What am I afraid of?

I don’t know what inspired me to start asking it. I don’t even know how I came to the understanding that fear or anxiety were often the primary emotion driving my most intense moments of frustration. Almost certainly it was some lightbulb moment of connection that happened either while reading or in the wake of reading one of the countless books I read as a new parent, singularly compelled by a desperation to do right by my children.1 But whether it was one specific book or just the conversations in my head engendered by many of them I can’t say; it was too long ago now. Regardless, it became a foundational question I would repeat and return to each time I began to feel that slow creep of irritated heat climb up my chest, threatening to boil over into my head and spill out of my mouth. Of course I wasn’t able to remember do this in every situation, all the time. But if I could do it — if I could somehow remember to wade through that hot sea of frustration and grasp for those words, which most of the time I could—2 they often immediately served as a cool sea breeze that would settle the heat.

What am I afraid of?

The question, for whatever reason, took me out of irritation and into curiosity. It served as a reminder to stop, to think, to reconnect with myself and assess the situation at hand. Occasionally, my brain would stamp its proverbial foot and petulantly declare I’m not afraid of anything! and then I’d know that whatever was happening was more about my own inner child than my actual children, that I needed to take a second and tend to her.

But often I could identify that I was in fact parenting from a place of fear, and that usually the type of fear could be distilled to a variation of one of following two themes:

1. Fear of others’ judgement;

2. Fear that something happening in that moment would reflect, define, or predict something negative about my child’s future.

In truth, most of my least proud parenting moments happened because of fear number one; when I think back at all the times I caved into authoritarian parenting,3 all the times I felt least authentic and least in integrity in my parenting, it was usually because of worry of what other people thought of my parenting. I could probably write an entire article about fearing judgement in parenting, the way shame, when left unchecked, can become a powerful force in our relationships with our children, and maybe I will someday. But for now I want to focus on fear number 2:

THE FUTURE.

In the late stage capitalist world in which most of us are parenting — and by “most of us” I mean my readership, the vast majority of whom I understand to be reading from within the imperial core — THE FUTURE is assumed to be the primary motivator in parenting. In fact, it’s the whole point, right? We are bombarded, constantly, by messages that tell us our purpose as parents is to produce successful adults. Implicit in the words we use to describe parenting — “raising children;” “childrearing;” “upbringing” — is an orientation toward the future, the idea that parenting is a linearly progressing endeavor toward a specific end goal. And we are told that every choice we make - from how our babies sleep to what schools our kids attend to how we “discipline” our teens - should be made with an eye toward that end goal. Everything we do is an investment in how successful they are once they’re grown.

This messaging, of course, relies on a tactic assumption that the whole purpose of being a child is to be raised into an adult. But this linear conceptualization of life is neither universal nor accurate, and, like so much of what we’ve naturalized and internalized, is instead a construction borne of the toxic interplay between colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. When we look at pre-colonial and indigenous understandings of the lifespan and child development, though, the conceptualizations of childhood is very different.

Take, for example, the Maori. The word for children in Maori is tamariki, a word derived from tama-te-ra, the central sun, the divine spark. In Maori cosmology, tamariki are the “physical manifestation of aeons and aeons of ancestors, and embody the achievements of those who have gone before them,”4 a sort of “repository of the combined strengths, knowledge and abilities, of their ancestors: taonga or treasured gifts.”5 In this understanding, children are not just representative of the future, not just worthwhile because of who they might become in the future, but a throughline between past and future from which adults are expected to learn from as much as they teach.

And this understanding is actually a commonality the Maori share with many other indigenous cultures. The Indigenous Connectedness Framework, developed in 2019 by Dr. Jessica Sangiq Ullrich (a tribal citizen of the Nome Eskimo community in Alaska) and based on a review of the literature regarding conceptualizations of child development and well‐being among Indigenous peoples across the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand foundationally puts children at the center or “heart,” of indigenous societies, the link between family, community, generations, spirit, and land.6 For the majority of these cultures, childhood is understood a complete state of being unto itself rather than a stepping stone or less developed version of humanity than adulthood, and children are seen as “bringers of light”7 with “status, responsibility, and respect”8 rather than adults in training waiting to be molded. Meanwhile, Dr. Stacey Patton, who has done beautiful work disrupting the idea that spanking and other corporal punishment is a “distinctly Black [American] tradition,” writes that pre-colonial “West Africans believed that children came from the afterlife, that they were gods or reincarnated ancestors who led profoundly spiritual lives and held extraordinary mystical powers that could be harnessed through ritual practice for the good of the community.” In other words, there’s good evidence that indigenous and pre-colonial ways of knowing oriented not toward hierarchal understandings of the relationship between adults and children, but mutuality and reciprocal knowledge exchange, an understanding that children are not just adults-in-training but one of the many valuable and valued ways to be a human in the world, with insights and strengths unique to that time.

So while Western culture may have convinced us that it is natural to think of children as individual products that individual parents optimize into fully formed and productive adulthood, we need only look toward these indigenous and pre-colonial ways of knowing to understand that worldview is not a reflection of objective truth, but a cultural construction. And not only has it been constructed by a culture, but this narrative also helps to construct and reproduce a culture. It does cultural work. We haven’t internalized an industrial capitalist obsession on product rather than process, on linearity rather than cyclicality, because it’s somehow the objectively correct way to approach the world, but because instilling the belief in people that it’s the objectively correct way to approach the world is a project that has been very, very successful at at consolidating power and resources among a small segment of the population. And one need only look at the foundations of Western conceptions of childhood to see how they parallel and buttress the needs and desires of that small segment of the population. The earliest understandings in Western culture of childhood as a distinct stage are inextricably woven in with narratives of colonial capitalism, from John Locke’s “tabula rasa” — the idea that children are born blank slates and must be shaped, primarily by their parents, an idea that is structurally parallel to his ideas that “uncultivated” native lands simply awaited European development — to the early twentieth century evolution of “developmental psychologists” like Luther Emmett Holt and John Watson, whose theories of childhood reflected the mechanization and optimization of industrialization. These latter theorists, who promoted what they argued was a “scientific” approach to parenting called behaviorism, emphasized rules, discipline, order, and rigid routine. By following strict protocols, many of which were explicitly modeled on the procedures and routines of the hospital, factory, and farm, Holt and Watson argued that parents could “produce” a child “who finally enters manhood so bulwarked with stable work and emotional habits that no adversity can quite overwhelm him.”9 The goal was, of course, to get children to that independent future where they would conform to “polite society” as quickly as possible. Too much affection — and specifically too much “mother love” — was on the other hand a “dangerous instrument,” one that might “ wreck your adult son or daughter’s vocational future and their chances for marital happiness.”

It is not surprising that the mechanization of parenting proliferated during the Fordist/Taylorist10 era of increased mechanization; it is not surprising that feminine energy and affection was becoming maligned during a time of women’s suffrage; it is not surprising that so-called experts sold middle- and upper-class white parents “rational” paradigms and practices to distinguish themselves from traditional, global-majority parenting practices at precisely the time when so many feared that Anglo-Saxon supremacy in the United States was being threatened by increased immigration and the abolition of slavery. Of course parenting has been of especial interest to the ruling classes; as Rupa Marya and Raj Patel write in the masterwork Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, colonialism is

the invasion but also the subtle centuries-long dynamics of normalizing restructured relationships of power. In order to create a new normal, you need to control how society is reproduced. This is why colonialists have always held a deep concern for the institutions of that shape the consciousness and behavior of colonial subjects: the school, the jail, the hospital, the workplace, and the household.

But the fact that colonial capitalist ideals have so infected our understandings of childhood remains invisible — even, often, to those who consider themselves leftists, or abolitionists, or Marxists, or anti-imperialists, those who otherwise find themselves adept at deconstructing white supremacy and capitalism in other domains — precisely because children are the most marginalized members of our society. It hasn’t been widespread to wonder where the idea that parenting is a fundamentally hierarchal endeavor where one “raises” a child into adulthood came from because we have so naturalized the idea that adulthood is center.

And this is why I always say the quickest way to start embodying decolonial ideals is to start rethinking your relationship to children.

Adulthood is not objectively “the end product” of childhood— because, after all, does adulthood end? Is there a monolith of adulthood, an age where we are fully formed and stop learning and growing? Obviously not. It is an ever-evolving process. We are all always growing and learning; this isn’t specific to childhood. And part of how many of us evolve, how we learn and grow is through our relationship with children. Children teach us just as much about what it means to be human as we teach them. Childhood can be understood, then, as valuable as it is and not as preparation for anything else.

Children aren’t products; they’re people.

So what if we parented our children as they are now, to validate their humanity and needs now rather than in service of the future?

What if we gave ourselves permission to be in relationship with them as they are rather than struggling to find the right recipe to create who we think they should be in the future?

What if we trusted that our children would become loving, respectful, helpful members of our communities in the future because we trusted ourselves to serve as potent models of how to be loving, respectful, helpful members of our communities — and we included them in those communities — in the present?

What if we let parenting become a journey of discovery rather than a performance of expertise?

Look, I’m not arguing that it’s possible to completely divest from thinking about our children’s futures. I named this piece “Against future-oriented parenting” because it’s short and snappy and because in this attention economy short and snappy is compelling, but I’m also not denying that many of my parenting choices have been and are continued to be made with an eye toward the long game. Obviously even in indigenous and pre-colonial communities that value childhood not as preparation for adulthood but as its own worthwhile and spiritual phase of existence, children are seen as members of a community and, as such, are prepared to be members of community throughout all of those worthwhile and spiritual phases of existence. What I’m instead encouraging us to divest from is the idea that all the choices we make in the present should be overdetermined by a fear that we are not setting up our children for an optimal future. That if we don’t sleep train them now, they will never sleep. That if they are not reading by age 5, they will be “behind.” That if we go to a playdate and they spend more time in our laps than playing with friends, it means they will be antisocial or never gain independence. That if they don’t do enough “enrichment” activities they won’t be able to get into a good college, and if they don’t get into a good college, they won’t have a chance at a financially secure adulthood. I’m encouraging us to critically engage with the ways this kind of thinking serves a colonial capitalist machine more than it does us or are children. Because the truth is, we actually never know what’s coming next, anyway. Everything — the world, our children, and us — are changing all the time, in ways we cannot always predict. And our constantly trying to optimize toward one assumed goal is often impeding us from seeing all the possibilities that could transcend it. Seeing parenting as a sort of world building for the future prevents us from understanding that we are building the world through our parenting right now.

Rooting our parenting in the present shifts us from paradigms of optimization and fear toward one of acceptance and trust. It relinquishes the illusion of control we have over who our children will be and anchors us in appreciation and curiosity for who they are. Paradoxically, it is precisely this kind of presence that promotes strong, secure relationships — and not just with our children, but with ourselves. By leaning into the idea that we can respond to our children as they are and understand what they need in the present, we are not just validating and nurturing them, but we are building our sense of trust in ourselves. It reclaims our sense of what we know to be true from those who would evaluate and advise and train us out of it, both in parenting and our lives at large. Trusting ourselves is radical. Trusting ourselves and our children is revolutionary.

In other words, we don’t have to explicitly parent toward the future to powerfully invest in the future.

Future-oriented parenting is a construct of a capitalist paradigm that fetishizes mastery and hierarchy (ie ambition, status, wealth, competition, etc) above all. Nurturing children responsively, being in relationship with them as they are now, is an act of resistance against those forces.

And THAT is the best true hope for our collective futures.

In love and solidarity,

Robina

Speaking of inner children, at the start of the year one of my intentions was to continue making monthly playlists like I did in 2025, because in that year I had discovered that the practice was potent inner child work for me. Alas, 2026 has thrown too many disruptions my way to have held fast to that intention in the first half of the year, but I did spend some time making a July playlist, and if you’d like to hear it, it’s here:

And on another note to you, dear reader, I have endeavored to keep most of my writing free (at least for large swaths of time, though some do eventually convert to paid) so as to remain accessible to the widest readership, but my family does in fact rely on and deeply appreciate those of you who still choose to sustain me in doing this work, especially now more than ever as the Trump administration’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill has further emboldened insurance companies to deny coverage for my midwifery clients. My practice is currently 65% sliding scale to make up for the new insurance denials, which has meant a huge loss of income for my family for the same amount of work. Your subscriptions actually really does matter to us, perhaps more than you know! If it is within your means, you can upgrade your subscription now:

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And if you can’t afford to become a paid subscriber, but want to show your appreciation with a one-time or monthly subscription of a different amount, you can also “buy me a coffee” here.

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As I progressed through teenage- and young adult- hood, reading remained a necessity not mainly for my own survival but because it was required by forces outside of me: for high school, for college (where I majored in English), then for a PhD (which was also technically in English, but only in its broadest and most interdisciplinary form). It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the books that were assigned or which I assigned myself, whether for homework or research or grad school applications or exams or teaching; many of them I enjoyed very much. But they nonetheless very much represented work. I never stopped picking up books “for fun” here or there, while traveling or during school breaks, or to read slowly in between the books I had to read, but these were the anomaly. I didn’t make it a regular practice, not really, of reading just for me. Of reading just because I wanted to, with no other agenda.

I don’t know what it was about giving birth to my first daughter, Wrenna, that made me start to read strictly for pleasure again. Or maybe that’s not true. Maybe I do know. Maybe from my vantage point now, almost 19 years later, I can tell you that something in me immediately and instinctively knew that parenting was going to be reparenting, that caring for this small, new human would create the context for me to care for and connect with and heal the small human I had once been, and that because that small human I once was had found reading to be such a comfort and joy I would also reclaim that joy now. At the time, though, the idea just washed over me, and I let it: I would, I decided in that first week of Wrenna’s life, pick up a book I wanted to read every time she needed to nurse. A week in, I had no idea how much time nursing would represent, but I figured it’d probably be a decent amount of hours.

Reader, in the first year of Wren’s life, I read sixty-five books. That is how much a newborn nurses.1

Social media was still fairly nascent in this stage — I had been on MySpace and was still vaguely on Facebook, but they weren’t terribly compelling — and I did not yet even have an iPhone. The first time I even saw one was when the backup midwife who attended Wren’s birth took one out of her pocket, and I wouldn’t get one myself until after Josie’s birth five and a half years later. So my options, it seemed, were binge watch Netflix (which had only just started streaming 11 months before Wren was born!) while nursing or try to do work on my laptop while nursing (a task which I had attempted — having no maternity leave, as a grad student with a fellowship — just four days after her birth and quickly realized would be extremely frustrating, logistically if not emotionally2).

Because GoodReads had launched, like Netflix streaming, the same year Wren was born I pretty quickly found myself a perfect way to track this project of reading for pleasure. By the time they launched their reading challenge in 2011, I was two kids deep into my “reading every time I nurse” practice, and I readily accepted. I had in the 3 years that I’d been tracking read anywhere between 233 and 65 books, so I did the ambitious and obvious thing, which was challenge myself to read 52. I did not read 52. I did however read 42, which in retrospect actually seems incredible given I also did complete my PhD, start midwifery school prerequisites, and work feverishly on Occupy Wall Street that year.

Despite my initial failure, I have done a reading challenge every year since, though in 2025 I switched from tracking on GoodReads to Storygraph as part of my longstanding Amazon boycott.4 I don’t know if it’s the ego-driven elements of my Leo sun, the intellectualizing and strategizing of my Aquarius moon, or the pragmatic and small-joy-driven qualities of my Taurus rising, but I very quickly realized in order to make the reading challenge even remotely interesting to me it also needed to be thoroughly attainable. So since 2011 I have set my goal as one more book than I’ve read the year before, a tactic I highly recommend if you are looking to set a goal that is both realistic but not guaranteed (as evidence by the fact that I reach it about 75% of the time).

There are a few reasons why I like tracking my reads. I needn’t belabor most of them here.5 But one of those reasons is that, simply, I find the books I have read to be such a beautiful map of each year, and in the accumulation of multiple years, of who I have been over time. Oh right, I did read several books of the Twilight series in Wren’s first year, so enamored was I of what it meant to read not as an intellectual pursuit but just because it was fun, again. Of course I read endless (and mostly poorly written) midwifery memoirs in 2011, when I was enrolled in the most dreadfully boring prerequisites and was trying to keep the faith that someday I would find my way to what I saw then as my spiritual calling. And of course those midwifery memoirs were accompanied by many books on homeschooling, because that was the year we officially decided we were not enrolling Wren in public pre-K. And it makes sense that it was 2018 that I laughed out loud listening to David Sedaris’ Calypso and cried listening to Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things while in the car because it was my first year of midwifery practice and I still did all home visits, so I was always in the car listening to audio books. And, oh look at all those comfort books I read next to a lake all summer, the summer I had taken off thinking I would write a book of my own but instead spent debilitated and nauseated, on my 2022 list, all those Clementine books I delightedly giggled over with Josie after having giggled over them with Wren seven years earlier, the book about freediving I read aloud to Ilan6 while the baby we didn’t yet know as Hanif flipped and flopped inside me in his own little sea?

In so many ways, I’m an archivist at heart, and reading lists are an archive, an archaeology of who I’ve been.

Earlier this year, I started posting book recs monthly on Instagram, since people are often asking me for them and many had commented that they always wait for my end of year wrap-up to screen shot and take notes from. But I only made it to March, I think, before our world fell apart. When I considered returning to social media generally, and getting back into the habit of sharing books in my stories specifically, I started thinking about all the books I’ve read this year, and how many in the Spring have been about grief. And then I started thinking about the books I had been reading just before we got the news about Taylor, how many of them feel like they were read by a different person entirely, and how — because these kinds of traumas create such a tangible “before” and “after” in one’s understanding of self— the reality of my reading list as archaeology feels very present this year. So I thought I’d take you on a little journey of my reading life in this first half of 2026.7 (But if you’d instead like to read my more traditional reviews, in more of a traditional list order, you can jump over to my storygraph challenge for 2026.)

I very intentionally strategized my first read of 2026. I hadn’t heard that Charlotte McConaghy had come out with a new novel until the middle of 2025, but when I did — despite her being one of my favorite contemporary authors — I knew I was going to have to wait to read it. McConaghy’s books read distinctly wintery to me; they’re not the kind of book you consume squinting out from under a sun hat while you sit on a beach chair and watch your child pour water out of a pail into the sand. They are the kind of books you read from under a blanket, ideally in the dark by booklight while the house is hushed and time seems meaningless, and that’s exactly how I read Wild Dark Shore (5 stars). The me who read this book stayed up late to devour it in two nights, weeping over its devastation and tenderness while the wind howled through the many windows of my bedroom. It was the perfect January read, when I so feel the introspection and interiority of winter but also feel a pull toward imagination because I am so enlivened by the fresh start of a new year.

Overall, that somehow both introspective and enlivened January Robina read a total of 8 books. My nursing-Hanif-to-bed reads included The Names (3 stars; an interesting premise whose execution fell very flat for me) and The Knockout Queen (3.5 stars; picked up because I adored Margo’s Got Money Troubles but overall a kind of unpleasant read with characters toward whom I felt no connection). I read The Knockout Queen once my late December client gave birth, much later than she ever had in any of her many previous births with me, and we finally escaped to Vermont for a much shorter vacation than we had originally hoped, so my memories of that one are often by firelight. The January books I read for my middle school and high school lit classes, meanwhile, were Bye Forever I Guess (3 stars; sweet but entirely predictable, though many of the younger kids in that class really loved it) and The Left Hand of Darkness (3 stars; a great book to read in January given that it takes place on a planet called Winter but LeGuin, while undeniably a foundational speculative fiction author who tackles interesting and important questions, has never been one of my favorites). I also re-read The Book Thief (5 stars) for middle grade lit, which I hadn’t returned to since 2016 me read it and wrote reading _the book thief_ was a return to my childhood, in some ways, because it allowed me to live inside its world in a way i have not with many novels as an adult. Yes, 2016 me still had an affected writing style that involved using a lower case “i” to refer to herself. The version of me I am now, or was in winter at least, set up an activity based on the introduction to that book that involved the students using color to depict emotion and then guessing which emotion their peers had illustrated, and my chest had filled up with a delighted spark when the activity landed well, the same kind of spark it felt when it recognized my daughter Josie’s enthusiasm for the book as a mirror to so much of my own when I first read it.

