The wild and wondrous birth of Hanif Insaaf, Chapter 1
In which she wonders if the beginning is the beginning
Eid Mubarak, my friends and comrades!
Although I wrote my birth story months ago at this point, I’ve been waiting for Eid to share it. Hanif won’t technically be three months old (and officially out of the “fourth trimester”) for another week, but this new moon feels like the end of the cycle that was my childbearing year, when my little family went from this:
To this:
Can you believe it? Sometimes I can’t. When that first picture was taken, I genuinely had no idea what this year would bring, and I often still look at this little baby of mine with complete wonder that he is here, that after ten years of being a fivesome we became six. And yet somehow, in that way children always seem to, he feels inevitable. Imagining a time when I didn’t somehow know, deep in my bones, that he would make it to us, feels absurd. Of course he’s here. What a trip, truly.
I’ll be posting the story in chapters because, true to my nature, it’s long and detailed. I hope you enjoy! And if you want to have the chapters delivered hot off the press into your inbox, make sure you subscribe!
I awoke the morning of Saturday, January 28th in what can only be described as a white hot rage.
I was 40 weeks and 3 days pregnant, and the sun shone through my window: the crisp, bracing light of a January day. I lay in my bed, still and stony, but inside I churned with the force of a storm. In three prior pregnancies I had never made it to 40 weeks, but that wasn’t the problem, precisely. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure what the problem was. Was it that I had some labor signs the night before and so convinced myself I’d have a baby overnight that waking up well rested sent me into a fury? Was it that I had spent the last week frantically completing tasks I was worried I would not finish before I gave birth, and now that they were done I didn’t know what to do with myself? Was it that my father was in the hospital? Or that I had been bickering with my husband, who had assumed I’d have a baby by now even more than I had? Maybe it was that my dog was dying, her giant tumor growing exponentially and making her look like a genetically modified chicken raised for breast meat more and more by the day? Or maybe it was as simple an annoyance as the fact that the cinnamon-cardamom rolls I had allowed to slow rise in my fridge earlier in the week, in the hopes we could eat them for breakfast the morning the baby was born, needed to be baked before they got ruined and therefore could not be eaten the morning the baby was born? Who was to say. All I knew was that I was enraged, and I didn’t even want to feel better.
But wait.
Is that really where this birth story begins? With my rage when I awoke on the day I would eventually go into labor?
I just don’t think it is.
What even is a birth story, really?
Birth is more than any one day, or the moment someone is born. It’s more than the music that was playing or the ways hands press into backs and hips or the desperate exquisite pain of contractions or even the slippery, warm weight of a baby on one’s chest.
The moment of birth itself is only one small part of the story of any birth, because the truth of every person walking this earth is that they are just small piece of a thread spooled out through every single moment that had to align exactly right for them to even exist. The odds that any one of us are born at all are so unlikely as to be virtually impossible. In order to exist, you and I, Hanif and any other baby, all of us required the exact right moments of love but also the exact right moments of heartbreak. We required specific moments of delight and loss, specific migrations and rootedness, specific big choices and specific mundane moments. We are each marvels of statistical improbability, and each of our births is the story of everything that needed to happen to make us possible: the stories that are conscious and in reach but also all the stories that are unknown, so far in the past or so far removed from us our cells can hear only the softest tremor of them, echoing out over a wide gulf. A birth isn’t simply when a body opens to make way for a baby to come out. Birth is also when that body opens up to let something in: all of those stories, the eternity inside of us that we know and that we don’t. Because we need to draw on all of it in order to have the courage to love anything as much as we will the person we birth.
We are all our own story and the stories of other people. This birth story is my story and it is Hanif’s story, and it is also the story of other people.
So here’s what you need to know about this birth: it is my own and it isn’t. It is complicated and simple. It is doubt and loss and joy and discovery. If you are here for twinkle lights and Bon Iver and one transcendent moment that I make look easy, you may want to find a different story.
(But spoiler alert: there are also twinkle lights and Bon Iver and one exquisite contraction that very suddenly brought my baby to me, too.)
Absolutely adored this line, “The odds that any one of us are born at all are so unlikely as to be virtually impossible.”