The wild and wondrous birth of Hanif Insaaf, concluded

In which we become six

I said I wanted to return to the bathtub. It seemed ironic that the one labor where we hadn’t set up a birth pool – “it smells too much like work,” I had joked, when people asked if I would have one – was the one where I would spend the most time in water, but that’s birth for you, and I knew what I needed.

At first the contractions continued to pummel me, brutal and harsh.  I got into hands and knees and stared at my shadow on the shiny white wall of the tub – the spirals of hair I had neglected to braid or put up, the circles of the earrings I had neglected to take off – and the beads of water between them. The music had continued playing in the bedroom and I could hear wisps of it, like a strange echo calling me back to some version of myself.

This doesn’t have to hurt, I thought, a laughably absurd thought, and not quite what I believed or meant but something that comforted me, smoothed out the harsh edges of the contractions nonetheless.

Spirals, circles, beads.

Each one will end, I reminded myself.

Soft voices singing like a strange echo calling me back to some version of myself.

This labor is what it is.

My lashes, blinking, slowly, my mouth tasting the salt and gingery sweetness of the labor aide I had been so excited to make just a few days ago. Me. That had been me.

Those bangs tho. All photos besides the last on this post courtesy of Katherine Marivelle Photography.

I thought of a friend who had written, after she had her sixth child, “I gave [birth] one last go and she had her way with me.”

I thought of the last birth I had attended pregnant, how my client had wondered aloud about what was happening, had wondered why the baby hadn’t yet been born, how she'd asked if she was doing anything wrong. How I had said, firmly. No. No. You are doing everything right. Everything is perfect.  How, later, as we sat on the dark bathroom floor together, her arms holding the son she had borne, her back leaning into the belly where I held my unborn child, everything was.  

We could have been two women anywhere in time, together in birth, but we were us.