January me also listened to two audio books, mainly because we were beginning renovations of our house and what that meant was I had a lot of closets to empty and organize and merge. I listened to The Wedding People (3.25 stars; I’m not much interested in rich white New Englanders) while sorting through seemingly endless bags of children’s clothing in various sizes. The second audio book, The Road to Tender Hearts (4.5 stars) was near perfect. I loved this book and its characters with its whole heart, something I sometimes think about now because most of them had experienced absolutely devastating losses, and yet at the time my appreciation of this fact was about as superficial and theoretical as it could have been.

I wrote of February’s audio book, The Change (4.0), “It’s just really hard not to love a story of menopause bringing superpowers and pdfiles getting what’s been coming for them” and I stand by that review. February me also read Mother Mary Comes To me (4.5 stars; felt like it was a bit unedited but in truth Arundhati Roy can do no wrong) in her newly renovated and pink-walled living room and thought about how much it felt exactly like listening to Roy speak, which I had done a few months earlier with my friend Marcia. I nursed Hanif down at night while reading The Bright Years (3.5 stars; cozy enough but unremarkable) and taught Carry On (4 stars and just as pleasurable and clever as the first two times I’d read it) and Parable of the Sower (4.5 stars; WOW my tolerance for violence must have really changed since I first read this as a teenager).

Technically I also started to listen to Part of Your World (2.75 stars) at the very end of February, though I didn’t finish it til March. Here’s the story about that: somehow, somewhere there was some kind of technological snafu where the book I thought I was going to be listening to (based on the description) and the book I ended up listening to were not the same. I thought I was going to be listening to a gay romance (lol forever) and somehow ended up listening to one of the most cringingly derivative hetero romances I have listened to (though, admittedly, I haven’t really listened to a lot of them). Now, look, I don’t listen to romances because they’re super intellectually stimulating, obviously. I had learned that they were a good “chores” listen — primarily because they often have great narrators, secondarily because they don’t require a ton of focus — in the months after I moved Wren to college last summer and really need the book equivalent of a cupcake in order to make it through the emotional ups and downs of that time. But this one just felt insulting. I somewhat hate listened to it, often while making suhoor at 4am, because Ramadan started during this period. Luckily for me, I followed it up with an absolutely fantastic audio listen, The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi (5 stars). The audio narrators of this book were as fantastic as its protagonist: a queer Muslim 12th century pirate and mother. — Returning to Amina and her crew, even at 4am as I made suhoor for me and whatever constellation of kids were fasting that day — Illy every morning, Josie a few times a week, Wren while she was home for Spring Break — or iftaar with a rumbling belly was like returning to old friends. Also in March I finished another 5 star read, the Antidote (also 5 stars), which absolutely astounded me with its brilliance and which in my memory is the first book I read it in its entirety from my new, third floor bedroom. The books I taught in March were Snow Crash (2.75 stars) and the Nine Moons of Han Yu and Luli (3.5 stars), the former of which was just too old in a dated way and the second of which was not old enough in an age-of-reader way for our group, but which I’d still recommend for younger kids.

And then we got to April.

I managed to, somehow, read the two books I would teach at the end of April: Oryx and Crake (3.5 stars) for High School Lit, and Undrowned (4 stars) for my midwifery mentorship program, Tideshifts, but that’s all I read. And in all honesty I don’t even remember how I got through them. At the time, I felt like I was embodied in my grief; certainly I cried a lot with Wren, certainly I felt bereft, certainly I felt lots of things. And yet now when I think back to the myself I was then I can’t totally find her from behind the veil of shock around her. I was there, certainly; I was exquisitely and painfully present. And yet I see now that I hadn’t quite landed back in myself. I think I re-read Undrowned in a couple of hours in daylight right before I taught it, and I’m pretty sure Wren was having a terrible day and I kept getting pulled into her room as I watched the minutes count down the start of teaching. Meanwhile, I think I had already re-read most of Oryx and Crake before we got the news about Taylor and I finished it right before I taught it at the end of the month. I don’t remember feeling much of anything while reading either so much as the necessity of doing it. Libertad (4 stars), my book for middle school lit, was also read mostly before Taylor died, and my sister took over teaching this book while I was away tending to Wren. I had loved the beginning, though it was, again, a book about loss and I distinctly remember how Josie audibly cried out when she reached that part in the book; I barely remember the end but I do remember Josie telling me most of her classmates were disappointed by it.

May brought Grief in the Fourth Dimension (4 stars), which middle grade lit had decided on by consensus before Taylor even died, if I recall correctly, and I enjoyed this book though wish it had packed more of an emotional punch given the heavy subject matter. It was an excellent book to discuss with young teens though. May also, blessedly, brought Station Eleven (4.5 stars) to my High Schoolers, which I devoured just as quickly and appreciated even more than I had the first time I read it. We also read the brilliant Exit West (4.25 stars) together. I had found my copy in a lending library in Wren’s dorm room while I was still here and I thought, in a weird kind of beleaguered daze, oh that’s lucky, knowing I had to return to Brooklyn to teach it. In May I also picked up After This (4.5 stars) which I read in every stolen moment I could find, sometimes even in the middle of my living room in the middle of my day while toddlers clambered over toys at my feet. I’ll let my review speak for itself on that one:

I came across this book while perusing more academic/clinical/therapeutic books on grief and I picked it up on a lark, compelled by the surprisingly high reviews. It’s the kind of book that feels embarrassingly “woo” to say you’re reading, especially as a clinician who has been indoctrinated into all things “evidence based.” And yet, I loved it. It was a beautiful mediation, and it gave great comfort at a hard time in my life. Even if you don’t “buy” some of the experiences Bidwell Smith has, her thoughts on grief are rigorous and worth reading here. Compelling and moving - could barely put this one down.

On the other hand, I hated my May audio listen, Heart the Lover (2.5 stars), which took me two months to get through despite its diminutive size because I found it so repellant. Why I never moved on from this manipulative book and its miserable characters I don’t know. Perhaps it is as clear evidence as anything else of how hard everything was for that version of myself; I simply didn’t have the energy to do the work of perusing book descriptions to find another one.

I wrapped up my first half of the year in a neat bookend from the beginning, at least quantity wise. As in January, I read 8 books in June. Four were for teaching: Black Sun (3.75 stars), A Psalm for the Wild Built (4.5 stars), Code Name Verity (4.5 stars), and On A Sunbeam (4.0 stars). As you can see from the ratings, all were solid reads; all made for excellent discussions with my classes; all I read quickly. I joked with my high school students that the Teek character (i.e. a mermaid) was my favorite plot line of Black Sun because all I had emotional capacity for (in an otherwise quite dark book) was controlling the sea with song, eating good food, friendship, and flirting; I gave my middle school students a list of esoteric words from Code Name Verity and had them practice using them in creative writing; I allowed myself to be comforted by the hopecore qualities of A Psalm for the Wild Built.

And then Yesteryear (2.0) came off my holds. Oh, Yesteryear. You, dear reader have probably already read about Yesteryear in twenty other places and I don’t mean to add to the noise around it, but I will say that in some ways I’m grateful to Yesteryear because it was so propulsive I sometimes snuck out and read it in the sun in my yard when I should have been doing something else, and because when I sat there in that sunlight I thought wait I kind of feel like myself, because the end of June was the first time in ten weeks where I felt even glimmers of what I remembered feeling like as a human being before April 18th.

But that’s where my gratitude ends. Reader, I despised the book. Here’s what I wrote on storygraph:

Two stars for the premise and the propulsive quality of the book. But the condescension, the lack of any interior arc - let alone humanity - for Natalie, and the extremely uninspiring prose made this more or less a hate read for me. Is this supposed to be satire? Because satire isn’t just hating and mocking your characters. There’s supposed to be substance and cultural commentary involved. But there was nothing incisive happening here. What is the message? Tradwife bitches be crazy? Burke seems to understand her novel brings up deep questions, but barely touches them with a ten foot pole. This is white neoliberal feminist satire where it’s god enough to hint about Patriarchy! and Capitalism! and Religion! but at the end of the day conclude that some people are just Bad (especially mothers who don’t want to be with their kids?!?! Uhhhh….). It’s the hashtag version of satire - all vibes and shorthand and no depth. Definitely feeling like one of those moments where our media overlords have decided that this is the “it” book of the season and so now it is. A bummer.

My last two reads of June was another book for Tideshifts, Hospicing Modernity (4 stars; important and thought provoking but ultimately, as I found, way too dense for one 90 minute conversation) and The Grief Cure (3.5), which I read while surrounded by hipsters on the L train on my way to and from a postpartum visit and with Alex G (someone whose music I enjoyed long long before I even knew Taylor existed, but who now I associate with Taylor because they also loved him) in my ears. I don’t know if I related more to Cody Delistraty or wanted to mother him, and it felt so on-the-nose white man to need to study various “scientific” interventions for grief to ultimately conclude that the only way to survive grief is to feel it, in community, and yet I was so glad he got there, because obviously I believe it too.

So there you have it: who I’ve been and what I’ve read in the first half of 2026, and how, actually, those things are entirely entwined because everything we read shapes us, and everything we are shapes how we read what we read. I hope you have gotten something out of this rather unorthodox review post — if nothing else, pick up some of these books!! — and I look forward to hearing your thoughts in comments if you’ve also read or have thoughts on any of them.

In love and solidarity,

Robina

Dear reader, I have endeavored to keep most of my writing free so as to remain accessible to the widest readership, but my family does in fact rely on and deeply appreciate those of you who still choose to sustain me in doing this work, especially now more than ever as the Trump administration’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill has further emboldened insurance companies to deny coverage for my clients. It actually really does matter to us, perhaps more than you know! If it is within your means, you can upgrade your subscription now:

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“How are you doing?” she asked, her eyes sorrowful, “How’s Wren?”

“Bad,” I admitted. “We’re doing bad.”

We talked about grief for a while, then. This was not, actually, a topic unfamiliar to us. We’d spent so many other hours on that couch, in that room, in evening visits and morning visits, in winter and in spring and in summer, talking about grief nearly the entire time her baby grew inside her, in fact, because she was, herself, at the time grieving. She’d lost her sister to cancer.

“I thought about bringing flowers,” she said now, “but I didn’t want to… I don’t know.” She faltered then, caught her breath, continued. “I guess I didn’t want to make you think about it during your workday.”

“But you know, “ I said, gently but insistently, “that I’m thinking about it all the time. That there’s no moment, right now, that I’m not aware that Taylor died, even when I seem okay.”

And it’s true. There’s no moment of the day where my grief is not accompanying me. Sometimes it is sharp and loud and demands attention. Sometimes it is dull or humming in the background, a sort of white noise I can almost tune out but still always know is there. This is an experience I understand as normal, because as a midwife, and a friend, and daughter and cousin and general recognizer of the in-between, I’ve heard about it and seen it in others, and because in the last ten weeks of consuming books and writings on grief I have come to see it even more. Grief is, so often, a disorientation, a feeling of walking in two worlds simultaneously: one where everything around you, including even you, move as though things are normal, as if there hasn’t been a huge rupture in your universe — a world where dinner is made and work tasks are checked off of lists, and conversations about the weather are had with people in the grocery store — and the other one that is a shadowlands, an unfamiliar place where you have no footing and nothing is normal at all and you peer at people putting gas in their cars or reading a book at a sidewalk cafe or cheerfully chatting with one another in a playground as if they are a different species. A world where you can rely on the beautiful patterning of your brain to run you on automatic through the things you must do and also where the beautiful patterning of your brain is absolutely adrift because what it expected to find in the pattern is no longer there.

And yet over and over again people say this to me, or other grievers share that they too have had this said to them: everyone wants to avoid “triggering” the griever. The reality of our experience must not be called to attention; we must be “given space;” there is the perception that reminding us of our loss is somehow a violence or a harm., as if it is not foremost on our mind all the time anyway. Somehow we as a culture love metaphors for grief the speak to its omnipresence— grief never gets smaller but your life gets bigger around it; grief is like butter in a croissant that gets folded and baked in to every layer that you are — and yet simultaneously in our interpersonal relationships we approach it as a pathology or wound for which the goal is “closure,” behaving as though even hinting of its presence aloud opens it up and risks us bleeding out, messily and catastrophically all over our friends’ white blouse.

In All About Love, bell hooks writes, “rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” But in the case of grief, we seem to expect healing to happen behind closed doors, as if the cure to missing somebody is to be more alone. As if the cure to missing someone is for no one to speak their name.

Weeks before, I had had another conversation, with a different client, who sadly shares with me the experience of unexpected and traumatic loss (in this case, of her father), and she and I bonded over this cultural inability to acknowledge grief.

“Well, I think the problem is everyone copes with grief so differently,” my client partner’s pointed out. “No one wants to do the wrong thing.”

It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? No one wants to do the wrong thing, so they do nothing. It’s instinctual to want to avoid doing the wrong thing, right?

Is it, though?

Or is it something we’ve been taught?

If we don’t know what someone wants, why is the instinct not just to ask them?

*****

The story of death in Western culture mirrors the story of birth. Once upon a time, everyone could expect to witness birth at one or many points in their lives — it happened in the community, and so the community had some familiarity with it. This was true of men. It was true of children. It was, simply, a matter of necessity and material reality. Industrialization took birth out of the community and hid it, made it the domain of “specialists” with exclusive (and expensive) knowledge, and subject to abstruse ritual and procedure that the community no longer understood. Death has undergone a similar evolution: something once very near and omnipresent that is now often hidden, sanitized, controlled, regulated. Like birth, it is, also, a big business: only a paltry 20 billion dollar industry to birth’s 80 billion dollar one, but still. Like birth, too, it has come out of the community: a century ago, 85% of British people died at home; in recent years that number is closer to 25%.

Birth and death are happening around us all the time: about 260 and 121 times a minute, respectively, worldwide. We could take those numbers to mean that they are banal, everyday, unremarkable, and represent nothing more than routine procedure and a business opportunity. Or, we could understand those numbers to mean that they are absolutely fundamental to what it means to be human, worth more because they happen so much, not less.

Taking these rites of passage out of the community has meant, of course, that knowing how to deal with them has also being taken out of the community. These collective, universal experiences have somehow become private, individual ones.

Different writers attribute this shift in the West — from public, communal grief to the idea that grief is an essentially private experience — to different causes. Some name the Black Death in Europe and its near apocalyptic number of deaths as an inciter. The sheer magnitude of the loss fractured traditional mourning rites because there were not enough priests to perform them — some died alongside the rest of the community, others refused to attend to plague victims for fear of dying — nor enough space for the corpses in churchyards, so many were buried in unconsecrated ground or abandoned in ditches. Others trace the shift to the industrialization of medicine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when suddenly people were surviving illnesses that would have once killed them, and so death became the domain (and the enemy) of the doctor, which shifted it from something communal to a private battle. 1 Still others cite the impact of the World Wars: that in the face of the once again apocalyptic multitude of death, there was enormous pressure to rebrand this loss less as senseless pain and more as moral sacrifice. Cody Delistraty writes,

During the First World War, for instance, American suffragists marched against the prospect of U.S. involvement, noting the immense loss of life and the struggle it would create for women left alone at home or widowed….In the heat of August, 1914, women paraded through Manhattan in traditional black mourning clothes…..In 1918, conscious of the public’s perception of the war, [President Woodrow Wilson] wrote to Anna Howard Shaw, the former president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, asking that the suffragettes encourage women across the country to reframe their mourning as patriotism. Instead of mourning clothes, he suggested, women could wear badges bearing white stars, which “upon the occurrence of a death be changed into stars of gold.” At the time, the Nineteenth Amendment [which granted women the right to vote] was in the balance, and Shaw, who understood the importance of Wilson’s support, obliged, asking her followers to dial back their public grief and change their dress. “Instead of giving away to depression, it is our duty to display the same courage and spirit that they do,” she said. “If they can die nobly, we must show that we can live nobly.”

(The strategic maneuvering as white suffragettes attempted to become ever more adjacent to power sure are implicated in a lot of the loss of our humanity over the twentieth century, as it turns out.)

The practice of discouraging people (and, often, women) from too publicly mourning their dead pre-exists industrialization, however. It’s been part of the larger project of colonization (both literal and religious) long before we had factories and medicine and world wars. Take, for example, the practice of keening. An Anglicized word derived from the Gaelic caoineadh na marbh (“lament for the dead”), keening was once a common part of Irish burial rites, a sacred chant sung, usually by women, over a lost loved one.2 Interesting, the practice of keening as a raw and unintelligible cry actually finds its first historical mention in the Pyramid Texts of 2600 B.C., which name the goddess Isis as the first keener. According to those texts, after the death of Osiris, she turned herself into a falcon, flew over his dead body and let out a long and enduring cry that had never before been heard by mortals. This kind of keening is actually in many ways almost universal — it is still practiced in some parts of what we call the Middle East/SWANA region, Africa, East and Southeast Asian, and even some North and South American indigenous communities. In Ireland, it was said that the goddess Bridgid first brought keening to the isles when at the death of her son, Ruadan her wails were heard throughout the four corners of the land. (Note that both the Egyptian and Irish origin stories center the grief of women.)

But in Ireland a collusion of Christianity, urbanization and modernization, and colonization had left the practice of Irish keening all but extinct by the middle of twentieth century. Niamh Criostail writes:

By the late nineteenth century keening was already fading. The church condemned it as pagan, unruly, indecorous. Its wildness, its female voice, its refusal to be contained within prayer books or polite silence - all unsettled clerical authority. At the same time, centuries of English colonisation had steadily undermined indigenous culture across the island. Rituals such as keening, along with music, language, dance, foodways, sport, art and land based spiritual practice, were all pressed into silence or branded as uncivilised. To appear modern and respectable meant conforming to English standards, and much of what was native was pushed into the margins. Suppression did not always erase these practices, but it forced them into smaller and more private spaces, eroding their visibility while memory carried them quietly on.

The interiorization of grief from public lament to private devotional practice replicates itself again and again as a colonial violence, from the British in South Asia3 all the way across the world to white colonial settlers toward African enslaved communities and indigenous populations4 in the United States as well. (It should also be said that collectivist societies have continued to insist upon their grieving practices even in the face of colonial policing — and that it is this ancestral heritage that has highly informed the way both Wren and I have processed our grief — but this is beyond the scope of this article, today.)

Why was grieving such a threat, such a danger, to the colonial project? Why was a central tenet of “the civilizing mission” to mute the pain of loss? For one, because colonizers knew grief was a threat: a force, a power, a motivator, something that could be collectively harnessed and used. And no doubt there is an element here, too, of the soul loss of the colonizer him or herself. One must separate oneself from one’s humanity to commit the atrocities necessary of colonization, of enslavement, of genocide. One must sever one’s connection to earth, to spirit, to each other, to oneself. To truth. And so grief, which is nothing if not an expression of the sacred connection to earth and spirit and each other and oneself and truth, must be also severed.

But also: because grief is costly. It is inefficient. It interrupts our productivity. It disrupts the normal. It grinds the gears to a halt. And, nothing, of course, in the colonial, industrial capitalist mindset, is worse than that.

******

I’m writing this on a Saturday morning. Saturday mornings are hard for me now, especially when they’re grey. When I wake up on a Saturday morning my body knows before my brain, before I am able to think the words It’s Saturday morning or This is the morning 4 or 7 or 10 weeks ago that Wren called me screaming or even Taylor is dead. The grief moves faster than thought. But there is no specific space in my muscles or organs where this knowing lives: it cannot be described as a tightness at the base of my throat or an ache in my chest. My heart does not beat faster. I do not hold it as tension in my neck. Normally, when asked how I can feel and where that feeling lives in my body, I am a Portlandia sketch of specificity: I know I feel connected because the aliveness of the earth is running up my left pinky toe and swirling warmth into my hips in golden light. But this feeling I wake with is not a feeling of my body. It is a pureness of emotion that exists both inside and outside my body, of me. It is, I suppose, timeless. A universal state of being unadulterated by any of my specific narratives of rage or resentment or helplessness. It is a wilted flower, a. big wide expanse of gray ocean cove and rain where my chest should be. It just exists. It is a truth more than a feeling.

