The wild and wondrous birth of Hanif Insaaf, Chapter 5

In which she is soothed by the ocean and deeply riveted by nachos

You’re reading the fifth chapter of a 7 chapter story. Missed a chapter? Find them here, here, here, and here.

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I knew my rage was absurd, that morning.  But I could not shake it.  I was bitter, resentful that I was in a story seemingly so uninterpretable, so unpredictable, so unreliable; a story that felt like it defied everything I thought I knew about my body.  I was more pregnant than I had ever been; I had had numerous signs that had always resulted in labor in prior pregnancies; my water was potentially even broken; and yet I was not in labor. I felt betrayed by myself, and though I knew this did not make sense, though I knew there is no value in laboring early or fast like I had before, felt a perplexing sense of shame that my body had failed to live up to those standards I had come to rely on.

“What would you tell your clients?” Mary Catherine asked.

“I don’t want to fucking midwife myself” I texted back, petulantly. I did not want to think about who I would be for my clients.  I had zero interest in being that person. I did not want to be calm and reasonable, a source of reassuring data, a steady voice of trust and faith. I had been telling myself for days that I knew it would not matter, that I would not care if the baby came by 38+4 or 39+4 like my other babies or at 40+4 or at 41+4 or at 42+4, or any time at all, once I was on the other side. But now I was done telling myself comforting things. I did not want to assure myself that there was a story here I would make sense of and in fact probably even love at some point; I did not want to learn any lessons about my own humanity. I did not want to recall any of the beautiful writing I had ever posted on the fucking internet. I did not want to rationally remind myself of the overwhelming likelihood everything would be fine.  I did not want to tell myself it would be fine, and I sure as hell did not want anyone else to tell me that either.

I wanted to have a full-on toddler-style meltdown, to scream and cry and throw things. The rage didn’t make sense, wasn’t what I would expect from myself. And also? I did not give a fuck. I wanted to be petulant and enraged.

I got up and threw the cinnamon-cardamom rolls in the oven: fuck it, we are eating these fuckers today, I thought. Despite feeling completely committed to my anger, I could not help myself: I looked to see if one of my favorite fitness instructors was teaching a class at noon, then asked Andy if we should do something as a family like a hike or a visit to the beach, my impulse to not wallow more reflexive than my internal tantrum. Andy asked the kids whether they would rather go for a hike or to the beach.  All three unilaterally voted for the beach, and I knew it was because they didn’t want to walk the length of a hike, which annoyed me. Wren took her time waking up, and so the four of us ate the rolls and eggs without her, which annoyed me. Andy kept disappearing into his office rather than getting us moving toward the beach, which annoyed me (even though I was doing nothing to get us moving either).

Getting ready for the beach. Stay tuned to find out if this would be my last belly pic.

Eventually we made it out to the car and headed toward Riis beach, choosing a song to listen to in age order (“playing DJ,” we always call it). The sky, which had been cheerful and sunny this morning as I laid stewing in my bed, was now gray. Everything felt angular and harsh in the afternoon light. I listened to the kids sing along to the music, but could not motivate myself to join them.

The parking lot at Riis was nearly empty and as I stepped out of the car I was annoyed, predictably, to discover that I already had to pee. I looked ahead out onto the horizon. A few people walked the shoreline with their dogs running ahead; three teens, bundled up, took selfies on the boardwalk; a lone woman with long blond hair meandered barefoot on the sand.  The sea and the sky were virtually the same color.  We began walking toward Ft. Tilden. Jo, with her wooden dagger, and Illy, with a wooden sword, scrambled up a pile of sand and posed.  Wren pranced ahead, earphones in her ears. Andy poked at some bright green seaweed that looked like kale.  We continued this way, the five of us little planets orbiting each other, none of us really interacting: Jo drawing in the sand, Illy laying down on it, Wren looping back to report that she was cold before prancing away again. I wondered if any of the bathrooms would be open and fretted over the fact that even being at the beach was doing little to pull me out of my sulk.

