The wild and wondrous birth of Hanif Insaaf, Chapter 2

In which her fourth birth is a little bit about her third (and everything that happened in between)

Apr 23, 2023

This is Chapter Two in a 7-part story. Looking for the first Chapter? It can be found here.

My third pregnancy was supposed to be my last. Andy and I had agreed we both wanted three children early in our relationship, years before we were ready to have children: years, even, before we were married. At 25 I had prophesized we would have a girl first, followed by a boy, and then another girl, and by the time I stared down at the daughter I birthed on our bed in 2013, with my 5 year old daughter and 3 year old son a few rooms away, I laughed out loud in both shock and recognition: how could I have known?

Moments after Jo’s birth, with the exact three children I had predicted

In some ways, that should have settled it: if I had magically known that this was our family before it was our family, it must be our family.

Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that Jo wasn’t our last child. Even during her pregnancy, I’d journaled about it:

It doesn't feel like this is my last baby. Three kids has always been my minimum, but it has always been Andy's target, and it would make sense for us. The puzzle pieces of how we fit in three kids, assuming this baby is healthy and okay (InshaAllah), work. We are done with being poor students. That phase in our life has to end as soon as we both graduate, Andy in 2014 and me in 2015. And then -- then I'll be a midwife. (I'LL BE A MIDWIFE!) When would I take time off from that, and could I ever take off from that given my earning potential exceeds Andy's? So unlikely. Plus, I'm 33 now. At what point will I just feel too old to continue? All roads seem to point to You'll be done at 3, and you'll be grateful. God knows it is more than I even deserve.

But this doesn't feel like my last baby. This doesn't feel like a last pregnancy. I can't put my finger on why.

Some parts of that journal entry proved quite prescient, even if others were laughably misguided (I thought I was getting too old at 33? LOLZ). But in many ways, I was right: life moved, as it does, with the chaos of three young unschooled children and one partner completing a PhD, finding a postdoc, finding a tenure-track job, and then beginning the arduous process of getting tenure at one of those jobs while the other completed midwifery school and began working in a public hospital.

In my car, moments after passing my midwifery boards, with absolutely no clue what being a midwife meant for who I would become.

Our friends joked we were like Superman and Clark Kent, never in the same room together. There were moments of possibility, forks in the road we could have taken, decisions we could have made and didn’t, but each time the logistics of having another baby seemed insurmountable. My hospital job didn’t offer paid family leave, for one. But even if it had, I knew that I neither wanted to be pregnant nor postpartum in the Medical Industrial Complex; I did not feel spiritually or ethically at ease there. I did not want a developing baby to marinate in the chronic cortisol I felt participating in a system I found abusive and toxic nor be emotionally and physically depleted with a newborn I would have to be separated from too soon. I also knew, given my demanding hours, that if I went back to work with a small infant, Andy would be the one to pay for it, with his research time, and I was terrified what would happen if he didn’t get tenure because of a baby he wasn’t sure he wanted. Sometimes, I thought about leaving my hospital job, but I was locked into a student loan forgiveness program that would penalize me triple the amount I had been granted if I reneged on the two-year contract even one month early, and so I didn’t.

It was the first time in my life I weighed the joys of a baby against the logistics; every other time we’d decided to have children we had not worried about our poverty-level adjunct incomes or our lack of health insurance or the fact that we were so young we knew no one else having children. My children called out to me, and my absolute and unwavering conviction they needed to exist trumped any logistical hurdles.

The fact that this faith wavered now was the first time I recognized that being a midwife was changing me. There was, I was realizing, no way to navigate the intensity of my calling, to live on the interstices of life and death and bear witness to the terror and beauty of birth – especially in a culture hostile to it – and not have it impact, meaningfully, every part of me and my life, who I was, the decisions I’d make. There was no way to keep the impact of midwifery out of my body, a body that would have to house and birth a child if we decided to have one. If I didn’t recognize the self who would weigh logistics against a child and choose logistics, it was because midwifery had made me into someone new.

So that someone new forged ahead on the path she was on, but in her mind was always a hum of some mythical perfect future, when Andy got tenure, perhaps, or when she had quit her hospital job and opened my own practice and amassed enough savings to take some time off. But that mythical perfect future began to feel further and further away even as those contingencies fell into place. I left my hospital job, opened a solo homebirth practice, partnered with another midwife, went back into solo practice. Andy got tenure. The kids got bigger. We were financially stable enough to explore the world and pay for the kids’ ever-expanding catalogue of music classes and renovate our house. Andy turned 40. I turned 40. I attended gorgeous breezy births and terrifying births and exhausting births and triumphant births and stayed reliably steady through all, tucking the experiences into the crevices of my cells and bones. We found ourselves in a global pandemic, something I suspected I’d live through in my life, but whose actual realities were surprising. I got COVID at a birth days before I was eligible for a vaccine and struggled with terrifying long COVID symptoms for six weeks. I began working on a book, signed on with a literary agent. Throughout, Andy insisted he was at capacity, and was not open to more children, and I began to accept that. The moments of longing became further and further apart. I embraced being a mom of big kids. Somehow nine years passed since Josie’s glorious, about-as-painless-as-any-I’d-ever-seen birth, and the version of me so sure it was not my last seemed remote. I adapted.

It was this me who in the middle of the night on May 1^st, 2022, found out that one of my clients’ waters had broken. It happened to be my son’s 12^th birthday. It also happened to be the last day of Ramadan. It was the first year in 15 – the first since I had considered myself a fully “recovered” anorexic, the first since I had given birth for the first time, those two facts entwined in just another way that birthing my children had healed me– that I had managed to fast most days. Each day of the month I had made my body a prayer of love and safety and capability, had given myself compassion and grace, and maybe it is for that reason that what happened next happened. Who’s to say?