I will date myself significantly here, but when I was a Junior in college I saw the 1999 movie Stigmata with some of my friends, whether in theaters or in someone’s dorm room for the first time I can’t say but what I can say is that that first time wasn’t the only time I saw it. My repeated watchings were despite the film being an overwhelming critical failure and generally accepted as a Terrible Movie; Desson Powe, writing in The Washington Post when it came out, described it thusly:

Is there an eighth deadly sin called "narcissistic direction"? I guess it would go under "pride." You never saw such an orgy of overwrought stylistics. Musically, the soundtrack is shrouded with pop-style doom and gloom, a hipster's cacophony of rhythm and ruse. Wainwright, whose head might rotate if I whispered "subtlety" too loudly, meets nothing he can't render in a monstrous close-up, or a doubled image, or in extreme slow motion. It's a miracle our eyes don't bleed.

Why did I pop that particular VHS into my player more than once? I don’t know, really. I was a teenager in the nineties? (I mean, come on, the entire soundtrack was writing by the Smashing Pumpkins!) I had a bit of a crush on Patricia Arquette? I was a baby punk with a penchant for being drawn into movies that hinted at conspiracy theories? I was a traumatized child who repeatedly attempted to rewrite that trauma on my body, to make it visible without speaking it, and was therefore compelled by the idea of spiritual wounds spontaneously physically manifesting on others’?

For all its foibles, there is one line of this movie that still lives in my head free5, and it’s when Patricia Arquette sobs, “I feel like my heart is breaking. Why am I so sad?”6 Well, Patricia, because you’re experiencing a physically manifested communion with Jesus’ suffering? Because you’re the messenger of God trying to impart a truth the Catholic Church is trying to suppress?

Okay, so I’m being tongue in cheek, but the truth is, the way Arquette portrays that line, and the simplicity of the language of it, was a revelation to me, then. At just turned twenty it occurred to me that I had very rarely seen sadness portrayed this way, as someone just simply stating they are sad. “Sad” is a word feels paltry, small. It is a child’s word. It’s a word often said sneeringly, as an insult. It is not beautiful, nor particularly evocative. As a writer, then and now, I knew that if I were just to tell readers a character was“sad” it would be considered bad writing. Sadness as a feeling has so many ways to be shown, manifested, described, cued for audiences. You don’t have to say the word to be able to evoke it, to make people know it, to make them feel it themselves.

One of the film’s many critics might have pointed to this moment as proof of the film’s immaturity, its under developed and self absorbed writing.

But to me, having Arquette just say it, having her just name the thing, without trying to describe it or explain it or make it more meaningful or beautiful, made it heartrendingly meaningful and beautiful. The purity of it was its power. How often do we simply name these things to each other, in these words? Without explication or contextualizing or minimizing? And let them just be?

I’m so sad.

In the first week or two after Taylor died, “how are you?” was understood as a rhetorical question. People would say it and then follow up with a caveat about how it was a dumb question. Or they’d show with body language and facial expressions that they understood it was a complicated question and that I didn’t have to answer it. But as the weeks went on, people started asking it in the way people always ask it, as an opener, as a script, as a greeting. There was no longer as much acknowledgment that the question could be a minefield. In the beginning, I’d try to reorient us back to that acknowledgement. Maybe with a heavy sigh and a “you know…” and then, depending on my mood, either trail off or explain: “You know, we’re getting out of bed in the morning but…” or “You know, we’re surviving, but….”

After a little bit of that, though, I began to question this impulse, the instinct to respond with an analysis of my own emotional life, this attempt at a quantification of our progress (or lack thereof) through grief, this desire to share that things were hard but also appropriate. That we were struggling but also assure people it was not in a pathological way. So instead, when people asked me how I was, I started simply saying “bad.” Or, the slightly longer alternative I offered my client: “Bad. We’re bad.”

I could sense, relatively quickly, how little people knew what to do with this answer. It was off putting and uncomfortable, and no one was able to hide that. And yet I continued practicing it, because it was the simple truth. And it seemed to me we needed more practice in holding those simple truths and if there is anything I am good at it, I suppose it is in persisting in being with the things other people want to ignore.

The truth was, also, that I was resentful, because I had started sensing the way people expected me to be approaching some semblance of normalcy in my life, just 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 weeks after a hugely traumatic loss, even as my therapist continued to reiterate that 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 weeks after a traumatic loss, the trauma is still “acute,” and “new.” I had noticed how people had started texting me again with no preface of “how are you?” but simply some question about. the logistics of our life or something they were thinking about. I was resentful, too, of how many people would say “why?” or “what happened?” when they did ask how I was and I answered “bad.” What the fuck do you mean, what happened?, I would think incredulously. Did you forget the part where my daughter’s 19 year old girlfriend died? But those questions also planted a seed of doubt: was I not supposed to be bad? Am I the only one who would still feel bad 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 weeks after a 19 year old kid who my daughter loved and who was supposed to be part of my family for a long time died? Was I supposed to not be bad? Was I supposed to be over it? Was there something wrong with me?

I wasn’t really angry at people for not knowing how to hold me in my grief past the first week or so (well, not usually). I understand that as a culture we have been groomed to know what to do around grief, especially immediately: bring food, maybe help with chores or offer childcare or get some of the paperwork sorted. We know how to put out the plates at the funeral and some of us even know to make a plate for the griever who won’t remember to do it and won’t even eat it. I understand that the immediate and tangible actions are, often, all we’re taught of the script, and that the script often ends there. I understand that in an overarching structure where we at best get 4 days of bereavement leave and an understanding of grief that lists 5 linear stages that ends with “acceptance,” it’s not really any one individuals’ fault that we don’t know how to hold anything outside of that entirely task-based (and almost entirely devoid of emotion) routine. That in a world where we are indoctrinated into the idea that every problem has a solution, that every challenge must be fixed, it’s hard to hear someone is in pain and not offer them suggestions of how to be in less pain (have you tried…. massages? therapy? grief groups? working out? walks? sunlight? staying busy? breath work? microdosing? SSRIs?) , or to offer them narratives that might tidy up that pain into something legible and neat and coherent (it’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all, and all of that).

I didn’t expect people to understand the layers upon layers upon layers of trauma this experience has brought up in me, or intuit the huge life questions it has raised, the way I’m suddenly rethinking every element of my existence. But I was resentful at how thoroughly, it seemed to me, our instincts around grief had been colonized out of us. How we seemed to have no ability to perceive that grief is a web that touches every part of us, and that, especially in the beginning, there is no interacting with a person who is grieving without interacting with their grief. But even more importantly: that that is as it should be, okay, normal, expected, not something to be fixed. That even if they physically able to compartmentalize enough to shop for celery at the grocery store or lift a kettlebell in a gym or look through a list of work tasks with you, their grief is anything but locked up in a compartment: that they taste it in the celery, that it is part of the weight of the kettlebell, that it is felt in the letters of the work tasks. I wasn’t really angry at people for not knowing how to tend to me in my grief, for not understanding the layers upon layers or intuiting the huge life questions it has raised. But I was angry at the fact that as a collective we don’t even have an instinct to ask what we don’t know, that we have been so trained by white supremacy toward perfectionism, toward the idea that there is “one right way” and we must always try to conform to it, toward individualism and our own right to comfort and freedom from conflict that we have come to believe it is more instinctual to fear being wrong than it is to vulnerably connect about one of the only things we all have in common. That we have naturalized and accepted being so risk averse to feeling incompetent that we’d rather risk people feel more alone in the one of the loneliest experiences all of us go through.

Do you know how many reddit boards and blog posts and nonfiction pieces and novels about grief I have read in the last 10 weeks? Would you like to guess how many complain I was not given enough space in my grief? Would you like to guess how many write I did not want to be asked about or reminded of the person I love? Would you like to guess how many say I wish I felt more isolated?

100% less than the people who said “I felt so alone.”

In fact, while many people will complain about the ill-informed but well-intentioned platitudes people say in the face of loss, it’s surprising how few will say I wish people didn’t say anything at all.

Meanwhile, the truth is, we often don’t even need to say much of anything. Grievers are not looking for the people who love them to be profound. There’s nothing to say, and we know it. It’s not about words. It’s about being with.

There are so many complexities and nuances and caveats and illustrations and expansions I could offer here, and it’s my own internalized white supremacy that fears not getting in to all of them, that feels like all of my thoughts about this need to be summed up in one comprehensive article. Maybe these are complexities and nuances and caveats and illustrations and expansions are ones I’ll continue to explore in upcoming newsletters. Maybe not. Maybe the waves of grief and living will sweep me into a different topic, a different focus, and I won’t return to this particular thread. So much is unpredictable these days, even as I slowly do see the return of glimmers of the self that I thought had fractured and disappeared the moment I brought that telephone up to my ear and heard Wren screaming. That is, of course, one of the truest lessons of grief: that we control, actually, nothing. That the predictability on which we all blithely pretend we can rely is not at all guaranteed.

The other truest lesson of grief, I think, though, is this: grief is everywhere, though you might not truly appreciate its omnipresence until you are in its shadowlands itself. When you are grieving you will endlessly find others who are grieving, too. You will see the evidence and residues of it everywhere you look. Sometimes, you will feel so alone in grief that you will seek out stories of others’ grief; sometimes you will be reading an article about a musician or poet you like and see it there. Every fourth person you interact with, upon hearing about your grief, will open like a matryoshka doll, cracking into halves that show the person you had always perceived them to be, and also the person who walked through this world appearing like a human but felt like a keening banshee who did not recognize the place around them and could not conceive of how they could ever continue to live in it. Friends will connect you to an acquaintance who has also experienced the most tragic and unthinkable of losses: sudden, expected, violent, drawn out, planned, expected, unexpected, young, old, complicated, simple. In all cases life transforming. And you will wonder, why did I never know that I needed to acknowledge this more? Not simply because loss fucking sucks and is awful and devastating, but because it simply is. Not because there is something missing, but because it is also something a gained, something that is now a part of the person standing before you, right now, an essential part of the story of their aliveness. Because, after all, we are all each other; and, as it turns out, we are all the loss of each other too.

What I’ll leave you with here, for now, is that I hope I can give you a little permission to worry less about being perfect or useful in others’ grief. But I also hope I am convincing you that we do need to worry about making it a practice to be with grief, period. And maybe, just maybe, instead of trying to anticipate what the “right” thing to say is, that practice could involve more vulnerability, and more trust. That we could do the radical thing of just asking others what they need, and believing them without needing to “fix.” That we could accept the answer without narrative, judgment, or shame. Not in a “let me know if you need anything” way (a phrase which has rightfully stoked the ire of the internet in recent years) but in a “I’d really love to spend time with you; would you want to watch a movie or take a walk with me on Saturday?” way. In a “does it help to talk about your loved one, because I really enjoy hearing about them?” way. In a “Right now, do you prefer when I ask you about how you’re feeling or is it more comforting if I initiate the same kinds of silly and distracting conversations I always do?” way. You don’t have to try to be perfect. You can just be curious. You don’t have to guess what the “right” thing is, and then beat yourself up when you’re wrong. You don’t have to intuit something profound. You just have to ask and then trust the answer. You just have to persist in being with. You just have to not forget. Because I promise the grieving person you care about hasn’t.

I’ll leave you, too, with a few questions:

What would it mean to imagine grief not as an individual pathology but a collective skill?

What would it mean to imagine grief as a force that could make us more human, more connected, more honest, more brave?

What would it mean to imagine grief as a form of solidarity, a thread that ties us together?

What would it mean to imagine grief as a form of resistance?

And I thank you, for in the gift of your time as you read this, you have practiced being here, with me, in mine.

Love,

Robina

Dear reader, I have endeavored to keep most of my writing free so as to remain accessible to the widest readership, but my family does in fact rely on and deeply appreciate those of you who still choose to sustain me in doing this work, especially now more than ever as the Trump administration’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill has further emboldened insurance companies to deny coverage for my clients. It actually really does matter to us, perhaps more than you know! If it is within your means, you can upgrade your subscription now:

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“every stupid ex; every letter written; every time a ridiculous argument with andy over something like whether the use of ‘pink moon’ in a volkswagen commercial was well done turned huge and existential; every summer evening i spent sitting on a stoop with maria, waiting for the ice cream truck, fantasizing about our lives as teenagers; every missed period from starving myself; every scar on my wrist; every february's melting snow, which always makes me horny; every stranger on the subway who offered me a tissue when i cried about one thing or another; every time i sat and stared at a rat. every moment, significant and not-so, that makes me who I am, every step, mis- and otherwise, walked me to that moment on february 27th when wren sprouted.”

I wrote “walked” as though this process moved along at a reasonable place. But the truth was, it actually felt to me from this new vantage point that I had been singularly propelled by the inevitability of her, pulled rapidly by a force stronger than myself. Like I had not been walking, but running toward her, all along.

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*****

On the morning of April 18th, I was doing assorted administrative tasks at 10:11am, when the crickets of my phone’s ring tone started chirping and I looked down to see it was Wren. I was doing these tasks from bed, still in my pjs, but I don’t remember which (which sounds trivial, but is not). I had collected a newborn screening the night before and was about to start filling it out, the last task I wanted to do before getting ready to bring Hanif to a birthday party. I had drank a cup of chai but hadn’t eaten yet, and I figured birthday cake would have to do as breakfast. Wren had texted me earlier, at 9:51am, to tell me her roommate had gotten in touch with her because someone from Res Life had showed up at their door asking for her.

“What does that mean?” I had texted back. It struck me as weird, but probably not as weird as it should have, in retrospect.

“Idk,” she responded, “But it’s freaking me out.”

She had been worried about the administration’s response to the Students for Justice in Palestine encampment she had helped plan, and where she had spent most of the evening before, so when the phone rang exactly 20 minutes later, I assumed it was something about that.

But when I picked up the phone to hear her scream “Mama! Mama!” before I could even say “hello?” the only thought in my brain before I became nothing but pure, trembling, animal body was

she can’t be dead because she’s screaming.

*****

In July of 2024, Wren and I went to see Illinoise!, the Broadway production of Sufjan Steven’s 2005 album of the same name, with my two sisters. The night was balmy as we drove there, for at least part of it with the windows down, all of us cheerful, me in a yellow dress, Saadia with red lipstick, Wren and Tahira both in white. Saadia squeaked into a tiny parking spot and we all cheered. We sat in a row and checked out the rest of the audience and I could feel a little electric zing move through all of our skin as the lights went down and then up again and the familiar opening piano of “Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland Falls, Illinois” started. Wren and I held hands.

Afterwards, we chattered about what we thought, Saadia and I laughing when we both articulated how much the campfire scenes made us wonder why we live in a world of credit scores and alarm clocks when we clearly all ought to be living in community and making art and telling stories under the stars. Wren and I came home only to walk the dog together and continue to chew on what we had just witnessed and what of it we would change (“me and Wren are wondering why palisades wasn’t about what palisades is about, like literally why!” I texted my sisters at 9:57pm).

Three days later, Andy, Ilan, Josie, Hanif, and I all drove Wren up to a “pre-college” writing program she’d gotten into at her dream school. Seven months earlier she had asked if she could apply to the program so she could confirm that this was indeed her dream school and, should that indeed be confirmed, increase the odds that she’d eventually get in. For me, the process felt like my first test of homeschooling: would my homemade transcript, and the classes and experiences it listed, be deemed acceptable? Had I taught her well enough to write a compelling admissions essay? As it turns out, it was and I had. In February, while eating breakfast with half my family in Lahore, Pakistan, we got the email that she’d been admitted, the table erupting in cheers, one of those moments that sticks in your brain forever because you see all those people around you as if from a distance and think wow, I am really lucky. Now, in July, it was time to drop her off. It took, as it turns out, nearly exactly the length of “Illinois” to drive from Vermont, where we were staying for the two weeks while she did the program, to the parking spot we found outside her dorm. We both thought that was a good omen. She propped the program from “Illinoise” on her desk.

One year, four months, and five days later Wren sent me a video of her on her 18th birthday. It was our first birthday apart and I’d spent most of the day crying, but by the time she sent it, I had stopped. I pressed play to find her sitting in an empty dining hall at a table in that same college, which she now attended, surrounded by friends who giggled as one of them tried to light, without burning themselves, the 19 candles on the cake I’d found a baker to make and deliver to her. I instantly recognized that the person trying to light the candles was Taylor.

I’d been hearing about Taylor for most of the semester and, in fact, had already even spoken to them on the phone when Wren had the flu and they had brought her food. “Woke Taylor” was the nickname to which Wren had initially referred — they had apparently earned a reputation for being “the most sensitive and respectful white person on campus” — but by November Wren had switched to “Comrade Taylor” because her and her Marxist friend Lilya had decided that “woke” had a negative connotation. Taylor had a back story that sounded like the protagonist of a YA novel — a triplet from Phoenix, Arizona who had lost their mother (and their only parent) to pancreatic cancer just a couple of weeks before graduating high school, a brilliant artist who was attending their competitive college on an extraordinary scholarship that basically paid them to go there — and earlier in the semester I had jokingly sighed, oh Wren, if you date an orphan you need to understand you may always have an ex as part of your family because I will never let them go.

But this eventuality, too, seemed inevitable. Taylor and Wren clearly had it bad for each other. Though they hadn’t started dating yet, all their friends knew it, and I knew it too, even only hearing about their interactions through Wren. That night, I only felt vaguely embarrassed that I watched the video again and again mainly to focus on Taylor: the way they looked at Wren, how their face lit up with it, the buoyant enthusiasm of their body language. After all, I didn’t need to watch Wren over and over to know every line and expression of her face better than my own: I had spent my life staring at her. It was this new person who had so captured Wren’s attention and affection that my brain wanted to figure out.

Later, Wren would tell me that music played during most of her birthday celebration, and that during “Casimir Pulaski Day,” another song off Sufjan’s “Illinois,” she and Taylor had locked eyes and sang to each other softly. I’d smiled and thought of myself writing, in looping curves, on a mix CD I’d made for a former lover

in the morning through the window shade
When the light pressed up against your shoulder blade
I could see what you were reading

and felt a velvety contentment warm up my chest.

*****

The entire first trimester of Wren’s pregnancy, I spotted. I was spotting when I took my positive pregnancy test, and I was spotting a week later. I spotted when we interviewed our homebirth midwife, and I spotted on the plane on my way to Phoenix, Arizona, where Andy’s parents had moved just a few weeks before. I spotted as I got ready to go to dinner at his half sister’s house and as we hiked in the desert. I spotted while vomiting and crying on the bathroom floor back in New York, I spotted during the 9 week ultrasound I decided to get to investigate all the damn spotting, and I spotted for weeks after that too.

All the spotting gave my first trimester the feeling of a held breath. I so convinced myself I was going to lose the pregnancy that some part of my brain still believed that even after the first trimester, and the second one, even after the birth. For years after I’d sometimes look at Wren and have to remind myself she was the baby who had been growing in me that whole time, that the spotting had not inevitably led to bleeding and a miscarriage, as I had so many times believed it would. That she had made it, that that pregnancy had actually continued, that it had resulted in this toddler sitting across the table from me, picking up blueberries in her chubby fingers, one by one.

I never got to talk to Taylor’s mother about her triplets’ birth. We never got to meet the way mothers of partners usually meet: during family weekend, or for a milestone birthday, or a graduation, or a wedding. We never got a chance to have the inevitable conversation everyone always initiates with me, even people who have just met me, where they intimate all their most vulnerable feelings about their births they haven’t even told anyone else.

But I do know Taylor was born at just 30 weeks, weighing just 3 pounds, and that their sisters were just 2 and change. I do know their mother had severe preeclampsia that progressed to eclamptic seizures, necessitating that early arrival. I do know their mother was in the ICU afterward, and Taylor needed heart surgery, so they were not reunited for days. I do know that once they were, Taylor was loved and cherished and invested in with a deep and unwavering devotion.

I didn’t need to meet Margie to know that in the days and weeks and months and years after dancing in the veil of that birth, she often held her three babies, or stroked their hair as they slept, or listened to them play together, or took in the three of them in simply eating at the dinner table, only to realize, with a jolt of joy and surprise that the four of them had actually had made it, that they had breathed and grown and survived.

*****

Sunday, May 10th, 2026. Mother’s Day.

Isn't it weird, my sister says, from the other side of her round wooden table, where we sit in her kitchen, me and her and my mom and Wren, while the toddlers play noisily behind us, that Margie never knew we’d exist, that there’d be this family all the way across the country, this Pakistani Italian family who would spend all their time talking and wondering and crying about and missing her kid?