Eventually we did find an open bathroom, and after using it, I sat down on a rock, waiting for Andy to return from yet another jetty he had walked down.  When he did, I asked him to help me “dogfight” (our manner of describing getting my swollen feet in and out of shoes) and he agreed, pulling off my boots and handing them to me, then peeling off my long woolen socks and sticking them in his own pockets. I dug my toes into the wet sand, which felt less cold than I expected.

The kids scampered over to us, asking to go to the playground. We nodded.  “We’ll meet you there when we’re ready to go,” we told them, and they ran ahead. We ambled slowly behind.  I waded into the water, giggled at the iciness of it.  We walked some more.

I looked ahead, saw two women taking pictures of their baby in the sand; looked to the side, saw a man and women throwing crumbs out to the seagulls; I looked out at the waves and saw myself, pre pregnancy, the version of me who would swim in this same January ocean, my veins popping out green and blue against my skin like some sort of sea creature.  I felt very far away from that self, a sea of nausea and sedating nausea meds and bad news between us on one side, and who knows what on the other.

I wanted to be that Robina. Really, I wanted to be any version of Robina other than the one I was right then.  In truth, in some ways I had been fighting who I was the entire pregnancy.  I did not want to be the version of myself who would get a positive pregnancy test and not be excited. I did not want to be the version of myself who was endlessly nauseated and anhedonic because of nausea meds. But most importantly, I did not want to be the version of me who had seen the darker side of birth, who had had to reckon with all the ways it could go. I did not want to be the me who knew what it was to watch a baby born too soon shudder with its last breath or to stare into the eyes of a woman about to pass out from blood loss and see in her pupils the veil between life and death – but I also did not want to be the me who understood that there was a whole range of experiences between my glorious, straightforward births and traumas like those. That there were long mindfucks of births and births with endless vomiting and births with babies who could not tolerate them even if we couldn’t figure out why; births where babies would not descend no matter how much we believed they could and gave them the time to; births that wouldn’t make families but separate them; births where danger signs appeared and gave us all gray hairs but the babies came out screaming; births with no danger signs but babies who came out not okay; births with long, exhausting recoveries or horrible lacerations.

I wanted to be the version of me who did not know any of that.

So I had gone this entire pregnancy judging my worth as a pregnant person by how successfully I embodied the blithe 27, 30, and 33 year old pregnant person I had been before, the pregnant person who not only had utmost faith in my ability to birth, but who had birthed easily and joyfully, who had recovered easily and joyfully, and who had parented – wonder of wonder – more easily and more joyfully than she had ever dreamed.  I did need to compare myself to anyone else but myself: I was my own ideal.

The trick about being your own ideal is there’s the illusion that it must be an attainable ideal, because it was you, after all.  

All I needed to do was to ignore the entire 10 years of experience I had in the meantime.  All I had to do was deny the person I’d become over the course of an entire decade.

For most of the pregnancy, I did.  I brushed off even the slightest hints of doubt. “I don’t feel like midwife Robina,” I journaled once. “I just feel like Robina, pregnant.”

As if I could deny all the stories my body held. My rage now was my own body revolting at all I had refused to face, rearing up, fangs bared. I was angry at myself for denying my whole self, for refusing to engage in the truths of what I had seen and how they had changed me. Because I wasn’t actually afraid of unlikely scenarios happening, blood loss or a shoulder dystocia or even a baby who died, not really. What I was mostly afraid of was not living up to my own expectations. That birth would bring me to the very barest essence of myself, and this time, I wouldn’t love what I found there.

I stared out into the ocean and suddenly the storm inside me translated into an outpouring of words: words about risk tolerance, words about me mattering as much as a healthy baby, words about decisions I would make about scenarios I wasn’t even really afraid of.  Andy looked at me quizzically.

He said, “I know all of this. But none of it is going to happen anyway. I’m not worried. You’re not worried, right? You’re just going to have a baby eventually.”

“I know,” I replied. “I don’t know where all this is coming from.”

Andy shrugged, and I took it to mean You don’t have to know why, and that was enough for me.

