completely surreal. I am a walking contradiction, two versions of me at the same time.
I had a baby in 2023, and his name is Hanif. His middle name is Insaaf. Put together, the names mean “true believer of justice.”
Hanif, the youngest child in a family of teenagers, the next-to-youngest child in a big family of aunties and uncles and cousins, has a lot of nicknames. One of them is Hani.
Hani, as it turns out, is itself a whole name, an Arabic name meaning “cheerful” or “happy” (which, as it turns out, Hanif is). It is also a name that, over the course of the last three months, I’ve discovered is apparently very popular in Palestine.
Over the last three months I’ve also attended a lot of births, as well as supported a few pregnancy losses. In one particularly notable birth storm, I helped to welcome 4 babies to this world within 5 days of each other.
Here’s the thing about attending births, especially births outside of the medical industrial complex that does everything in its power to strip away the humanity and spirituality of birth and overwrite it with technology and procedure. Even in a best case scenario, even when the world feels “normal” (which is to say, even when the injustices and violences of the world are not at the absolute forefront of your mind every waking second though you are aware they exist), attending a birth is like breaking, palpably, from the timeline you are in and entering some third space, a space of held breath and possibility that operates by its own logic and straddles all contradiction. It is ugly and beautiful; it is loud and it is quiet; it is ease and it is effort; it is brutal and it is tender; it is terrifying and it is sublime. It is singular, and yet it is universal, and you feel that contradiction in your bones. You are in the most bodily and urgent and raw of humanity and yet also in the presence of a humanity that transcends the body. You are both in between everything and are everything, at once.
In that space, time stretches like taffy, and loses all meaning. The outside world falls away. There is no outside world, really. Birth is its own womb.
And when you emerge - when the parents and the baby are tucked into bed, and the supplies are cleaned and packed up, and your shoes are on and you step out into the big wide world — it takes a while to remember what it is to be part of that world. The in-betweenness and everything-ness of birth lingers on your skin. The air of the outside feels, tastes, smells crisper. The people around it move faster and wear their emotions like bright fabrics on their bodies. The leaves in the trees whisper secrets. You think, did this street always look like this? You stand apart, and yet you feel the thread of connection everywhere. You are singular in the pulsing universal.
In early December, I left one birth only to arrive at another just a few hours later. I left that second one in the grey light of a December morning listening to a boygenius song where Julien Baker sings of being in the “backseat of her body,” on repeat. I am in the backseat of my body, I sang, over and over. I drove past a billboard that said, simply, “Courage.” I have driven down the BQE thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of times in my life, and had never noticed that billboard.
It is New Year’s Eve. I do not feel courageous, or brave. I feel bruised and tender. I feel full of love, and full of guilt. I feel bewildered, caught in a riptide of life pouring in every direction. I live in birth, and in it I live in death. I feel birth, and I feel death, and I feel all that is neither/nor and yet both that exists in between. 180 people a day are in the veil with me, across the world, in Gaza, and from them new babies emerge. Do they feel the 136 babies and children leaving as they arrive, their fingertips softly brushing in that place where time stretches like taffy?
Here, in New York, I cup babies’ heads in my hand as I measure them and listen to the sounds of their heartbeats. Their foreheads wrinkle at me with the questions of what it means to be here. I don’t have answers, and I want to ask: did you feel the babies and children leaving as you arrived, your fingertips softly brushing in that place where time stretches like taffy? Instead, I count the breaths moving through their lungs and breathe with them, tenderly, a song of our survival.
I come home and my baby, the baby I can’t believe exists and yet does, cries for me, arms outstretched as I race to the bathroom before I settle in to nurse him after my absence. When he is deposited in my arms, little droplets of tears flicker in his eyelashes like stars, like diamonds, and I leave them there. He latches onto my breast, and his eyes roll back, as though the relief and safety are too much to bear.
On my phone, a baby who shares my baby’s name stares out unmoving, eyes wide and empty, his face an exact replica of his mother’s.
I wonder what I was doing, the exact moment Hani, the baby in my phone, and not — blessedly, miraculously, inexplicably, undeservedly - Hani, the baby at my breast, died. Was I offering tea rich with the spices of my fatherland to someone who has turned hope into flesh? Was I tenderly holding the cup to their beaming faces, listening to them chatter excitedly about the miracles and alchemy they have just performed? Was I steady, smiling, holding back the dark edges of infinity so they could linger in its light?
I put down my phone and take in the curve of Hani, the baby at my breast’s, cheek as he falls asleep. He does not need his name written along that curve so people can identify him. We move through our days believing, however mistakenly, that he is ours and we are his and that we will always be here to claim each other.
The relief and safety are too much to bear.
My older kids walk in, and remind me they need a ride to band practice. The world is turning as it does, for some of us.
I am tired and I am alive.
I am imperfect and terrible. And I am
better than I could have imagined,
navigating a riptide of life moving in every direction.
I am looking for the shore.
I am trying to be the shore.
I look down and brush away the tears in my baby’s eyelashes, gently, and then rub away my own with his still on my fingers. We are, after all, one.
Today is New Year’s Eve. It is a bittersweet farewell and the promise of a fresh start. I pray that every day of this new year the fact of your survival leaves you breathless with the wonder of it. I pray that every day of this new year the fact that it is not guaranteed also leaves you breathless with the wonder of it.
And I pray that every day of this new year that wonder will beat so loudly and so righteously in your heart that it will stop at nothing to ensure our collective survival.
how much of this truth can we bear to see / and still live unblinded
how much of this pain / can we use3
Love,
Robina
I could, and maybe someday will, write about these sessions, which represent an offering that is both relatively new and incredibly popular and have been, by turns, incredibly enlightening and incredibly devastating. Talk about the singular and the universal: the specific ways in which the MIC works overtime to impose the same oppressive, colonial capitalist narratives onto the most vulnerable and powerful moments of our lives is staggering.
I also want to point out here that this war on children pre-dates October 7th, as discussed in depth in this 2022 UN Report, where Gaza is at the forefront of every single human rights violation against children that is possible.
These two lines are a paraphrase from the always relevant and breathtaking brilliant Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider.
My God, I am so glad I found this and you. This piece spoke to the dissonance I have been feeling throughout the bombardment in Gaza from my safety in Canada. I see babies with the manes of my boys. I see humans with naked of my parents and my sisters and my friends. I see friends who’ve lost family members and continue to worry about the ones who are still there, in the terror.
Your words are a balm. The relief and safety too much to bear repetition made me sob while staring at my infant. I’m so grateful to have your writing to turn to.