*****

When Wren was about 5 weeks old, Andy got called in for grand jury duty. The thing about grand jury duty is that it requires showing up every day from 9-5 for at least two weeks (which was not a schedule either he nor I were used to, being graduate students who taught college classes to make our living) and, at least according to Andy’s understanding of it at the time, you can’t get out of it even if you just had a baby. At some point during one of the nights in this two week period, I asked my sister Tahira, who was home for the winter break of her first year of college, to stay overnight and help me with Wren so Andy could sleep without interruption.

The next morning, Tahira peered at me with one eye open while the gray January light filtered through our white and green curtains. She blearily growled, I have never ever heard anyone sound so perky in the middle of the night and recounted how every time I moved Wren from one side of my body to the other to nurse her I’d chirp, “okay, let’s get belly-belly!” and how every diaper change was accompanied by animated chattering as if it weren’t the fourth time I’d woken up that night.

In truth, over the course of the first two years of Wren’s life I came to believe she was A Terrible Sleeper, mostly because I fell prey to all the noise around infant sleep our larger culture envelops us in. But in those early days, in that fourth trimester, it is undeniable that I moved through life with an almost manic enthusiasm I had never felt for anyone or anything. I was delighted by every mundane and exhausted part of mothering, by the rewiring of my brain, the way every compass point now oriented toward care. Our interdependence was the safest home I had ever found.

Eighteen years and three months later, I curled next to her on a dorm bed borrowed from her suite mate that we pressed up against her’s and that, until another dorm mate loaned me a mattress topper, rested three inches lower. I stretched my arm up and over the gap as I stroked her hair, or wiped away a tear that was about to drip into her ear. Sometimes I’d just climb into the one twin bed and wrap my arms around her heaving body until she got too hot. She screamed and cried and wailed and bargained. She asked me why, over and over and over again, and every time I’d say, I don’t know. She’d say she didn’t know what to do, and I’d say you don’t have to know until I said it too many times and then she screamed that she hated when people told her she didn’t have to know so I switched to that makes sense. She’d yell about how she didn’t want to change, how she had loved her life until this, how unfair this was, and I agreed. She asked why she deserved this and I’d say oh baby it’s not about deserving, you didn’t deserve this, this wasn’t about you at all and then I’d ask God what I had done to deserve to have had this kind of pain inflicted on my child despite what I’d just said aloud. One night at 3am, when my stomach growled and I realized I had not eaten more than a few bites all day, I choked down unevenly microwaved mac and cheese only after scrutinizing her breathing closely to make sure she was actually asleep, with a carefulness I’d only ever used when trying to do anything with a napping baby in the next room. She’d claw and groan and weep and sob and then we’d drift off, only for her to suddenly startle awake and then we’d be up to do it all over again. Once in a while she’d wake up and simply say “mama?” until I patted her back and she fell back asleep.

I laid there with my hand on her back, and I thought of that young mother who had laid in our bed in Brooklyn, surrounded by our maroon-painted walls — Wild Manzanita, the color was called — with her dark-haired, apple-cheeked baby against her chest. I thought of her astonishment at the responsibility of being another human’s safest place. I thought of her imagining the long horizon of sweet possibilities in store. I thought of her never knowing this was one of them.

****

A list:

How to feel better, at least in the short-term, after sudden traumatic loss:

*****

“I’m really scared,” she said to me, as we walked to the car. “I don’t know if I want to do this.”

I considered my words carefully. I didn’t know what to say. It was a perfect New England spring day: blisteringly golden sun, blue sky saturated like oil pastels smeared against a canvas, pink and white blooms, green leaves. Wren had been having coffee with Taylor’s grief mentor — someone they had been matched with by a non-profit that pairs adults who lost parents young with youth who had recently lost parents — and I had had to interrupt to remind her that, if she wanted to go to the funeral home to say goodbye to Taylor, it would have to be now. I had spent most of the week sitting with grieving teens as they cried and joked and sang together, texting updates to my family, meeting with college admin to express the concerns I had with their (lack of) crisis response, and on the phone with the handful of adults in Taylor’s life trying to assist in any way possible. Taylor’s aunt had now finally arrived to collect Taylor and bring them home to Phoenix, and generously had extended the invitation to Wren. It was the one and only opportunity we’d have to see them before they were cremated.

“You should do whatever you feel in your gut,” I replied. “There’s no right and wrong. And even if we go, you can always change your mind at the last minute if you don’t want to go in.”

In Islam, tending to a loved one’s body is an important part of grieving. We wash the body, weep over it, shroud it, return it to the earth, feel that earth fill our palms. I knew I would never want to mourn a death without that closure. But in Islam, you do this in community. It’s collective, and shared. I didn’t know what I’d want to do without that piece. I also never had to think about doing anything like this at 18. I felt scared, too: scared that I didn’t know the right answer to guide her toward, scared she wouldn’t goodbye and regret it, scared that she would say goodbye and that it would be too much, scared to walk into that room myself.

“Can I play ‘Sadie?’” she said, as we drove. I gulped — in another life I would have quipped, “that’s ballsy; you trying to kill us?”— but now I just nodded. We sang. Or, really, Wren sang and I sputtered, the grief filling up every part of my throat and the words kind of leaking out around it from the barely perceptible spaces that were left. I didn’t even try to wipe my eyes. I just drove, my face tear-streaked, wondering how the rest of the world could look so normal.

“I think I want you to go in first,” she said, when we got there and I pulled into the parking lot behind the funeral home. “You can tell me if Taylor looks okay or too scary, and then I can come in.”

My stomach sank in terror. I nodded again. Anything. There had not been, and would not be, any other option than anything.

But after we waited for a while for Taylor’s aunt and cousin to be done with their time, after we had hugged them and they told us Taylor just looked like they were sleeping, after the funeral director confirmed this and told us to just remember to breathe, after he led us downstairs, and after I could see a sliver of a hand, resting on a body, just out of the corner of my eye, Wren pushed past me, ran past me, crying out “oh hi baby! Oh baby, oh baby, hi!” and dropped to her knees so she could better drape her body over her beloved’s. The funeral director gently moved a chair closer to her, but she did not get off her knees, or look up, for a long time. Satisfied we were both breathing, he left. It was just the three of us.

“I was so scared,” she finally turned to tell me, “but all I feel when I am with them is love.”

We spent an hour with Taylor, and I could try describe what it is like to watch your daughter talk to and kiss and sing to and stroke the hands of and joke with and gaze at the body of their dead girlfriend; could try to describe what it was like to kiss them and thank them for loving my daughter myself. I could try to describe the surreality of taking pictures, of trying to pay attention to how to artfully compose them, inviting in the my high school President-of-the-Photography-Club self into this space she never could have conceived of, because I knew Wren would want them and that the more beautiful they were the more comfort they’d bring. What it was like to twine my voice with hers as we sang “Mystery of Love” to Taylor. What it was like to have the funeral director tell me time was almost up after Wren had said over and over again how she didn’t know how she was going to leave. The singular way my heart cracked open when I finally convinced her it was time to say goodbye and Wren kissed Taylor again and said, “okay baby, I’m going to do something brave now. Will you be proud of me?”

But I can’t. I don’t even know how I would start. I don’t even know what words exist for the way my body felt through all of that. I don’t have words that even begin to touch the sacredness, the holiness, the abject awfulness. I don’t have words for the way it felt like being forever changed, every cell reshaping, my entire soul and world transforming. I don’t have words for how it felt like I was everyone and no one, how this was my life and not my life, how it was like knowing everything I know about living in the in-between and walking in the veil, how it was like not knowing anything I thought I knew, how it was like not knowing anything, at all.

You don’t have to know. I hate when people say that to me.

*****

I am crying on a crowded subway car listening to Sufjan and I’m thinking about how every single person around me will feel exactly this pain that I am feeling, more than once, over and over, in their lives, how all of just have to lose people and that there is no escape from that fact for any of us, and what I really don’t understand, what really just doesn’t make sense, is how little any of us seem to know how to hold each other through it, this only inevitable thing.

*****

A list:

Moments in music that make me feel almost like a human these days :

1. The beat drop in Tame Impala’s “Eventually” at 3:33.

2. The transition in Sufjan’s Stevens “Should Have Known Better” at 2:40, where the song transitions into a second part as though the sky is clearing after a dark heavy storm.

3. The entirety of Lorde’s “Buzzcut Season,” which was Taylor’s answer to the question, “what song could you listen to on repeat all day” and which has now, it seems, become mine.

******

People mean well, but I don’t want to be told you are such a good mother. I don’t want to be told Wren is so lucky to have you. I don’t want to be told I know no one better suited to hold a child through this or support a community of grieving kids or navigate the veil. I don’t want to be told I am amazing or resilient.

I know I am fucking resilient. I spent half of my life trying to build that capacity, to claw myself out of trauma and despair. I know I am a good mother. I spent the other half of my life singularly devoted to trying to learn and practice the skills of responsive, respectful parenting. It took a lot of fucking work. I do not think Wren — or any of my kids — are “lucky to have me.” I think I am lucky to have them. What I have done for them is nothing compared to what they have done for me. I am not so much a good mother as I am prostrate with gratitude, always trying to earn back the privilege they have given me.

More than anything, though, I do not feel particularly equipped to deal with this than anybody else. Watching my baby hurt hurts, every fucking day. Reorienting my brain out of the story I thought we were in and into the long, hard journey inherent in this one exhausts me, every fucking day. Having my own trauma triggered and trying to not get sucked into it is terrifying, every fucking day.

I have had to stare the reality that children die, all of a sudden, with no warning, for no real reason, and so could mine straight in the face, kiss that reality’s cold forehead and thank it, and then I have to walk around in the world pretending I don’t constantly peer in at my sleeping children with dread to make sure they are still breathing. I am doing all of this with a heart already weak from the sutures I’ve sewn to hold it together after watching a constant stream of dead babies on my phone for most of my three year old’s short life, and a brain that had worked so hard to unlearn the feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop that is so common with c-PTSD.

Nobody looks at someone drowning, watches their arms paddling and their feet kicking and thinks look at how resilient. They recognize it is simple necessity.

I want to be seen in the simple necessity. I do not want to hear that I am extraordinarily buoyant. Everyone means well, but if it’s a truth it doesn’t feel like it’s one that’s actually for me. It is cold comfort, the kind of thought that goes alongside my own: the only mercy in all of this is that Margie wasn’t alive to see it. It feels like a way people make distance between themselves and the hideousness of the currents trying to devour me.

Maybe there will be meaning in all of this someday. In fact, probably there will be meaning in all of this someday. I will find it whether people tell me I will, or not. But right now there is just that — the hideousness of the currents, the way my throat hurts when I wake up in the middle of the night inexplicably gasping for air as if I have just barely escaped going under — and it is there that I most want to be met.

*****

That morning of April 18th, I was in the car by 11:04am. I could say I don’t know what happened in the fifty minutes between 10:11 and 11:04 but that’s not actually true. It’s more that I remember every minute of it with an agonizing clarity that is too hard to put to words. How it was grey out, but the colors still seemed saturated like a horror movie. The ashen faces of Andy and my sister and my brother-in-law when I walked out into the yard where they were playing with Hanif and his cousins, and told them in a voice that didn’t sound at all like mine, what had happened. The exact crumple in Josie’s face as she started to cry. The shower where I stared around my bathroom like everything was alien to me. The way I held the phone in the crook of my neck as I called my mom while rifling through a laundry basket, my voice cracking and then coming back together because I had to go, I had to go. The way I handed my sister things to pack in a bag; exactly what I packed and why I chose the things I did (though what I chose ended up being entirely insufficient to how long I ended up staying on campus). The way Tahira stopped me and held me, the realization that my body was shaking uncontrollably. The way everyone kept telling me I had to eat and the way I said no, I have to go, I have to go. I’ll get something on the road.

I spent the entirety of the car ride on the phone: with a few different friends, with my sisters and mom again, with Andy, with my therapist (I’m sorry to text on a Saturday morning, I had typed, but I think this is a Saturday morning kind of text). I knew I would not be able to focus on an audio book, knew listening to music would undo me, but could not tolerate silence, afraid that being alone in my mind would send me off the side of the road but equally afraid that being alone in my mind would mean nothing but a reminder that my irritating solidity would just endlessly tolerate the intolerable, again, without fanfare. Andy called back and said you are going 85 and that’s too fast and I said I’m just keeping up with traffic. Tahira called again and repeated that I needed to get food. The idea of stopping this momentum, of making Wren wait one moment longer than she needed to, was unthinkable. I drove past exit after exit, with Tahira tracking my progress on her phone and telling me what each exit held, trying to convince me to stop. Eventually I admitted I had to pee, and when I realized I’d be passing a Trader Joe’ familiar from the innumerable times we’d stopped there as a family on the way north to Vermont or Massachusetts, I finally gave in. Both bathrooms were full and I paced the hallway waiting for one, texting Tahira furiously to distract myself — both the bathrooms are full and people already flushed but aren’t coming out come on guys second flush wtaf — and in some vague, remote way understood that in another circumstance this would be one of those ridiculous stories my sisters and I retold again and again — that time Bina was in such a rush to get to Wren she almost peed her pants in the back of Trader Joe’s in Connecticut — if I wasn’t in the middle of the nightmare.

I made it back to the car, turned the key in the ignition. I had 54 minutes left. I think I spent them all on the phone with Tahira. Eventually I made it off the highway. Eventually I drove through town, approached the college. “Holy shit,” I said into the car with a dawning realization. “It’s admitted students’ day.” It was exactly as dreary as it had been a year before. I remembered it: wandering around campus with Wren; taking a picture of her at the gate bearing the name of the school, her hands on her hips; the free lunch in a giant gymnasium and the way someone at my table had mistaken me for a prospective student; the lavender iced latte I got at a coffee shop housed in an old train car afterwards, when the sun came out. “I’m almost there,” I told Tahira as I started weaving toward the roads leading to Wren’s dorm. “Let me get off the phone now.” I turned onto the familiar side street where we always parked when we visited. The quad was green. I pulled up next to a spot, and then I looked up. Wren stood there, on the steps of her dorm, gazing down the street, looking impossibly young, her arms around herself. She must have been tracking me.

I backed into the spot, straightened forward, put the car in park. I turned the keys in the ignition. I opened the door. I did not take anything out, my phone with its GPS map in its holder on the dash, indicating the destination was just up ahead. I put my foot onto the pavement, and it was the first time I truly felt the ground beneath me since 10:11am that morning. I closed the door. I took a step toward her, then another. And then I broke into a run.

You can read more about Taylor here.

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It’s been exactly a month since I received the worst phone call of my life so far, which is to say it’s been exactly a month since my daughter Wren called me, screaming in terror, to tell me that her 19 year old partner, Taylor, had unexpectedly died.

It’s hard to describe what the last four weeks have been: how grueling, how all-consuming, how holy, how profound, how destabilizing. This was not an experience I anticipated ever having to experience as a parent. There were so many things I have worried about, so many things I had imagined and dreaded and prayed against, but this was never one of them. I still don’t believe it happened. Walking alongside a child through a grief this enormous has taken every ounce of who I am, and every ounce still does not seem like enough.

It has been hard to conceive of how I would ever return to this space, to sit and put proverbial pen to paper again. Though I’ve always used writing to process every pain, every joy, every thing I have experienced, big or little, I have not been able to fathom how I would ever be able to write about this — or how I could write about anything else without having written about this.

In some ways, it’s because it’s not even mine to write about. The experience of supporting Wren through loss is, of course, but how could I start there without people even getting a taste of what she had lost?

And so before anything else, I wanted to share a little of what Wren herself has written. These three poems were part of a collection of poems she had started composing for Taylor called “Inventions,” and she wrote of them on her Instagram the day after Taylor died:

This has been a horrible 24 hours. It is sickening beyond words to try and speak, think, or breathe in a world that no longer has Taylor in it. The love I have for Taylor is a love beyond comprehension - I think our souls must’ve been entwined. They were soft and tough and silly and smart and so talented and so tender beyond all imaginable words. Taylor’s sweet voice has echoed through my mind every single second since we lost them, and, if I’m honest, I feel like I have nowhere to go and no one to be without them.

I was working on a collection of poems as a gift for the future, keeping it a secret so cheekily, as if we’d be together for a million years. I felt in my soul that we would be - I feel deeply betrayed by my own body for that, for giving me that feeling of longevity - but I loved (love) them infinitely and that forever felt tangible, then. These are not particularly good, smart, or public facing; they were for Taylor, and really only for Taylor. They will always be for my Taylor, but in light of them never getting to read most of these (with the exception of the very first chunk) I want those who loved them like I did to read them instead. They always had a thing about me being a writer; they thought it was so cool and I brushed it off, because I was shy or unsure or whatever. I regret that horribly. I should’ve written Taylor a hundred poems every single day.

Rest easy, meri pyaari. I love you across the universe, beyond every star the sky. I wish you were still here.

Quieting (02/02)

I would say this to you, but I’m not so good with words. If you read an ancient Chinese text, you often find the writers referring to a lost color, qīng, a word that fell out of use long ago. In Russian, they have two different words for dark blue and light blue. In Japanese, the words for green and blue are the same. All that is to say, we all see color differently, and everybody has their own ideas about it. But I only want to hear about it from you. I seriously don’t care what any polyglot has to say, what any other artisan or any historian claims. Brilliant, I only want to hear about any of it from you.

The word inventor comes from the Latin verb invenire, invent; ‘to find’.

Which I think makes being an inventor seem rather silly

And rather accidental.

But it couldn’t matter less what I think about inventing;

I have never made anything useful with my hands and

I do kind of expect planes to fly on their own.

Sometimes they do.

I have known a lot of miracles like that-

Of course I have-

I have known you.

I would say this to you, but I am not so good with words. If I could count every strand of hair on your head, I would, but there aren’t really enough hours in a night, so I have decided to count your eyelashes instead. Sometimes one of them will fall from you & and I like to catch them, like ladybugs on the tips of my fingers. You are not from around here - you so easily give me these summer charms that I am unfamiliar with. When we make eye contact for too long, your cheeks get sort of pink, like you are being burned a little by a special, internal sun, one that glows from within you - that kind of sun that makes the plants grow. Even my childhood vices leave me - I don’t even mind that I have to start counting all over again.

Wish. I am not so good with words. Make a wish.

you, who kisses my dry mouth, will discover why the sand is thirsty for the saltwater (3/11)

You are so beautiful

And you make such beautiful things!

Like a second God, or

One of those birds that makes its nest out of city scraps,

Creating stuff out of other, abstracted stuff that I am too dumb or too hungry to understand right now

But I’m smart enough to want them

And hungry enough to want them badly

You are so beautiful

(And they say you can’t eat dreams,

BUT!)

If there ever were a dream I could eat, I’d want it to be one you’re in

And maybe also in it, I’ve written a hundred books

And our bedroom is green.

And they say you can’t eat dreams

But I’ve done it fine enough so far.

My aunties always told me Ramadan is for the parts of you that no light ever reaches.

That the hunger breaches past what you want

into what you really want

And then, into what you need

Like if the ocean suddenly

parted so the sun could suddenly

reach the snails and the anglerfish and the big old isopods at the very bottom.

And I don’t know about that.

I am ashamed of myself in ways that the sun hasn’t reached,

In ways that the isopods will never experience

BUT!

I’ve never had a dream I couldn’t eat.

And there’s never been a day you haven’t been a dream of mine.

April and the Closed Eye (04/13)

The starlings are so loud this time of year,

Crackling and screaming,

Like summer hail falling on hot sidewalks and sizzling.

These birds are louder than grown people

Louder than the faraway thunder

And,

Though nothing is louder than the guns,

There are so many birds that I closed my eyes

And I almost couldn’t hear them.

I could still hear you, though, and I turned,

Saw you bright and beautiful as

the moon in a blue sky

(Although there really is no metaphor for it,

You are beautiful in the singular,

Here on the ground),

And said

“The starlings are so loud this time of year”.

And no, I wouldn’t call that a song,

But it’s a sound with a name.

Nothing is louder than the guns

But I put my head on your chest once

And I listened till my head filled up with the sound of water

So clear and sweet, you could’ve planted a forest

On the asphalt

And it would grow.

And I thought, now that’s a song.

You can read Taylor’s obituary here.

We’ve gotten to a place where the general public has more or less accepted that medical professionals are the experts in “safety” — in defining it and in providing it — as well as that the concept of safety can not only be objectively defined, but also universally defined. But, once, this wasn’t a given. It was a construction and a shift in belief that took decades of sustained, and sometimes violent, effort.