Maybe it was the words. Maybe it was the ocean. But I felt a little better.

We met up with the kids, who walked back to the parking lot balancing on the fence between beach and boardwalk. The light was now dusky and so was I: my insides no longer sharp angles and cold wind but soft borders and hazy warmth.  We drove home, the five of us belting along to the Backstreet Boys’ “I want it that way.” Andy complimented my ability to hold a note. We passed a bag of pretzels back and forth because everyone was hungry and I was, of course, nauseous. I had a single, long, painful contraction, which I breathed and giggled and squirmed my way through. “Wouldn’t it be funny if after all this trying to time labor so I don’t scare you guys I just gave birth in the car on the Belt Parkway right now?” I asked the kids.

“Please don’t,” Wren said drolly.

I turned and looked at her. “I need more than one contraction to have a baby.”

“We know,” all three responded in unison.

I laughed, then grew quiet, nibbling on another unsatisfying pretzel thoughtfully. Finally I looked up at Andy. “Really though, I think we should figure out a sleepover for these kids some night soon, or I may never have this baby.”

“Makes sense,” he said.

And then I suggested we go out on a dinner date when we got home, just him and I.  We began to discuss where we could go, a conversation we continued as we entered the house. Andy called one of my favorites, Olea, to see if they still had outdoor seating.  I sat on the couch and sent him a few menus of other places that I knew that still did. He went down to his office while on hold, though I’m not sure why, and didn’t reappear immediately. I texted with my friend Angelica a little bit, about Kerrygold butter and waffle makers and feeling like I would never go into labor with my kids around. I tucked my feet under me, put my head down.

And then I fell asleep. The nap wasn’t long, about 35 minutes.  But when I awoke the lightness I had felt after the beach had been replaced by nausea and dread again.  Andy was still downstairs, and I texted him: “I’m so nauseated again.  I just have no will to live lol.”¹ 

“Oh I thought you were feeling a little better,” he texted back.

“I did until I fell asleep,” I responded.  “Now I feel anxious and uncomfortable and nauseated.”

He offered to make me something to eat, but I didn’t respond; it seemed ridiculous to pregame a dinner date with food.  I looked out into the dark yard, considered how many layers I would need to eat outside.  It was now 6:45pm.  I sighed, stood up, and walked to the bathroom, where I proceeded to have a contraction around the same intensity as the one in the car nearly two hours prior. I held onto the sink and stared down into it. What the actual fuck, I thought.  This is so fucking annoying.

When it was over, I peed, washed my hands, and put my hand on the doorknob to leave for a moment before needing to grab the sink again: another. I considered myself in the mirror, was reminded of how in Josie’s birth my first few contractions had happened in the exact same place, at the bathroom sink, literally the minute Wren and Ilan had left for my sister’s so I could (ostensibly) take a nap. How I had also looked at myself in the mirror, how I had put on deodorant - one armpit, pause for a contraction, the other, another contraction – and briefly considered mascara. Once those contractions had started, they hadn’t ceased until I held my baby in arms 3.5 hours later.  I knew, instinctively, this was not that. But still:

“I just had two back to back really hard contractions,” I texted Andy as I walked back to the bedroom to get dressed.

He texted back to say that evening seemed to be when I started having labor signs; that it was around this time yesterday that I had hid from the teenage boys in the shower, this time on Tuesday I had experienced some intestinal “clearing out” followed by some painless contractions that were nonetheless both clearly palpable and visible, and in a manic burst of energy rolled out cinnamon-cardamom rolls at 10:30pm.  I was getting tired of 7pm fakeouts.

We strategized that I’d get into the shower, where they would surely wane enough for us to go on our date.

