The wild and wondrous birth of Hanif Insaaf, Chapter 3
In which she stares at a pregnancy test, disbelieving
This is Chapter Three in a 7-part story. Need to catch up? Find the first chapter here and the second here.
I spent the first 99 hours of May going back and forth between my home and my client’s. There I checked in on her baby, provided IV fluids when she started to vomit, reassured, planned, pet her dog, even read aloud to her when her husband had to step out. At home I made birthday cakes, made Eid cakes, organized chairs and tables in my yard, opened my palm to my sister for mehndi, told my skeptical auntie I had always wanted a fourth but that it was too late (“it is too late!” Andy echoed from the background). I emailed my son’s friends’ parents about his upcoming birthday hike. I texted other midwives, talking over my client’s situation. I read aloud at home too, bedtime stories to my children.
And, apparently, I conceived a baby. On Eid, apparently, a fact I perhaps understandably forgot given the chaos of my week until a few weeks later, perplexed, I searched my text messages for the word “sex” and found mention of it.
There were many odds against this happening. We needn’t belabor them now. But somehow, against all of them, as I listened to the sounds of my client on the precipice of birthing her baby, finally, just as I had known she would, even as the hours had passed and her doubts had grown, unbeknownst to me, my body was working, stitching a person out of cells and stardust and long abandoned wishes.
I was not elated, did not blink at the positive pregnancy test through tears of surprised joy, when I found out weeks later. Instead I was mutely dumbfounded. I texted a friend a picture of the test with the caption “this is not a COVID test.” Then I got in the car and went to a postpartum visit. What else was there to do? This was my new self, my midwife self.
I had long relinquished attachment to the idea of ever being pregnant again. I had done so much work to be at peace with this version of reality. In the days that followed, I felt whiplashed, and the new version of me who weighed logistics against a baby could not make the math work, did not know how to solve the equation. I stared at my life as if a Rubix cube whose colors I could not align, and the spinning colors made my nausea, which had kicked in immediately, worse. I could not imagine continuing with the pregnancy, but I could not imagine the alternative either. We had built a life we all loved. I did not want to change that for anyone in my family, did not want to run the risk of ruining anything for any of them.
“I never hear what you talk about what you want,” my sister said.
Did it matter? I wondered. I didn’t know, and besides, my happiness was so wrapped up in my family’s. How to even know if I could enjoy what I wanted if it made someone else miserable?
Truth be told, I never quite made the decision to continue with the pregnancy so much as I never made the decision to end it, though I sometimes eyed the misoprostol and mifepristone in my office cabinet and wondered if I could. I dry heaved and vomited and cried and texted the few people I had told and picked at my Capn’ Crunch cereal miserably. I fought viciously with Andy, sobbing, about all of it and none of it. I thought I cannot do this. I thought about giving birth again and felt elated. I thought about giving birth again and felt dread.
But somehow the days passed. I started sensing the human inside me, their curiosity, their generosity. I started feeling movement. We told the kids (Jo shrieked and cheered, an elation she’d maintain for the next 29 weeks; Ilan after a few moments of excitement, wept a bit, saying “it’s just been the five of us for so long;” Wren stared at me with consternation, as if I were the teenager and she my mother, then gave me the silent treatment for the rest of the night, something she’d never done. before and hasn’t since, and which caused me to weep bitterly for hours). We told my family. I told the internet. My stomach grew. I anticipated and hoped desperately for relief from the nausea but remained nauseated. I jumped off floating docks into cold lakes and the baby jumped with me; I could feel them bounce, every time I hit the water, effervescent and eager. I tried to write, couldn’t find the words. I tried to get off nausea meds, got worse, went on them again, over and over again. Again I attended births: easy births and hard births, home births, and hospital transfers. Summer turned to Fall and Fall turned to Winter. Andy, now a tenured professor, got laid off along with 30% of the faculty at his university, and I cried for hours until I fell asleep at 10pm, then woke up at 4am and without missing a beat immediately cried some more. I took pictures, naked and round and ripe and brown, in the cold white snow. Our pipes, exposed thanks to a stalled renovation next door, burst in a cold snap. I nested, furiously. Over the holes in the wall where the pipes had burst we pasted wallpaper with tigers that reminded me of Pakistan. I prepared drinks for labor and cinnamon cardamom rolls for birthday mornings. My other babies had been born in the 38th and 39th weeks and each day that I accomplished more tasks felt like a gift; I was in a race with my body, and somehow, miraculously, I was winning.
Until I awoke, 40 weeks and 3 days pregnant, in a white hot rage.
Thanks for every pieces of your story, slowly and poetically patchworked together, seams visible and invisible. What a landscape. Thank you for the realities and the dreams shared so generously with us.