I’ll get back to that first part, but today I want to focus on the second.

When I returned from fasting — the experience of which I wanted to reflect on and write about here, and maybe still will, as a check in, because a lot happened for me in the month I was gone! — and started to poke around on Instagram again, I admit I forgot my own “best practices” in how I manage my social media consumption. Only a couple of days after Eid, I got sucked into a late-night doomscroll to “catch up.” Even more egregiously, I made the mistake1 of getting involved in a comment thread about the ProPublica report. Now, normally, for the sake of my nervous system, I barely even get involved in comment section on my own more controversial posts, preferring instead for it to be an ecosystem I vaguely tend — i.e., making sure no one is using racist or transphobic language, encouraging and validating people who share vulnerable stories, and sometimes thanking people — rather than direct. But, as hapless as a baby chick who had never crossed these internet streets in my post-Eid state, I commented.

In this case, it was to respond to someone who had disparaged a Black woman on the thread for saying “This is why I advocate for homebirth.” The commenter — a non-Black person of the global majority, from what I can surmise from their comments and their name, at least — had gone on what can really only be labeled as a fairly unhinged tirade, insisting that she should be “held accountable” for offering “medical advice” on the internet, repeatedly demanding, “are you willing to GO ON RECORD as recommending I have a homebirth after a caesarean?”, and most intriguingly to me, declaring “It is objectively true than a VBAC is safer in the hospital than at home.”

Now, okay, maybe I’m just a pavlovian puppy whose ears perk up when they hear the word “objective.” Maybe, deep in my heart, I am still just an overexuberant high schooler clutching a copy of Sophie’s World2 and asking, “does truth exist?” — questions no doubt that preoccupied me largely because I was growing up straddling two cultures that often had very competing ideas of truth, and one of which was trying very hard to sell a version of truth that painted the other as a barbarous villain.

But, as a provider who is often in the position of facilitating people’s medical decision making, actually, I don’t really even ask the question anymore. Is there an “objectively safe decision we can ever attain” is not an interesting question, because the answer is pretty obviously no. Because “safety” is a slippery, subjective term to begin with.

Let’s take the specific claim here: is VBAC objectively safer in a hospital than at home? Well, ACOG certainly thinks so; its Committee on Obstetric Practice considers prior cesarean delivery to be “an absolute contraindication to planned home birth.”3 The rationale behind this recommendation is that in a TOLAC there is a greater risk of uterine rupture — the complete division of all three layers of the uterus — and that access to an operating room and a NICU staff in the event it does happen is necessary. And, indeed, uterine rupture can be a catastrophic event; it carries a 6% chance of fetal loss overall (3% at term) and high morbidity for the birthgiver too: hemorrhage, hysterectomy, cardiac, cerebral, renal, and respiratory complications, and death.4 So yes, immediate access to both an operating room and NICU staff increases the likelihood both baby and birthgiver will survive in this worst case scenario. That fact is objectively true, and it is the definition of safety from which that commenter was working: the safest place is the place most able to respond to the worst case scenario. That’s a perfectly valid measure of safety, and one many people would agree with. It’s also, incidentally, something I make very sure the clients who come to me interested in an HBAC (Homebirth After Caesarean Section) understand. I do not want anyone choosing homebirth, TOLAC or not, without honestly investigating all the contours of their own risk tolerance, priorities, and beliefs..and you can’t do that unless you have the full picture of information, or at least the best approximation of the full picture of information.

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Now, I should say here that reel blew up, which I mainly see as evidence it resonated, or was appreciated, by a lot of people. Over 300,000 people saw it; nearly 20,000 liked it; it gained me a couple of thousand “followers.”1 And I want it to be clear at the outset that its reception was overall positive. So this article that you’re about to read? It isn’t offered as a complaint. It’s isn’t aggrieved or annoyed at being misunderstood. It’s definitely not an attempt to call out the small handful of trolls who show up in everything that is ever posted on the internet. It’s not an offer in bad faith. In fact, it’s offered in a spirit that is opposite of bad faith, because as my very wise friend Michelle points out, “a lot of the time, comments are left unthinkingly, which makes them great examples of the ways we have internalized white supremacy. Being able to name the way in which these narratives show up in our interpersonal relationships and communications and lovingly deconstruct [them] is incredibly powerful and necessary.” And that’s what this article is about. I want to interrupt those dominant narratives — which are, by the way, alive in me as well, because we have all been colonized by them — and pull them out from the vague, dark, amorphous undercurrent where they live. I want to shine a light on them, because we can’t transgress them if we don’t know they are there. And anything we can build to support our thriving, either collectively or individually, must transgress them. Because they are, quite literally, killing us.

So this article, then, is an invitation. It is an invitation to investigate with me how we, sometimes unknowingly and unintentionally, sometimes even despite our very best efforts, reproduce beliefs and value systems that are harming us all. And if you find yourself feeling shame or defensiveness as you read this, I invite you to lean into the gift of your feelings and ask yourself why. What are you compelled to defend, and is it something that actually belongs to you?

What has become clear to me is that in order to do this kind of work, we have to start by reviewing what white supremacy culture actually is. One of the things that was interesting to me about the reception to my recent piece on Ina May Gaskin (both here and, again, on Instagram) is that even in an article that both clearly defined white supremacy culture and carefully described the mechanisms by which it perpetuates, some people will still have a difficult time unbraiding white supremacy culture from extreme and overt acts of white supremacist and nationalist hate. Even in that article, where I explained that if we understand as white supremacy to be the “centering [of] whiteness as the norm, the standard” and refusing to question that centering, thereby allowing white supremacy’s “overt violences” to “continue on, undisrupted,” then Gaskin’s behavior and legacy is steeped in white supremacy, people seemed to still want to insist that Ina May Gaskin couldn’t be a white supremacist because, after all, the Farm ran an ambulance service in the Bronx and sent tofu to Guatemala (really.)

Which begs the question: are those people also then saying American enslavers who claimed to believe they were improving the lives of the Africans they enslaved — “civilizing” them, bringing them to the light of Christianity, supposedly meeting their material needs — weren’t white supremacists? What about colonists who believed they were “advancing” the regions they colonized by bringing new technology, health care, or education to them? White saviorism is actually a foundational principle of white supremacy, folks. It is the band-aid white supremacists slap on the festering wound of structural injustice in order to hide it away. It is a “rescuing” of marginalized people from systems built precisely to marginalize and oppress them, while directly and indirectly supporting and benefitting from those structures in their continued marginalization and oppression. It is an addressing of symptoms rather than a meaningful dismantling of root cause, an impulse that not only helps allow white supremacy to go unchallenged but also to thrive. Gaskin is a white supremacist because instead of using her privilege to fight against the forces that were eradicating the ancestral knowledge of Black Granny Midwives all around her, she used that eradication as the foundation of her own little empire — on stolen land, with stolen knowledge. The underlying assumption was that this was her due, that she had somehow “earned” this acknowledgment and celebration, that this was the natural order of things, that because she wasn’t actively participating in that eradication it was simply backdrop, that because she would later come to speak glowingly of the skills of those eradicated midwives, she was somehow not racist. Likewise, the Farm’s non-profit organization may have felt good about providing aid (if you can call culturally discordant, non ancestral food aid) to Guatemala or the South Bronx, but what meaningful work did it do to address why those areas were so underserved to begin with? Did it question what mechanism allowed them to be in the position of providing charity in the first place? But I digress. This is not actually an article about white saviorism, but! If you do want to read more about this you might start with Teju Cole’s article in the Atlantic or Rafia Zakaria’s Against White Feminism or even Ivan Illich’s “To Hell With Good Intentions,” which seems particularly pertinent here.

So to say it clearly, once again, white supremacy culture is not limited to people in Klan hoods or incels on 4chan or people who use slurs. It is instead, a system of beliefs, values, and norms that we (meaning all of us, white, Black, Brown, indigenous, and so on) are marinating in all the time. And because it is the “water we swim in,” in educator Tema Okun’s famous words, “we absorb [its] messages as individuals and as a collective. As a result, white supremacy culture shapes how we think and act, how we make decisions and behave.” And I’d argue comments section on my “villager” reel shows how that culture plays out in real time, illuminating how even though no one said anything overtly white supremacist, the underlying assumptions and beliefs that shaped their comments, are distinctly white supremacist. In illustrating this, I will employ Okun’s list of white supremacy characteristics, developed during her time working with organizer and teacher Kenneth Jackson Jones and deeply inspired by works of Black feminist thought that she links on her page (and if you’re not familiar with it, I urge you to delve in to that linked page more deeply; it is a treasure trove of information for those seeking to understand and disrupt white supremacy culture).

Why do this? Well, because if we understand the origins of white supremacy culture as a cynical and intentional construction by early settler-colonists in the United States to undermine and disrupt solidarity among the many diverse communities at whose expense they were profiting, then we almost must also understand expanding and strengthening our senses of solidarity and community to be an integral part of how we deconstruct it. And to expand and strength our understanding of community, well, we have to understand how we understand it.

So let’s got for a ride, shall we ?

One of the clearest white supremacy characteristics I saw in the response to my community reel was that of perfectionism. Perfectionism showed up in many different iterations but the clearest example was a hyper focus on the inadequacy of others to live up to people’s expectations of community. Hardly anyone commented to share successful experiences of reciprocal service and care. No one chimed in to say that it was when they realized that mutuality must be the center of any village that their community building efforts took off. Instead, commenter after commenter complained that they had served others but that their efforts had not been reciprocated. It could be argued, to be sure, that this was in response to my own framing of the reel; it does start, after all, with the statement “having a village is not the same as having servants.” So perhaps it’s not surprising that there would be dozens of comments about people feeling like others expected them to be servants. But much more time of the total video was spent detailing all the ways in which how, in a true village, people give and receive according to their capacity in different seasons of life — and, importantly, how even if this doesn’t represent an effortless way of life, it represents a life that feels easier and more meaningful. So I think it’s telling that the part about people expecting service received exponentially more attention than the positive elements of building, serving, being supported by, and living alongside one’s village.

What I found to be a consistent and glaring omission in most of these comments was how people concluded that the other people in their communities weren’t willing to serve. Okun argues that, in its most common iteration, perfectionism manifests in people “talk [ing] to others about the inadequacies of a person or their work without ever talking directly to them.” And what I kept wondering, over and over again, is whether this perception of one-sidedness had ever been addressed with the so-called “takers” to whom my commenters so consistently referred. It was unclear to me whether any of the aggrieved “givers” had ever expressed their feelings to the people in question, or ever even directly asked for help. Did they sit down and call in their friends? Did they offer opportunities for their friends to make it right? How often did they share their vulnerabilities and admit that they were in a season where they required service, or state clearly and directly what they needed? (Spoiler alert: my guess would be that, for the vast majority of commenters, this kind of honest relational repair was never attempted because fear of conflict is another white supremacy characteristic.).

Here’s a really good example of an exchange that illustrates that:

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My invocation was actually, to me, a sort of casual one. I mentioned her only to point to her as the midwife who has probably contributed most to the popularization of this narrative (though she herself, I think, mostly inherited it from obstetrician Grantly Dick-Read; more on that later). Her transphobia and racism, I thought, was common knowledge and relatively uncontroversial for an audience reading in 2025. But, I was wrong. For a not insubstantial number of commenters, the two slides of ten involving Gaskin were the major takeaway of the entire piece. Many requested more information because they didn’t know about her “dark side.” I lost a lot of followers. One announced their departure as being because “midwives don’t shit on each other, especially an elder.”

And it occurred to me, then, that it was probably worth writing in a little more detail about the hero-worship around Gaskin, a worship that has apparently persisted despite her transphobia and white supremacy being well known for at least the last decade, and allegations around her and her husband’s Farm becoming more and more public in recent years as well. It occurred to me, too, that critically examining this hero-worship is particularly important right now, when more details about the harms of the Freebirth Society are coming to light (hear my speak on that here; and read about it yourself here), and in the wake of the tremendous loss of Black midwife Janell Green Smith because, in fact, all of these threads are connected. That people can still herald Gaskin uncritically as the “mother of modern midwifery” is emblematic of a culture that also allows grifters to make 12 million dollars off of vulnerable birthgivers (even as they play a role in the deaths of their babies), and whose accumulated stressors contribute to the deaths of Black birthgivers.

Because the fact of the matter is, even the paradigm that inspired me to write the piece — that we must transcend pain and fear in birth — is at it roots a colonial-capitalist, white supremacist belief, one that rests in centuries of false dichotomies between “civilized” and “primitive” birthgivers. And we need to, as a community, interrogate those roots before we accept them as fact. We cannot grow liberatory futures from rotten roots; and so we need to trace our roots deep down and face them.

So let’s.

A hero for w(h)om(b)?

I want to establish something at the outset. Almost every comment regarding Gaskin on that post, which to me can be interpreted as a marker of who has a stake in the narrative around her, was made by people who were, at the very least, white presenting. And I will admit here that my own blithe assumption that my mention of her could be casual speaks to a larger truth: if Gaskin was ever a hero, it was to very specific people. I personally did not feel like I was “shitting” on an “elder” in that post, because she was never part of my midwifery lineage. Many Black midwives expressed similar sentiments after controversy erupted after Gaskin more or less blamed Black birthgivers for their own racial disparities in a talk in 2017 (I’ll discuss this more later); they did not have to grapple with one of their heroes falling, because she never was one.

I first picked up Spiritual Midwifery, Ina May Gaskin’s 1975 book, as a young woman voraciously searching for any and all literature on homebirth that I could find. I was an academic who had first started reading about the history of midwifery academically, but eventually began consuming books about it from a more personal perspective, as I began to fantasize about becoming pregnant and having my own homebirth (and, later, of leaving academia to become a midwife myself). But even as her so-called “target audience,” Gaskin held very little resonance or inspiration for me. I could barely get through Spiritual Midwifery; I also found myself uninspired by her follow-up, Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth (which remains in the top ten bestsellers of pregnancy and birth related books on Amazon even today). What I did read of both was read with a sort of distant anthropological curiosity. And why wouldn’t I feel that distance? It so clearly wasn’t for me. The pictures and stories were all of white hippies. They walked past cows on a farm in labor. Their reality couldn’t have seemed less relevant to mine, a biracial Pakistani who would eventually be giving birth in New York City. I intuitively found myself turning away from stories where white midwives helped white women transcend their brain to “surrender” to their bodies, where white men telling their white wives how marvelous and sexy they were was the only thing that allowed their cervices to open. Something about it, though I’m not sure I could have articulated it at the time, left a bad taste in my mouth. Besides, I knew enough about the history to know that while Ina May Gaskin and her clearly high friends were having orgasmic births on their unregulated birth center, Black midwives were being villainized and regulated-to-eradication all around them (more on this in just a moment).

When people say, “we can’t deny the powerful and positive impacts she’s had,” I wonder, who is “we?” Is Ina May my elder simply because I practice in the United States, and she has indubitably influenced midwifery in this country? Do we assume I couldn’t exist as a midwife in the way I exist as a midwife if she didn’t? An if that’s the definition of an elder, is J. Marion Simms, the obstetrician who performed dozens of experimental surgeries on Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy — the women he enslaved — also my elder? I do, after all, use his speculum routinely (although a good half of my clients now do their own screening for cervical cancer!).1 Where is the line, and who gets to tell me where it lies? What do I owe the people who came before me, and to which people do I owe it?

To be said more plainly: white heroes for white people are not heroes for everyone, and I think white people tend to forget that. 2 That everyone assumes that whiteness is the center.

And this is part of why, I think, people might experience my calling Ina May Gaskin a “white supremacist” as offensive, as some kind of intense, slanderous insult: to them, a white supremacist wears a white hood and cites replacement theory and uses slurs. White supremacists lurk on Nazi message boards and try to get books about the history of enslavement banned and openly admit that they see a Black pilot they hope, “boy, I hope he’s qualified,” or say on-air that“stupid and unskilled Mexicans” should do the menial labor white Americans don’t want to do. White supremacists don’t travel to Guatemala to help people after earthquakes (even if they then steal knowledges from those people and then peddle it is its own), right? White supremacists don’t host Black Panthers on their farms to teach them about midwifery.3

But in actuality to be white supremacist is as simple as to center whiteness as the norm, the standard. It does not mean you have to be overtly racist. It simply requires you be complicit in it, to not question it, to refuse to dismantle some of the foundations on which the overt violences can continue on, undisrupted.

A little context

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“This is something we do every year on the solstice, along with putting away our fall books, taking out and reading our winter ones, and hanging up our ‘welcome winter’ banner; we make sugar cookies to then pair with the other cookies I make independently (this year it was chewy molasses cookies — our mailman's favorite! — and chocolate-hazelnut crinkle cookies) that we hand out to various people in our lives. This tradition started despite the fact that I find working with sugar cookie to be incredibly frustrating with children and the whole project is an exercise in deep breathing for me. But Wren LOVES it, so it perpetuates.”

That I wrote “this is something we do every year on the solstice” makes it sound like an intractably enduring ritual, perhaps a laughable sentiment for someone who had, after all, only been a parent for five years. And yet it is true that when I looked back, trying to compose this post and pinpoint the exact origins of this tradition, there are pictures of me rolling out sugar cookies with a newly 3 year old Wren (where 7-month old Illy is in these pictures is unclear), and perhaps it was fair to say that anything that had endured for 50% of my parenting tenure, at that point mostly defined by the impermanence and chaos of early childhood, would seem like a constant.

I don’t, not in pictures and not in LiveJournal, ever record how it came to be that Wren insisted we share the cookies we made, not just within our little extended family but with everyone around us, an endeavor that became increasingly ambitious each year as she, and then her siblings, added people to list: not just our mailman and friends next door, but also the neighbors we rarely interacted with but whose holiday decorations they loved, or the tellers at the our community bank, or the guy at the bodega. I don’t know the explanation for it, really, if it was an idea she got from a book, like so many other of our family traditions (like the blintzes we’ve made on the spring equinox ever since 5 year old Wren read this book, or the “pumpkin party” we threw for several years after 6 year old Wren read this one, a tradition I happily brought back this year when she was home for her college’s fall break). I don’t remember if it was an episode of some cartoon or another that gave her the idea, or if it was, simply, the genes she and I share, the legacy of being from two cultures known for loving you, aggressively, with food.1. I do know that this interplay between me and my children — that they had some big, ambitious, generous idea; that I leaned all the way into it — feels to me as good as any metaphor for my experience of early parenting. They had no sense of the limitations of the world, did not conceive of a world that wasn’t good and giving and abundant, and I — because I wanted that world too — stubbornly refused to dampen their sense of it prematurely. Because the truth was, they were showing me, every day, how much it was possible.

And so I did this thing, this thing that kind of frustrated me, this thing I found needlessly finicky and fussy, and year after year wondered what of this process they would hold on, what of it would remain: memories of the joy of giving out the cookies, or memories of the mother who, occasionally, resembled a cartoon with steam coming out of her ears as she threw a cookie cutter across the room and announced this moose is too hard and we will not be making any more moose today.

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That I ever became as good a cook as I am is a bit of an improbability. I was, after all, someone who spent the better part of my formative years (fourteen years actively, and then many subsequent years obliquely) struggling with anorexia. This is where I’m inclined to credit those genes again, or perhaps it was my annoying immigrant first daughter need to absolutely excel at everything, or maybe it was simply, that I spent an inordinate amount of time a poor student and needed to figure out how to make the best out of a grad student stipend. Or perhaps we could reduce it — though if you’ve read my last Substack, you’ll know is not a tendency I prefer — to my disordered eating, the classic textbook case of wanting to feed others well even when you yourself are not eating, the decoy of it, the vicarious pleasure of it, and also, simply, the control of it, a desire to make sure I was optimizing what I did consume. Whatever the perfect storm of factors that make me me, cooking is one of those things. In my early twenties nothing made me happier than adding a new vegetarian cookbook to my collection, or sitting down for my weekly meal planning with all those books spread out in front of me, a habit I’ve continued ever since. This integral part of me only got exponentially stronger once I experienced the primal, almost manic satisfaction of watching my own children eat well; I joked for years that I homeschooled partially just so I would have the time to cook my children hot breakfasts every morning. I have spent years cycling through making easily acquirable things from scratch — bread, granola bars, yogurt, fermented mayonnaise, kombucha, bone broth, and on and on and on. I am never happier than when a crowd of teens sits around my table and talk about my saag paneer as a “religious experience.” When Wren asked for a going-away-to-Smith party I, watching with no small amount of growing dread as the client I had thought would go well before the date we had chosen continued to stay pregnant, spent 4 days leading up to the party meticulously prepping dish after dish in small increments so that most things would still be home-cooked for the 60+ guests we had invited should I find myself called to a birth.2

But I am not a fussy cook. You will not find me slicing white potatoes and sweet potatoes with a mandolin to precisely layer them in a beautiful Le Creuset. (Honestly, I didn’t even know how to spell Le Creuset.). I have made pies every single March 14th since a very young Ilan was enraptured with the book “Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi” but you will never, ever see me laying down a beautiful lattice crust or cutting out leaf-shaped decorations for the top. No thank you to any recipe calling for a Garni. My food will taste delicious but it is unlikely to be plated in a beautiful way. I cook with the brute force of my inherited Italian grandma arms and a trust in the alchemy of spices thrown into a bubbling pot with abandon.