As with the night before, in the shower the contractions initially became more rhythmic. I asked Andy to bring in a speaker so I could listen to music, then asked him if he could tell what the spacing between contractions was. I talked him through deleting the archive on my phone’s contraction timer, casually asking him what date they were from, though I could not, at the moment, do the math, remember whose contractions in October I had been timing. The idea of me sitting at someone’s feet and hitting a contraction timer button on a screen seemed remote. Though my own contractions weren’t terribly painful, they were, as it turns out, coming like clockwork every 2 minutes and lasting for 40 seconds each. With each I’d turn away from the showerhead and lean over to press my hands onto the cool tile at the back of the bathtub before returning to whatever song I was singing along to.  I wasn’t committed to labor, was convinced that this was just some new trial my body had concocted in order for me to deserve the right to go out on a date. I stayed skeptical, lucid.

But when Florence and the Machine’s “Free” came on my eyes welled up and my voice trembled as I sang along to the line “Is this how it’s always been / to exist in the face of suffering and death / and somehow / still keep singing?” I caught Andy’s eye, who was peering at me through a crack in the shower curtain, and smiled sheepishly, caught off guard by the tears. I felt little, vulnerable.  It was a line that had always resonated with me; it was, after all, what I was good at. Keeping going. Weaving words out of trauma and terror. And what was being a midwife, after all, but an exercise in keeping faith for people when they themselves felt at the limits of their capacity for faith?

I myself didn’t have faith, currently. I wasn’t laboring, I was sure of it. But I wanted to be laboring. But I also didn’t really want to ever have to labor, to be reduced to my most essential self, to meet the absolute limits of my capacity. But I also really wanted to meet my baby.

Basically, I was all up in my feels. So I cried to Florence & The Machine in the shower. As one does.

But the longer I stayed there, the longer the spaces between the contractions grew, and, as with the night before, after about 45 minutes they waned completely.  Fuck this, I thought, or maybe said aloud. 

I shut off the water, marched to the bedroom, put on lounge clothes.  Josie followed me in and asked if she could rub my feet with my magnesium cream, as she had been throughout the pregnancy. “Sure,” I said, as cheerfully as I could muster. I smiled at her, then at Andy as he snapped pictures of us, but I was deep in my own thoughts about how I could possibly summon the resilience necessary to “keep” being faked out. I was simultaneously irritated by own lack of perspective: how many times had I anticipatorily counseled clients, especially clients who had more than one baby, about how common practice labor is; how many people had I reassured about days and days or even a week of contractions before labor actually started? Meanwhile, I had had 2 short episodes of nearly painless contractions: so what? Why was I being such a baby. At some point Jo stopped massaging my feet.  At some point Andy told Wren he was going to order nachos for dinner and could she pick them up? At some point Wren came in in to ask if they could get Jarritos with their nachos. At another Andy went out to hand her cash. I barely paid attention.

Maxing and relaxing at Jo’s spa.

When Wren did return from picking up the nachos, Andy asked if I wanted some.  Some part of my mind still thought we might get dinner, somehow, but suddenly I was ravenous and I nodded my head. He brought a tiny portion in a bowl and I shoveled the chips into my mouth, the salty, greasy cheese and beans a revelation.  I wandered into the kitchen where the kids were eating at the table.  “I want more,” I told Andy, “but I don’t want to eat the kids’ dinner.”

“Oh, I bought enough for us,” he said.

“I guess we’re not going out, then,” I said.

“No, I don’t think so,” he said, looking at me dubiously.

“Oh,” I said, looking down at the foil pans. It’s not great labor food, I thought, but I’m not in labor anyway.

So I ate, standing over the table, directly out of the foil pans. I think I chatted with the kids a little, though not much: they were all on screens, with earphones in, possibly because we had prepped them for being alone this evening, or possibly because Andy had told them to be so he could tend to me? The fact that I didn’t register this nor think to ask about it, in retrospect, probably shows why Andy knew I was probably going to have a baby before I did.  Though I hadn’t been having many noticeable contractions since getting out of the shower, the fact that I did not question that my children were on screens at the dinner table was a sign I was on a different planet.

A planet where I was deeply, deeply riveted by nachos.

Until, suddenly, I wasn’t.

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Continue to Chapter 6 here.

1. This is the text verbatim. Why I said I had “no will to live” and then followed it by “lol” is anybody’s guess.