Sugar cookie dough, on the other hand — particularly when gluten free, which in our house it had to be for well over a decade — is an unforgiving, persnickety thing. It requires advance planning, a light touch. My signature recipe also involves zesting — zesting! One of the fussiest things I can ever be convinced to do — because I cannot make a bland anything, and so my sugar cookies dough is fragrant with just a touch of orange and cardamom. It is not a piece of garlic to be wacked with the back of a knife and peeled and chopped, or a pizza dough to be kneaded well, or a stew you can throw together at the last minute from the odds and ends in your fridge and whose flavors you can taste and adjust, over and over until you get it right. It asks for care, and patience.

I don’t know about you, but care and patience and a light touch are not things I associate with young children. I never set out to make Pinterest-worthy cookies with my children; it mattered me not at all what they looked like. It was simply the effort involved in getting them to exist at all, in a way that satisfied the children and didn’t waste money in an already cash-strapped, two-graduate-students-with-two-kids household, that often overstimulated me.

In 2012, later on in the entry I quoted above, I wrote,

We bake a lot (usually bread, both quick and yeasted, or drop cookies, and sometimes things like homemade lara bars or granola bars) with little conflict, but sugar cookies, man, they are the worst. The kids actually made the dough itself almost entirely on their own. That wasn't the tricky part. But when it came time to roll out and cut the cookies, it didn't go so smoothly. I didn't chill the dough long enough — the kids were too excited to wait as long as they needed to — so that added this weird tension to the whole project (have you ever dealt with too-soft sugar cookie dough? OMG WORST!). Wren kept covering her eyes and yelling "I can't look!" every time it came time to extract the shaped cookies (LOL). Then I definitely lost my temper with Ilan for grabbing (and then throwing!) dough. It was ugly. I'm not a yeller at all, normally, but I definitely raised my voice then, and it totally scared the crap out of both the kids. I don't know when I will stop cringing thinking about that moment and I'm not entirely sure why I am recording it here, because it just makes me sick to my stomach to recall it. Such a bummer, those moments when you are trying to do something special and it all goes wrong. I feel like that was the story of my childhood (having nice family time be ruined by some kind of tension -- usually fights between my parents) so it stings when it happens for my kids. Luckily my kids seem to have forgiven me. And handing out cookies —to six sets of neighbors, the women at our bank around the corner (who found it incredibly charming), and the mailman and UPS guy (along with a little gift) — remains Wren's favorite part of the season. Her loving that so much, in turn, is my favorite part of the season. So it's worth the challenges. But next year I might make a little extra dough (so hard when you're already spending a small fortune on butter and other baking supplies! but probably worth it) to just hand off to Ilan to roll and play with on his own (even though I guess he will be 3.5 then, which is a very different age than 2.5. But still probably young enough to not want to be too deliberate about making sugar cookies). And I'm going to look into sanding sugar shakers that are more manageable for small kids who don't exactly have a light touch when it comes to shaking. Maybe these things will make it more calm!

This was wishful thinking. Four years later, in 2016, now with 9, 6, and 3 year olds, I was back on the same topic. The entry begins with me admitting to the fact that I called out of my hospital job just to make the solstice cookies with the kids, so overwhelmed with the unforgiving schedule and secondary trauma was I (a subject that could result in its own long Substack post). Then I continue:

So, here's the thing. I actually HATE making cut out cookies with three children.

It's so hard! They handle the dough too much and it gets soft and then it's hard to work with. Someone's reindeer's foot falls off, and then while I'm trying to help, Josie is under the table sneaking fistfuls of dough like she's fooling anyone. I am TOTALLY irritable throughout the whole thing. I even threw some of the more intricate cookie cutters across this room (THIS ONE IS TOO HARD! AND THIS ONE!!!) this year. I mean, I was laughing, and the kids were laughing, so I think I probably didn't traumatize them, but...still. Maybe this is a stupid tradition? Maybe they will find themselves on a therapist's couch someday, saying "you know, she really didn't like making sugar cookies because it's so fussy, but she did it anyway because we did and she loved us, and whhhhhhhhhhhyyyyyy did she have to be a martyr?" or whatever people say on therapists' couches. But I hope my sense of humor about hating it prevents that. Or that the sugar washes it all away from their memories.

This solstice, when my three teens and their toddler siblings were rolling out dough, I asked them, too casually, do you remember how frustrated I would get some years?

They all laughed. “Yes,” Ilan and Jo chorused, definitively.

“And you always got angriest with me because I just couldn’t stop over-handling the dough,” Wren laughed.

“Well I wasn’t angry,” I said sheepishly. Then I repeated myself. “I was never angry,” I said again.

“Oh, we know,” they laughed, and then the conversation was over. They kept busily rolling, pressing cutters into dough. They didn’t need help. No one’s reindeer’s foot fell off, and no one covered their eyes and yelled “I CAN’T LOOK!” as I pulled up a cookie cutter shaped like a wolf and tried to transfer the resulting wolf-shaped dough onto a tray without its masochistically thin tail breaking off. There was no toddler sneaking fistfuls of dough into their mouth under the table. Even Hanif, not yet 3, was easily managed because he was the only one I needed to supervise, and, in truth, because after fifteen years of making sugar cookies, I have grown up too. Both my technique and my perspective are different.

And the conversation was over because they had nothing left to say, and I had nothing else I needed to hear, because it was so obvious — from their body language and the tones of their voices and their laughter and the way they looked at me with nothing but pure affection in their faces — that what they had said was true. They did know I had never been angry. There were no bad feelings, just a gentle sort of bemusement that the process had been so exasperating for me. They did not begrudge me the many years I’d posted pictures of them with the hashtag #keepcalmandrolloutthemotherfuckingcookiedough on Instagram. This would not be another resentment for the proverbial therapist’s couch. They are of course only 18 and 15 and 12, now, so who knows: there’s time for it to become one. And presumably there will be no shortage of other little resentments, micro-traumas, residues to explore on that couch; in fact, it’s entirely likely it will be precisely the things that I’m unaware of that will constitute those explorations. But, for now at least, persisting in rolling out the motherfucking cookie dough will not be one of them.

*****

I want to tell this story partially because I want to tell all the parents of young children See? it’s going to be okay.

But this also isn’t a story about how, at the end of the day, all that matters when it comes to parenting is good intentions. I’m not here to tell you that it was because my intentions were in the right place that my kids are now able to remember my occasional temper tantrums while rolling out sugar dough with affection. So many harms to children are rooted in the best of intentions; academic pressure, over scheduling, forcing children to eat, even spanking are often justified by parents as tactics to try to ensure they grow up to have more opportunities than their parents or be “successful” or healthy,” to understand consequences and respect authority or follow rules, to make sure they don’t “grow up soft” in a world that will eat them alive. (It goes without saying, of course, that I do not condone corporal punishment; and it is well established these justifications are misguided.) No one — or, next to no one I’d argue — intends to fuck up their children, to attend to the tasks of parenting with bad intentions, but children get harmed anyway. Because parents lack structural support. Because parents are isolated, and overworked, or don’t have strong parenting models. Because parents have their own unhealed childhood traumas. And because, for most of us, parenting is conceived of within a context that has naturalized domination as its foundation.

In bell hooks’ masterwork All About Love, she writes about how love requires not only intention but action and, equally importantly, justice, or divesting from the “patriarchal thinking…which says the powerful have the right to rule over the powerless and can use any means to subordinate them.” She defines the act of all love — romantic, familial, parental, platonic — as a series of characteristics: “care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust,” as well as “honest and open communication.” I have tried, intentionally, to use this as a foundation for my relationship with my children, as the root of nurturing deep, resilient connection with them. But even if I were to offer that foundation up as an important principle, the specifics of what it will look like in lived reality, for different parents, will vary based on the temperaments involved (both yours and theirs), and the histories, the different intergenerational wounds and strengths, the things your own parents did wrong and right. The relationships, or lack thereof, and supports (or lack thereof) that surround you. The scripts in our heads about who we are and what we’re worth. Because our relationship with our children both exists in an ecosystem and is itself its own ecosystem that we tend to, together.

This is the problem with the parenting industrial complex, of course: it presents parenting as if it is a recipe for cookies, and implies that if you follow the instructions, you will come out with a perfectly baked reindeer without a broken foot, or a snowman without a thumbprint in its center. It rests on the idea that parenting is not an ecosystem, but an outcome, something we can control or manipulate like dough.

But children aren’t cookies, or outcomes, or blank slates we get to write the future on. They are human beings. And I think the best things happen when we remember that, when we relate to them as fellow human beings, remember that though they may be in a different developmental stage and learning different things, they are not different in that they are learning. What I mean to say is, when we remember that we their parents are learning humans too. It does nothing for humans who are learning, and who will be inevitably imperfect in those many and unending lessons of life, to perform some versions of ourselves that already know, that are no longer in process, that are authorities, or that are perfect and have it all figured out. We don’t, not actually, help model a viable version of humanity by hiding that we are human. In fact, that threatens to do harm because if we’re performing perfection because we aspire to cultivate a particular type of child, we are indirectly putting pressure on our children again, to “prove” that we have followed the recipe correctly. To say nothing of the pressure we put on ourselves to embody some supernatural capacity.

So if there’s anything I am offering with this story about cookies, let it not be a recipe. Let it instead be an invitation, as always, to return to love. In All About Love, hooks defines love as “the will to extend one’s self to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” In other words, love is the practice of constructing a safe space for other humans to grow into themselves. And this is what I want you to take away from this little story about cookies, the image I want to leave you with: the reciprocity of it. This is not a story of a mother extending herself overmuch, of doing something she didn’t like because her kids wanted her to. The cookie tradition was borne of a belief my kids had in a world that shared and loved, abundantly, with one’s neighbors, without any sense of limitation. The cookie tradition was borne of a desire for me, their so-called parent, not just to make that world real for them — but to make it real for myself. I wanted to believe in it, too. It wasn’t just that in the sprinkly messy magic I was trying to construct a safe space for them to grow into themselves. It was that they — in their invitation into their world, and in their acceptance of me in my own messiness as I tried to meet them there — that they were creating the context for me to grow into myself, too.

With all my hope that in 2026 you and I and all of us can help each other keep doing just that,

Robina

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My most listened to song in 2006 was “Sadie,” by Joanna Newsom. Or, at least, that’s how I remember it. I didn’t have a Spotify wrapped back then to verify it for me; I listened to music on an iPod I kept in a gray case with a blue stripe down the center. I wouldn’t have a smartphone for another seven years. I didn’t even see my first smartphone for another year, when the midwife who showed up to my birth used one.

I entered 2006, just about twenty years ago, a newlywed. I had spent the better part of 2005 planning an epic, many-day-long Pakistani wedding that I hadn’t even wanted. What I wanted was a baby. Andy, perhaps rightfully unwilling to jeopardize the wrath and judgment of my family, had offered me a proposal first. We naively thought we’d elope, then have a BBQ in Prospect Park. It didn’t happen that way. By the end of 2005 I was so exhausted from planning, then living through, a weeks’ worth of wedding activities I was no long interested in getting pregnant. I had enjoyed the whole experience more than I thought I would, but I needed a break from big projects.

2006 became, instead, a year marked by extremes. I spent the first half of the year feeling possibly the most brilliant and sexiest and funniest and most inspired I have ever felt. But I spent the second half listening to Joanna Newsom’s “Sadie,” over and over again — in between my other runners-up for songs of the year: Wolf Parade’s “Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts,” Stars’ “Your Ex-Lover is Dead,” and Death Cab for Cutie’s “Marching Bands of Manhattan” — on rooftops in Lahore where I looked out at the skyline mute and disassociated, and on buses in India where I considered the fact that it looked likely I might get married and divorced within 9 months with a sort of removed disappointment, and then back in Brooklyn, where I read 19th century novels about tragic heroines on hand-me-down couches in an unfinished sunroom and tried to sort through the pieces of what had just happened.

Bless those who sicken below, I would pray in my head along with the song, And bless those who have chosen so. Because it was important to me that I was choosing.

*****

What makes a year?

I rang in 2025 with a birth that miraculously happened early enough in the morning on New Year’s Eve that I was still able to nap, wake up, write, and participate in all of our annual New Year’s Eve traditions (which remain some of the most important moments for me of any year, and which I’ve written about here and here) afterwards. The birth was also, miracle upon miracle, supported by a doula whose own birth I had attended on New Year’s Eve six years earlier, on the last day of 2019, the last year I would ever ring in not having lived through a global pandemic. During most of this birth, the last-day-of-2024 birth, my client’s toddler was awake, and she, who I had never seen in any state other than smiling, kept smiling. But she perched on the edge of her bed as if plastered there, her toes curling through each contraction. When her toddler whimpered because she could no longer nurse him through them, she smiled and spoke soothingly, but I could feel the desperate effort of it. It was just after midnight. The toddler was tired, his eyelids heavy, but his mother was not asleep, and so he wasn’t either.

“I know you guys don’t really love this idea generally,” I whispered to her husband from where I sat on the opposite side of the bed, “but I kind of think this might one of those rare moments where you employ….” my voice became even quieter “a screen.”

“Yes,” my client affirmed, immediately.

So he did. He curled up on the bed with his son, playing videos of tractors on the phone he held in his hand. Tractor videos, more specifically, that were almost like a runway show for heavy machinery: simply tractors driving, in a line, on a field, with someone announcing their specs. My client’s husband repeated these to their son, whose eyes slowly began closing to the soporific words of “forty-six horsepower…” “two-thousand hitch capacity….” “six hundred and eight pounds…” and so on.

Every so often my client would look at me and silently mouth, “is he asleep?” and I would answer with my eyes and various hand and head gestures. We went on like this for a while, because her son’s eyes would occasionally still flutter open, so riveted was he now by the tractors. Occasionally he would sleepily whisper something about horsepower himself. When I finally felt confident that he was deeply asleep, I smiled and nodded my head. Her shoulders relaxed. And when the next contraction came, she, who had barely moaned or breathed through a contraction so far, opened her mouth and positively roared.

“MOTHERFUCKER!” she announced. The toddler didn’t so much as stir.

Then she got up from where she had been perched for the last hour and a half since I had been there, marched to the birth pool, got in, and gave birth to the daughter she delivered into her own hands. Later, I’d take a picture of her, naked in the pool, with a flute of champagne in her hand and vernix under her nose. A document of a self so completely her own. A capture of the very best life has to offer. A glimpse of the world we could have, uninhibited and whole and completely and totally built around love. A story that was her’s, and her daughter’s, but also her son’s, because the story would have been different without him, couldn’t have existed without him, because this version of herself couldn’t have either.

What makes a year? When I think of 2025, of course, as when I think of any of my years of the last ten or twelve or more, I think so much of the births I attended in them. This January there were births bookending a bout of the flu, the second in a wild snowstorm. In February, a client pushed out her baby into her husband’s hands when I was stuck in a cab at a red light I would myself had run, exactly one block from the client’s house, less than a half hour from her call, just two hours after she woke up with her first cramp. This was a client who had a long, heavily intervened-with first birth and had been separated afterwards by a definitely unnecessary procedural NICU stay and when I rushed into her house, she sat on the toilet, her baby in her arms, her eyes round, her face aglow, laughing. Her husband had blood on his shirt, and I said, “I guess you’re a midwife now.” In the Spring there were births longer than expected, where I stroked hair and rubbed feet and reassured; births where I helped older brothers open pouches of dried mango and giggled when husbands were soaked by malfunctioning pool hoses; births that involved days of waiting and IV antibiotics given in my office while my family celebrated Eid upstairs. When I came downstairs in my lehenga, my client’s eyes widened, and she was distracted as we talked. “You look like a princess,” she finally said, and I laughed. There were summer births in the quiet of the morning and the middle of the day and in the deep dark of night. Fall births where clients looked me dead in the eye and said, “I don’t know if it’s just some of the trauma I’ve seen in my life, but I am really having trouble coping with this,” and I said “I get it,” and I did. There were babies with shocks of hair and babies with big blue eyes and babies who came out stunned and need coaxing and babies who yelled immediately as if to say what the fuck was that?! There were babies who curled their toes against mine on the floor where we did the newborn exam. There was love, love, love.

What makes a year? The books I read, 43 this year, two more than the year before, books I talked about with teens around my kitchen table and tweens around my kitchen table and books I read alone on a cold beach, weeping. The songs I listened to, curated on the monthly playlists I made, some from a place of uncertainty and grief, some from giddy excitement, some just because it was something I promised myself I would do and so I did. There was the song Josie sang as a duet in a musical she helped write in June. There were the birthday candles Hanif blew out, surprising us all because we didn’t know he knew how, and the way all the big kids and teens and adults around him cheered as if he were a celebrity when he did; and the birthday candles I blew out surround by my children and so, so many families and friends and the way I looked up and recognized I am so loved with pure clarity; the birthday candles Wren blew out, which I only got to see in video form for the first time in eighteen years. There was the meticulous database of college dorm room items I created, then checked off, over the course of months. There was unpacking all of the items on that database with bubbly anticipation, and then the feeling of dread when we left them all with her in her dorm room and drove away. There were the meals I made — the overnight macaroni and cheese I made for Wren’s going-to-college party; the lamb and lentils rice I brought to a postpartum friend; the kheer I brought to another; the plate of grapes and strawberries and cheese I fed Ilan when he was sick, remembering what it was like to feed him when he was a toddler; the ragu I brought my father after his triple bypass, beaming under my mask as he ate it happily. There was the week I ate nothing but chocolate covered graham crackers after Wren went to college, because I had no appetite but plenty of tears to soothe. There was filling community fridges and walking to raise money for UNRWA and smiling at Wren from where I was handing out samosa and she was doing childcare at a “we take care of us” fundraising event for Palestine, and staying up late into the night on the phone with my comrade Kulani working through how to distribute $7,000 we had collected in one weekend for people who had been affected by SNAP cuts, and trying to craft just the perfect words to inspire people to donate different families in Gaza.

There were words, so many words, and yet nowhere near as many as I would have written if I had wanted to, and nowhere near as many I would have written, perhaps, had I stuck with the version of life that 2006 self thought she was working toward. There was taking myself on a writing retreat for a whole 48 hours and remembering what it is like to be alone, and have time that is yours, and Andy and Hanif joining me for one night of it, the way we three sat on the bed with Hanif watching the elevated subway move across the Rockaways from the large window of our hotel room before we got breakfast and they left me to my writing the next morning. There was the wind of the ferry whipping me in the face the next day, taking me home again.

There was bickering and crying; there were irritable, short-tempered answers to questions; there were apologies; there were desperate texts I sent to friends and my sisters saying the load on me is too much for one human being. There were the mornings after night births where I sat headachy and bleary once the coffee wore off and nights where I stayed up late prepping homeschooling classes knowing I would be tired in the morning. For a second full year in a row, there was staring aghast, again and again, at any given day’s worst thing I had ever seen. There was rage and despair and grief and cynicism and hopelessness and defiance. So much rage and despair and grief and cynicism and hopelessness and defiance.

What makes a year? What makes us remember what we remember, and forget what we forget? By what process do we hold on to things, and by what processes do we let them go?

*****

I didn’t enter 2006 at the end of 2005 knowing it was going to be a year of tumult. We traveled to Panama in January for the honeymoon we’d delayed until after the semester ended, and we rode in the back of a truck down the coast to a small collection of huts by the Pacific Ocean and read in the sun and by candelight, cuddled up together under mosquito nets. We walked across an unmarked border into Costa Rica just for fun. I ate dinner with the Australian’s proprietor’s rescued squirrel money in my lap. One afternoon, walking up to the path through the forest to get to the outhouse, howler monkeys aggressively threw almonds at Andy. I listened to Jose Gonzales’ “Heartbeats” over and over again as we rode a speeding bus up into the mountains. The bus had curtains that were closed and I rocked as if in the bowels of a ship on a stormy ocean. I returned home sun kissed and unfurled and in love and ready for my last semester of doctoral course work.

But as we approached the summer, when Andy and I had planned a trip back to the subcontinent with much of my family and several of our friends, I began to attend to my life with a drive and appetite that verged on frenetic. I recognized this vaguely as a warning, could taste the shadow of dread deep down somewhere in its tangles. But mostly I welcomed it, because I liked being that version of myself. I liked baking cookies for my classes like a sweet fifties housewife and then challenging my classmates passionately in a conversation about Samuel Delany while they ate them. I liked making out with people (“everyone in the English department is in an open relationship,” I would remark hyperbolically to a philosophy student), and figuring out how to visit a friend halfway around the world who really needed a friend to visit even if it meant flying into an airport three countries away and then taking both a train and a bus to get to her, only to spend 4 days there before I had to go back and do the whole thing in reverse. I liked the conversations I fostered with my entirely global majority students in my public college classes and having them whoop “oh you’re GOOD!” when I synthesized some of the ideas they were sharing. I liked winning fellowships and going to organizing meetings and academic talks and starting a food blog and working on multiple journal articles at once, whose first drafts I wrote in pencil on legal pads even though it took more time because it made the writing that much better to have that extra step of editing. I liked going out dancing and hanging out in dive bars talking late into the night and throwing parties with delicious food. I liked feeling like a force. Feeling like a force was an antidote to an existence that had, at certain formative moments, been defined by feeling forced, by being acted upon. I found it deeply pleasurable to be this self who refused to make myself small and quiet and polite and inoffensive, who didn’t carry herself like an apology for things she hadn’t even done. That small and quiet and polite and inoffensive self had chased perfection to prove that she was worth something despite the violences that had been enacted on her, but this one wasn’t performing. This one knew she was worth something, was relishing all life had to offer, all she could do. Could it be argued this was still, in and of itself, a reaction to trauma? Yes, of course. This is the trap of trauma: once it happens, wherever you are, there it is.

Is it inherently pathological to find traces of trauma in someone who has experienced trauma? Is there a pure, acceptable state survivors can return to where not everything about them can be seen as the result of what has been done to them? How do we separate all the roots, and can healthy things grow from rotten ones without being irrevocably tainted?

I think these are questions worth grappling with in a world of abject and constant violences, both interpersonal and structural. But our cultural narratives of trauma don’t engage in these nuances so well. We want neat and tidy answers, diagnoses, logical algorithms. In this age of Instagram therapy influencers and AI therapists everything is reducible, “niched down” and marketed to specific “pain points.” Reducing things makes them feel solvable — and solvable individually. One must only look at their own history, identify which patterns are “unhealthy,” and change them. What is happening historically and systematically, the stories that precede you, the way in which the selves you evolve as you move through a life inflected by trauma are received or rewarded or shunned, the responsibilities we have to each other in preventing violence in the first place, or creating a context where other people can meaningfully heal, don’t matter. This is in fact the framework handed down from what many still consider one of the foundational texts on c-PTSD, which largely paints survivors of traumas as irreparably harmed, and particularly flattens survivors of sexual violence as “addicted to trauma” without any structural analysis of why so many survivors are revictimized (here is an excellent overview of the many problems with The Body Keeps the Score, though the fact that von Bessel has been accused of being an abuser himself is glossed over).

But if something is not unambiguously “healthy,” does it mean it’s definitively unhealthy? Was my behavior that semester pathologic or not? Would we accept it if I said it was neither, and both?

In the Spring of 2006 I was walking on an edge, and I knew it. I knew that all it took was the right angle to see some of the way I moved through the world as worrisome, even as I felt happy and high achieving. I was well aware I could skate through a patch of thinner ice and be plunged into darker waters. I didn’t really understand why I was growing increasingly triggered at the idea of returning to Lahore when I had never experienced the city, nor my home in it, as anything other than as familiar and safe, but I knew that I was. In the weeks approaching our trip, I often imagined myself collapsing in the gulley outside our front door, screaming or convulsing, nose dripping blood. I knew these fantasies were improbable, even ridiculous. I still feared, or hoped, or both, that they would come true: that something would happen, something huge and confronting and visceral.

But of course, nothing did. When we arrived, I did not fall apart. My nose did not bleed. My bones did not crumble. My mouth stayed shut. I stood standing. I would, I suddenly realized, have to survive my own solidity.

It was somehow this realization that cracked the ice. I sank into the dark deep, receding into myself, drifting far away from everyone else. There was something here I had to grieve, some acceptance that there might never be any reckoning, no one huge moment that would represent the enormity of what had happened to me. My body would not simply lay my pain bare without my having to find the words. This was it. This was the mundane truth of trauma: it would just be there. I reckoned with this with complete disregard for anything around me. The more distant I became, the more my marriage dissolved; Andy, young and with no understanding of c-PTSD, had no idea what was happening, only that he was alone in a completely unfamiliar and overwhelming place with multiple friends we had agreed to host and that his wife had turned as remote and inscrutable as an iceberg. I could barely be bothered to care. I turned my headphones up, and silently murmured the lines of “Sadie” to myself, over again and over, instead.

This is an old song, these are old blues
And this is not my tune, but it’s mine to use

I did this until I stitched those words into all the crevices of my body, into each of my cells, until apparently, the whoosh of my heart beating carried its echoes too.

*****

What makes a year? How do I tell the story of 2006 in 2025? What version of myself will I become in 2026, and what is the story I’ll tell about her in 2045? I’m so far removed from that self back in 2006, who was not yet a mother, not yet a midwife, and yet so many things about her are still the things I like best about myself. What self have I become watching the world start over and over and over again, witnessing all the ways no one moment is one moment, no one person is one person? Now I watch people give birth not just to their babies but to new versions of themselves, in one single transcendent second where you can feel time lurch and shudder and bend in on to itself, but also over days and weeks and months, as they uncover the ways who they’ve always been will intertwine with the selves their children call them into being. Until they can no longer disentangle all the roots.

This is one of the things I love best about birth: it doesn’t make us choose. It doesn’t force us to be okay in order to be okay. It lays it all bare without pretense and without apology and without us needing to oversimplify anything. People might try to fit it into one neat and tidy narrative but it always resists. Birth is everything all at once, discrepant things simultaneously: pain and ease, exhaustion and energy, work and rest, fear and courage. We are simultaneously smiling placid mothers and ones that scream MOTHERFUCKER at the top of our lungs. It is not for nothing that its driving hormone at once contracts us down with excruciating, grinding force and also melts us into an infinite, expansive love that defies all sense of borders.

It was completely improbable that Andy and I would come home in the fall of 2006 and repair enough that I would begin to imagine us or myself as anywhere near healthy enough to start thinking about a baby again. After all, my disordered eating on the subcontinent had gotten so bad that my cycles were getting irregular again. After all, I was hospitalized in October with a kidney infection — an echo of my hedonism the spring before that had traveled through my body all those long, sweaty, bathroom-less hours I had traveled through the subcontinent. After all, there were dozens of logical reasons why having a baby would be ill-conceived: we were students who made little money, we were young and none of our friends were having babies, I was trying to complete a doctorate, we had no insurance, we both obviously needed therapy, and so on.

And yet. I did. I felt myself called, pulled, by some defiant force, impossible to ignore.

I could argue that in moving through a year of extremes, I learned to live in my contradictions. I could argue that that grief needed to be felt in order for me to be ready to move into a new phase in my life and, having done that, I was. Someone else could argue it was all still pathology, just another trauma response.

But we could also argue that the force was just Wren.

*****

Neither me nor Wren remember how old she was the first time I played “Sadie” for her, though we both guess she was around ten. But I remember, vividly, the scene of it. Andy had brought up the song, mentioned that she, a budding songwriter, might like it or be inspired by it.

“It’s about a dog,” he said.

“It’s about a dog,” I agreed, as I searched for a way to stream the song to our speaker. It was dark outside; I think we may have just finished dinner. The other two kids had already left to go do something else. In my memory Andy is doing dishes, or maybe dishes were already done, and he was sitting on the couch, a different green couch than the green couch we have now, but one that doesn’t look that dissimilar in the picture in my mind, even though it was. Wren was still sitting at the table. I was standing, near the counter.

As it played, Wren’s face fell. Her skin turned ashen and her eyes welled up. I’d never seen her react to a song that way. “It’s just…” she faltered “so…sad.” And then she started to cry.

I stared at her. I had never seen her respond to a song this way, ever. And yet in the unfamiliarity of her reaction I recognized something.

It was my own sorrow.

I could have felt guilty, I suppose, but I didn’t. I cannot help what she was transmuted from, in the same way I cannot help what unknown and yet felt sorrows and joys brought me here. It was simply a fact. My body had been hers; my body had sung this old tune, had felt this grief; she had heard it before she had heard it; and it had become hers.

and ‘till then, we pray and suspend / the notion that these lives do never end

This is, I think, the way we hold on to things, and the way we let them go. We do it in all those unanswerable spaces of overlap, of all our many selves, with all our selves together, and in all the ways we aren’t selves at all — just one long story that is our own and yet everyone’s.

Sending you much love for all your beautiful contradictions,

Robina

Dear reader, I neglected to share my November playlist here, but it being a collection of “sad bangers” is in keeping with the theme of discrepant perfection so here it is now.

Speaking of which, my family has been trying to divest from Spotify (here’s a good breakdown of why), but we had trouble with Tidal not working with our speaker system and being buggy in the app. What streaming service have you all turned to? I will take recommendations in the comments!

I became a midwife because I wanted work that I felt had potential to meaningfully change the world for the better, that felt generative in producing alternatives to rather than simply reacting to the oppressive structures around us. Birth and postpartum are such a transformative, literally mind re-wiring moment with such potential to either deepen or explode the narratives we hold. Caring for people through transformation that felt so potent in its possibilities.

Before I was a midwife I was an academic who did a lot of organizing as an “activist.” I felt something was missing - so much of what I was doing felt theoretical. After I had my first baby at home and started mothering her that feeling of something missing deepened but I continued with my PhD. It was after my second homebirth that I looked down at the baby in my arms and suddenly realized, that is the son of a midwife, and everything clicked.

Midwifery, to me, is the perfect intersection of all the things I love. My background in history and theory gives me a really unique framework for understanding the cultural components of clinical practice (because these practices are, after all, not purely “objective”). It is also a way for me to truly embody and actualize my belief in a kinder, more just, more interdependent world.

How do you define professionalism in midwifery?

I think professionalism might mean something different to me than what it means to many in the colonial capitalist context of the United States.

I think in being a care provider it is of the utmost importance to be continually critically questioning yourself - why do you hold the beliefs you do? Are you practicing in a particular way just because a preceptor at some point did and you haven’t grappled with the evidence itself? Do you actually know how to understand evidence - that is, to not simply read the conclusion of a study but understand the limitations of the designs and the questions it’s asking? Are you providing truly neutral informed consent? What biases and assumptions are you bringing to your work and your clients? How is it stopping you from hearing them? Are you internalizing white supremacy and paternalism? What of what you do is necessary and what is not? To me, that’s the kind of professionalism we owe the people we care for. A constant learning and unlearning and relearning, often at their feet.

But I actually reject the idea that midwifery is a “profession” in the conventional sense of the term. It is not just another job. It is a spiritual calling. And it serves a deep need to all communities, in all places and in all times. It’s like entering a current more than choosing a career. In that way I am not guided by a sense of “professionalism” that draws strict boundaries on what the relationship with my clients look like. I am not guided by a defensive medicine paradigm that offers very little real protection to providers and the collateral damage of which is often real harm towards our clients. I do not worry about appearing like a “professional.” think authenticity helps build trust and safety for everyone. What I worry about, how I embody professionalism, is thinking through how I can best serve clients with true integrity and honesty and transparency for both me and them.

What have you learned over the years that has shaped your style of work and ethics?

Over the years, it has become apparent to me that because this is an intense calling in a culture that is exceedingly hostile to it, it requires a lot of resourcing of oneself. One component of that resourcing is the constant learning I referred to above so you feel integrity in your own practice since you will likely never get that validation from the larger external world. It means building community with the people who CAN validate you - to not only talk over cases and aid you in that learning, but who can empathize with the spiritual and emotional impacts of midwifery. It means having outlets and things you can do that make you remember who you are and feel like yourself. It means remembering your body is a critical component of being able to serve people, and needs to be prioritized in whatever way that looks for you.

I have also learned that attempts to “control” midwifery and its impact on your life are things you will never stop doing but also at which you will probably never succeed. The things that are really hard about this job are not fixed by simple math equations of how many clients a month to take or whether to have an office or a partner or admin help or how much time off call you schedule or whatever. We do these things to try to mitigate the impacts of midwifery on our life but birth can be so unpredictable - you can have a month of 6 “butter births” and feel rested and happy and a month of 2 births that are absolutely grueling and exhausting or traumatic and have you rethinking all of your life choices. A midwifery partner will help you get time off call, but then you have a lot of interpersonal work to manage too. I say this not to be discouraging but because I think understanding that some part of it is out of our control and we can’t totally crack the code of how to make it easy allows us to spend our precious time and energy resourcing ourselves rather than trouble shooting and problem solving things that simply may not be entirely solvable. I think we need to normalize that it is an objectively hard calling and it’s not our fault if it feels hard. And to understand that a huge part of why it feels so hard is because the culture we are doing it in is structurally broken.

What advice do you have for me as a future midwife?

First, remember that you are a human being whose humanity matters just as much as your clients’ humanity. You are more than a repository of other people’s most important moments. You matter. You are loved by the people who love you; you have gifts you are offering the world; you deserve rest and joy and to revel in your you-ness. Being a midiwfe is a hugely important part of you but it is not the only important part.

Secondly, midwifery is a life path that will inevitably involve sorrow, grief, and loss. I recommend trying to make your peace with that rather than think you can avoid it if you are a perfect midwife. Reading about how different cultures handle loss and grief, maybe doing trainings around loss, leaning into your own spiritual resources around it, is important. Make peace with the inevitability of this rather than internalizing a western medicalized framework that if we make all the right choices we can avoid it.

Third, find your community! Full stop. That means community made up of birthworkers, but also community that isn’t.

Lastly, I know I’ve talked a lot about how hard midwifery is as a calling but it is also full of so much joy. Let yourself be present for it. SLOW DOWN as much as you can actually be present for it. Try to let some of that performance of professionalism go so you can truly laugh with a client in a prenatal or feel their rapture at their birth rather than thinking four steps ahead of all you have to do. Urgency is such a false, colonial capitalist imposition. Remember it is such a privilege to be trusted so intensely by someone. Remember that it is such a privilege to access this part of the world and humanity others don’t get to see. Remember the long and sacred lineage you are becoming part of. The world needs you. It’s such a special gift to do work that matters. Try to hold on to that.

I hope this was helpful, especially for all you midwifery students out there!

In love and solidarity,

Robina

👊🏽A last note: if you’re a midwife or a student midwife seeking a community committed to decolonial, anti-oppressive lenses and practice, I hope you’ll consider joining the waitlist for Tideshifts: A Midwifery Mentorship Collective. Applications open on the winter solstice, December 21st, 2025, and we begin together in March. 👊🏽

A few weeks ago, after I posted my last article on unschooling a child all the way to college, I opened up Q&A on my Instagram and invited the folks in that community to ask me anything about our experiences. I tackled a few of those questions in video format, and you can see those here, but I got many more than I could answer that day, particularly because it was after an overnight birth and I started getting loopier and loopier as the night went on. So I decided to answer them here, in written format. I will admit I got so many that it was definitely a challenge to put this post together (and apologies to those of you reading this in email, because I surpassed the length limit, whoops!), but I think I addressed all of the topics people asked about if not every exact specific variation on those topics. I hope this not only answers your questions, but gives you lots to chew on, and most importantly, that you enjoy!

Ahead: questions about curriculum, following the scope of a traditional school experience, how much time per week we commit to homeschooling, logistics like diplomas and applying to college and reporting to the state, when you start, how you start, whether my kids ever wanted to go to school, building community, what degrees you need to homeschool, how to deal with skeptical family members, responding to critiques about opting out of public schooling, whether it’s possible to work and homeschool, how we balance it all, and more!

Ready? Let’s go!

Q: Did you follow a ‘curriculum?’

I got many variations on this question, and I think in order to answer it, we have to move backwards and ask “What is unschooling?” Because the truth is, I think when people imagine homeschooling they imagine something that looks like school at home: my kids sitting at a table with pencils and notebooks, and me instructing them formally. But, in fact, our homeschooling rarely looked like this.

When I say we unschooled what I mean is that we precisely did not have an overdetermined curriculum. Unschooling means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and to that end I created a little booklist I’ve posted here so you can learn more. But for us the basic principle of unschooling was that learning happens everywhere and at every time — that in fact learning happens most effectively when it is contextualized in this way — and that it happens best when it is is not coerced — and that our role as homeschooling parents was not to dictate the content of what my children should learn but to cultivate a holistic environment of learning. This meant modeling a spirit of curiosity, joy, and persistence in learning; exposing them to a wide variety of subjects, potential new interests, and differing perspectives; providing the tools and resources they needed for their exploration; and, importantly, building and caring for a community around them. So the way I spent my time as a homeschooling parent might not conform to what the average person might think of when they think of as “teaching.”

Here’s the thing: if you want to nurture humans who will participate in the pursuit of a more equitable society, you have to start by actively interrogating your own ideas about equity when it comes to the most marginalized class of people on the planet: children.

So a big part of unschooling for me was deconstructing and divesting from the idea that children are humans in training, or somehow inferior to adults, and that it is our job as parents to mold them or produce perfect “products. (This was, for the record, easier said than done in a culture that very much internalizes this idea.) I tried to, instead, center our lives around a conviction in the inherent value of childhood — not as a stepping stone but as its own, fully formed stage of humanity that offers as many lesson to adulthood as adulthood offers to childhood. For me, a big part of that reorientation was to build my capacity to trust — to trust that my children would communicate to me what they needed from me as a co-learner and as the person who had a different set of resources than they did. And, as it turns out, mostly they did.

So, to return to the question of curricula: no, I never ordered a pre-scripted curricula that covered all the basic “subjects.” Did I occasionally seek out a curriculum to help me respond to my children’s specific interests or requests? Yes, I did. But mostly, my role as an educator was listening closely and researching — listening to what was lighting them up at any given time and leaning into it (often at the “expense” of other subjects, but trusting that we would eventually come around to a well-rounded learning experience, and that part of being able to engage in any subject was developing focus and curiosity generally). Much of my role was imagining ways and researching resources (books, projects, field trips, classes, other adults, etc.) that could help them explore what they wanted to explore. This was, I want to be clear, usually a much harder intellectual exercise for me than simply buying a curriculum. It was also really easy for me to overstep in their learning. Because there were so few clear boundaries between “play” and “learning” — early math and science and writing were integrated into baking and playing store or restaurant, or fun experiments with mud and dirt and sand and random kitchen items and yarn, or at the beach or in the park — I sometimes tried overmuch to make play “valuable.” I still remember when Wren spending weeks and weeks and weeks drawing plans for a “My Little Pony” amusement park at age 7 or 8. She would get lost in her imagination, sitting at her little desk with big sheets of paper and markers, for hours. I thought, why not use this as an opportunity to teach? Maybe I can get some math into this? and suggested we figure out how to actually build her plans in miniature. All these years later, I distinctly remember the expression she gave me when I eagerly proposed my ideas: it was a literal deflating. She did not want to, she told me with some disdain (Wren, bless her heart, has never been someone who easily hid her feelings), make models. The plans she were drawing were for an actual, real amusement park someday.

“But Wren,” I responded, “we can’t actually build this amusement park. You need a lot of space and money for that. But we could build an amusement park for your toy ponies!”

She basically stopped drawing the next day.

The thing I had missed, of course, was that the activity was valuable whether she was tackling a formal “subject” or not. When she was drawing those (very chaotic) scenes, she was developing her creativity, persistence, focus, and self-direction. She was learning what it meant to reach flow. These were foundations that she was going to need for whatever she did later. In the end, unschooling for me meant less about what they were learning and more about them learning how to learn. In the early years, that meant learning how to love learning, because in my opinion if the joy is taken out of the process of learning it becomes much harder to do it, and in the later years it meant a lot of meta-process in that I was less focused on them absorbing facts and more focused on them figuring out how to ask questions and then how to answer them. (By the way, Wren credits this approach with her ease in adapting to college: she feels like, even more than her traditionally schooled peers, college hasn’t been much of an adjustment for her because she already had so much experience directing her own time, and in thinking critically and exploring things in depth.)

I also want to say here that I often joke to people that I unschooled because I wanted my kids to learn how to be bored. But the truth is, a big part of why I was drawn to this style of homeschooling was that I honestly didn’t want them to rely on being directed and occupied every minute of their life, since we know boredom is in fact an important element of creativity and self-awareness. Working off a pre-scripted curriculum and feeling pressure to hit all the subjects a certain amount of times every week would have undermined that goal.

Q: Did you do a homeschool curriculum that followed what kid would do in ‘regular’ school?

It might seem weird to follow up my last question with this one. But I did want to address it separately, because there is actually some nuance to the answer to this question at least in the case of my family.

The TL;DR is that when it came to elementary school, the answer to this question was “no;” when it came to middle school, the answer was, “kinda;” and when it came to high school, the answer has been “mostly.”

Our homeschooling naturally evolved over time as the kids got older, and their interests and goals became clearer. One major shift for us was that at a certain point Wren decided she wanted to go to a rigorous, competitive liberal arts college (and she very early on set her sights on the one where she is currently thriving). This meant that she was going to have to arrange her High School years around that goal, and so her teen years looked less “unschool”-y and more traditional, though I’d hardly say her life looked like the average institutionally educated High School student’s. While we were plenty creative about the ways we tackled this, we more or less organized those years around making sure she met (and in many cases exceeded) the “requirements” for these kinds of colleges — so, four years of English; three years of foreign language, math, and science; two years of history, and so on. The ethos was still one of being student-centered, so for example while she did take some courses that were very traditionally “lab science” just to check off that box, we also spent a lot of time exploring the intersections of science with the concepts of race and gender, for example. She did a lot of creative writing alongside seminars we designed like “Asian-American Women’s Voices.” She spent a huge portion of her time playing and writing music, so her transcript included lots of courses like songwriting, voice and piano, musical theater, and music comp. Much of her math was done (with an a amazing tutor) via projects investigating rainbow washing and how much Spotify artists get paid. And so on.

But I also think it’s important to acknowledge that part of unschooling was, for me, critically engaging with the question of what it means to be “educated.” I myself had been a straight-A student, but I didn’t remember half of the information I covered in school, primarily because it was a truly enormous amount of information and few people have the capacity to retain all of it, but also because all that learning was happening from within an ethos that I didn’t have to retain it so much as regurgitate it on a test or paper and then move on to the next thing. The important thing wasn’t the material; the important thing was my ability to perform good student-hood. This was not something I felt inspired to recreate with my children. So though I always had an eye on whether or not I was exposing my kids to enough varied subjects that they could find their passions and have a nice well-rounded understanding of the world, I by no means prioritized “covering” all they would have covered formally in an institutionalized K-12 school setting. We read a ton about history because it was one of their favorite subjects, and we even took trips to Mexico and Greece to explore their interest in ancient cultures, but I am fairly confident that they never went over the entire breadth and scope of history that would have been covered in school. They never took a spelling test. I don’t know that we did a single formal grammar1 or geography lesson, though we obliquely covered both through play and the exploration of related subjects. Did we have moments like when I realized 10 year old Josie didn’t know how many continents there were, something my older kids had somehow absorbed along the way without formal teaching but I had somehow missed the third time around? Yes, yes I did. Was it a bit mortifying for me? Yes, yes it was. Did we simply review the continents right there at the dinner table, all of us together (where the fact of her not knowing became apparent in conversation)? Yes. And does she remember them now? She does. And I would argue it was precisely the fact that this came up in a conversation where she needed that information, and had enough background where she could absorb it quickly, that she has retained it effectively, without having to formally “memorize” it for a test. Because are there plenty of 10 year old school kids who have sat through formal geography lessons and also don’t know there are seven continents? You bet your ass.

(I also was 45 years old before I realized just how absurd the concept of a “Straight A” student is, in that it implies that any human should be equally good at every single thing they do, but also that the very concept de facto incentivizes spending more time on the things you don’t like and aren’t good at than advancing and gaining mastery over things you are, but that’s a story for another time.)

Q: How did you find equitable, inclusive curriculum?

As I’ve already covered to some extent, basically by making it myself. :)

It was extremely important to me that we centered marginalized voices in our learning, and it’s one of the major reasons I homeschooled in the first place. This felt easier to do by curating our own reading lists than it was by opting-in to a pre-scripted curriculum. No matter what there is a big element of homeschooling that involves spending many hours on research: searching for resources, investigating curricula, poking around on message boards for recommendations.2

There are a lot of sneaky religious curricula out there, or several that claim they are secular but are more faith-neutral (such as Moving Beyond the Page, which otherwise has a lot going for it, or Bookshark) and it can be a huge bummer, but there are definitely secular programs out there worth investigating if you need more direction. Here is a small smattering of some curricula I’ve used supplementarily or have heard good things about (but remember, this is not my area of expertise as an unschooler, so you might consider exploring places like Secular Eclectic Academic Homeschoolers for more recommendations):

Woke Homeschooling

Real Science Odyssey and History Quest

Bravewriter

All About Reading

Blossom and Root

Global Village School

Not a curriculum, but Stories Of Color has an amazing resource list.

Q: “What age did you formally start?”

I first formally registered Wren with the homeschooling office when she was in Kindergarten, which is technically a year younger than I was obliged to do. I think I first started thinking of myself as a homeschooler the moment I turned down her Pre-K spot, though.

Q: Where do you start?

Unschooling was just an extension of how we were living, except I chose not to put my kids in school. Since they were so little, and since we planned to unschool, I didn’t need to plan overmuch. So I think the first way to start is by getting cleat about your mindset and doing deep thinking about what learning means to you. And the second way is by finding and/or building your community, which in my opinion is the most important foundation of homeschooling to be had.

But my real answer to this question is you start by getting excited. You start by being enlivened by the possibilities inherent in this choice, by being curious about them, by not being able to stop yourself from wanting to find out. You listen for that feeling in your chest and make sure it is a bright hot spark of anticipation and joy rather than obligation and fear. That’s where you start: with that glimmer.

Q: What did most of your days look like?

One of the things that I had to make peace with as an early homeschooler was that we might never have a schedule — it’s just not my strength — but that we would have rhythms.

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I hear the bump, then the cry from the other room; little footsteps follow. I turn to meet Hanif, who is running toward me. “I got a boo boo” he cries, his mouth downturned into an exaggerated pout. He holds out his fingers. “Kiss it.”

Ilan chuckles from the couch across the room as I bend over to bring my mouth to Hanif’s hands. “Imagine having kisses heal every hurt you ever have,” he remarks.

It’s a thought I’ve had myself, many times. It’s a thought I’ve heard spoken by someone else even more times. I’m pretty sure, in fact, that I’ve heard this sentiment as the punch line of a stand-up comedian’s joke more than once. “Kissing a boo boo to make it better” seems to be one of those widespread, cross-cultural kinds of parenting instincts, but one I don’t think I’ve ever heard be spoken of with anything other than a sort of wry amusement. This time, though, maybe for the first time, when Ilan calls attention to it now, I don’t simply chuckle back. Now, this time, maybe for the first time, I actually hear the question. I take a moment. I consider it. I do exactly what Illy is asking, which is to imagine. I think of stubbing my toe or hitting my elbow, the initial burst of extreme and irrational outrage at the pain it elicits in me. I think of Andy’s loud “fuck!” whenever he bangs his head (often, because he is 6 foot 5). I think about the time I stood up right under an opened cabinet door, or the time toddler Josie reared back in protest when I was brushing her hair and I thought she broke my jaw, the way I started crying, the way fear coursed through my body. I think about my teens, wondering when exactly their stubbed toes or banged elbows, bumped heads or broken nails stopped being things they brought to me and instead managed themselves, with the same sort of outburst Andy and I have, walking away on their own while sucking on the banged thumb or rubbing their own heads. I wonder about the last time I looked into their eyes and touched their cheeks and kissed their faces and held them close in those moments. I thought about what it would be like to wrap my arms around Andy when he bumps his head. I thought about what would happen if, instead of continuing to do the dishes when I stubbed my toe, Andy stopped, shut the water off, cooed at me the way I do Hanif when he is hurt.

It sounds ridiculous. And yet. Even just visualizing it fills me with a soft, liquid warmth.

“Actually, I can imagine it,” I say.

*****

Hanif is my hand holder. He holds my hand when he’s falling asleep. He sticks his arm out at any angle, no matter how uncomfortable, if we’re stuck in traffic and he is losing his ability to cope. Whatever dysregulation he may be experiencing, if nursing is inaccessible to him, his instinct is to ask for a hand to hold. One afternoon last week he was protesting being stuck in the stroller our whole long walk home from the park (“I need to run!” he kept insisting, even though it was decidedly naptime), but once I reached a hand out and held his, stroking the dimple knuckles, tracing the little moons of dirt under his nails, he calmed down and eventually fell asleep. For the rest of the walk, until I finally, sure he was deeply asleep, let go of his hand, I received smiles from every passerby. “That is so cute,” a teenaged boy said aloud to the girl with whom he was walking. “God bless,” an elderly woman told me. It did not matter who the person was; there was not a single pedestrian that did not smile. We were a walking oxytocin molecule, lighting up coziness in everyone we passed.

It makes sense. Hand holding is a literal expression of our intertwining as human beings. It reduces stress and anxiety in our body so profoundly1 that simply imagining holding someone’s hand is enough to buffer the intensity of those feelings.2 This is true across the lifespan, from infancy to adults. And although hand holding is most helpful when it’s with someone you love, its stress mitigating affects are even observable when you’re holding the hand of a stranger.3

When researchers began studying hand-holding, it was assumed the practice mediated stress by increasing our ability for emotional regulation, a task controlled by the prefrontal cortex of our brain. This is the part of our brain responsible for managing our attention, inhibition, emotions, and self awareness. It’s the rationalizing part of the brain — the part that will remind you that a threat is imagined or perceived rather than actual and existential when you’re watching a horror film, for example. The support of another’s hand, it was initially reasoned, must help us more effectively access these “higher” parts of the brain and thereby tame our more primal fear networks.

But that’s not, as it turns out, what happens when we hold hands. Instead, hand-holding lessens activity in the prefrontal cortex. It seems it’s not that the support of someone’s hand amplifies our ability to rationalize. It doesn’t help us access our “higher selves” or more effectively use our executive functioning capacities. It’s that the support of someone’s hand allows us to better access our neuropsychological baseline. It’s that the support of someone’s hand allows us to be ourselves without so much effort.

It’s not an addition, it’s a return.

Needing to rationalize our feelings — needing to activate our prefrontal cortex to cope or rationalize or understand what is happening to us — is metabolically costly. Knowing we are not alone allows our brain to slow down, to spend less effort and energy regulating. James Coan, one of the researchers to whose work I’m referring here, calls this “social baseline theory:” the idea that our baseline, what is normal and expected for our brains, is connection and interdependence.4 This is the argument of social baseline theory: it’s not adding support that gives us our brain the tools to cope. It’s that not having support forces us to expend energy compensating for the lack. Having to figure out the world and regulate our emotions alone is the violation; we are, as it turns out, most at rest in ourselves when we are together.

*****

This week we learned that Adriana Smith, who was officially declared brain dead back in February but has been artificially kept alive by Emory University Hospital, had been delivered, via surgery, of the baby hospital staff had desecrated her corpse to gestate. Smith’s story originally broke in May, when she had already been on life support for nearly 3 months. The hospital had justified the decision to keep her alive, despite her family’s wishes, by citing Georgia law banning abortions after fetal cardiac activity can be detected (roughly six weeks into pregnancy). They argued that to take Smith off life support could be interpreted as effectively performing an abortion, and was therefore illegal. (It did not matter that a number of Georgia lawmakers, including the attorney general stated this was a misinterpretation of the law; Emory refused to be made legally vulnerable just in case). Smith was just 8 weeks pregnant at the time of her death, her embryo the size of a green olive. The day before she died, she — a nurse herself — had presented to the hospital with debilitating headaches but was, as it all too often the case with Black women in this country, dismissed without the imaging that could have detected the blood clots in her brain and saved her life.

Smith’s case isn’t the first of its kind. A 2021 review in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology found 35 cases of pregnancies that were artificially continued after a diagnosis of brain death; 27 resulted in the extractions of fetuses, 50% of which survived (the biggest predictor in that survival was, unsurprisingly, whether or not the gestating person was over or under 24 weeks gestation’ — considered the technical age of fetal “viability” — when they were declared brain dead).5 In one particularly visible case in 2014, John Peter Smith hospital in Texas refused to take Marlise Muñoz, a 33-year old and 14 week pregnant paramedic, off of life support despite her own explicit directives and the wishes of her family. The hospital, like Emory, claimed their hands were legally tied by Texas’ Advance Directives Act, which states that physicians may not withdraw or withhold life-sustaining treatment from a pregnant patient. (Again, they claimed this despite Texas lawmakers asserting this was not the intent of the law.) Her husband, Erick Muñoz , also a paramedic, sued the hospital for "cruel and obscene mutilation of a corpse.” He won. It took two months.

Life support in the case of brain death is, in fact, a cruelty to all involved. Keeping a body forcibly alive requires constant intervention: not just mechanical ventilation but hormonal and steroid therapies, feeding tubes, constant surveillance, antibiotics to fight the inevitable infections, nurses to tend to the inevitable deterioration. Many people had to collude in this grotesque charade, a fact which haunts me: this is what happens when we sever “care” away from an ethics of love. Muñoz described being forced to hear the cracking of his beloved wife’s bones when her limbs were moved, to witness her body increasingly smell of death, to look into “soulless” eyes he did not recognize, day after day. April Newkirk, Adriana’s mother, described the experience as “torture.” “I see my daughter breathing,” she told journalists, “but she’s not there.” This is to say nothing of the literal human being forced to gestate inside a body emptied of any of the feedback a parent normally provides. In pregnancy we mother through the waves of our body, training a new nervous system how to be, how to ebb and flow. I do not know what it means to grow without hearing a parents’ voice or experiencing their fear or pain or joy, their anticipation or their relief. Without oxytocin spreading through their body like the warmth of the sun. Without the trembles of their tears or their eruption of laughter. Without the intertwining that is at root of who we are. I do not know what it means to be a human knit together in a body without human experience. I do know it is a cruelty to act without asking the question, to reduce what we do for each other when we are one into forced breath pumped in and out of lungs.

When the news of Adriana Smith first broke in May, social media was a flurry of outrage. Many described this is as yet another case of medical experimentation on Black women’s bodies. The words “human incubator” appeared frequently. People, not surprisingly, often referenced The Handmaid’s Tale. Who will pay for this? they asked. Will the family have to pay for this? It takes roughly $7500 per day to keep a dead body technically alive. Smith was kept alive for approximately 120. People asked, how are hospitals not allowed to use life support measures to harvest organs for donation but allowed to force life support on an unconsenting family to use a Black woman’s organs? The posts said butchery. The posts said barbaric. They said Incubator Depraved Experiment Horror Film Inhumane. They called what was happening Terrorism. They called it Gilead. They called it A Nightmare.

For a few days, these words dominated my social media timeline. And then, they disappeared. Adriana Smith was still being kept alive. The days were still continuing. Her baby was still growing. The situation was the same. Paused. Waiting. But people had moved on, now captivated by other unrelenting horrors unleashed upon us by the powers that be: other things to protest, other things to fear, other things to make content about. Until this week, when it was reported that Smith’s extremely premature son, Chance6, had been extracted from her body, and that she would be, finally, put to rest. Then the same words came back.

It was an excavation.

It was a fetal removal during autopsy.

Ghastly Experiment Torture Incubator incubator incubator incubator. Incubator.

To reduce a human body into chemical levels and physical processes that can be manufactured by medication and machines is unequivocally dehumanizing.

I struggle with how narratives can do the same.

Adriana Smith didn’t consent to doctors using her body to continue gestating her son.

She also didn’t consent to becoming content.

I’ve thought about this before, of course; the world as it stands gives us plenty of examples of people being made into lessons about and illustrations of the brutality of the state. I have often struggled with the tensions between wanting to inform, to draw connections, to spell out how systems are at the root of most harm, and reducing an entire human into the singular act of what has been done to them. I wrote about it at length last summer, when Sonya Massey was murdered:

I find her obituary. Here, are the names of her parents, her siblings, her children, the grandparents that came and left before. She loved to do hair, it says. She loved to spend time with her family.

I cannot type into the search bar, how did she choose the names of her children? I cannot type into the search bar, How did her parents choose hers? What stories live there, in those decisions, in those hopes, in those remembrances? The search bar can tell me the weather the day she was born (a low of 50, a high of 63) but it cannot tell me what kind of birthday cake she liked or what she wished when she blew out the candles.

That whole self belongs to those who knew her, not me, and that is how it should be, I continued last July. But if I am destined to read a story about her, I wish it were one she wrote. I cannot help but wonder, if she knew that someday everyone would know her name, what would she want us to know?

What would Adriana Smith, mother, nurse want us to know about her three decades on this earth? Unlike when I have googled many other names in the past, asking, what is left here that is theirs? there is almost nothing to be found of her. I don’t know any of her likes or her dislikes, how her friends remember her, if she had a hobby. The record that exists is simply her, dead-but-not-dead, dead-but-housing-someone-who-is-alive. The record that is exists is what the rest of us think about it. She has been held in-between in something we have created that is her and yet not her. All I can find is what has been done to her, and the lessons the rest of us see in it. All I can find is her as a stand-in for the intersectional horrors of the American project.

But she is not just a stand in. She is not just a lesson, a horror movie, a fictional novel, a nightmare, an example of history repeating itself, a ghastly experiment. She is not an incubator.

She is her.

She was her.

Fuck.

How do we tell these stories about each other without erasing our sacredness, our irreplaceability? What does it actually mean to keep each other alive — in life, and in death?

There is something about Adriana Smith’s story, the prolonged and suspended animation of her body, that feels too tender, to me, for takeaways. Perhaps it is because I am someone who spends a lot of time briefly touching, almost imperceptibly, the spaces between here and there, and because knowing the feeling of those spaces makes the idea of being forcibly held between them without crossing into one or the other too painful to bear. Perhaps it is because I am someone who knows, intimately, how much we are made up of one another, and because the institutional violence of keeping Smith’s body alive in order to preserve an 8-week old embryo is such a profound perversion of this fact that it elicits a pure, animal echo of grief in me that defies words.

Or perhaps it is simply that when I imagine what it is to be a human being gestating inside a corpse, all I hear is quiet.

*****

In 2014, when I was in midwifery school, I posted a selfie of my torso in a dirty hospital mirror, green shirt under blue scrubs, hands cupped around the phone. The post was about my necklace: a wooden moth given to me by my sister. But at the end of my caption about my necklace I wrote, “PS: These are hands that catch babies!"

The idea that my hands could transform into those of a midwife, at that point, still felt surreal. My own midwife's hands were embedded in my brain, having stared at her lovely nail beds in between the contractions of my precipitous second labor. My nail beds are scraggly. I have never gotten past my teenager habit of picking at them. I don't get manicures, ever: I do not enjoy them, I hate the smell of nail polish, and I simply don’t have time. I do not have the long graceful fingers of a pianist. My palms have callouses from lifting. My hands are just hands, uncurated and unlovely. And in 2014 they were hands that had spent most of their time on this earth turning pages and scribbling words. My fingers had made a keyboard click with satisfying crispness as I turned a phrase, but I still wasn't convinced they were capable of doing any of the things I'd decided they needed to learn: reading a baby's position through skin and muscle and fluid, suturing a perineum, dislodging a shoulder dystocia, stopping a hemorrhage. But they had, at the point at which I wrote about my moth necklace, caught about fifteen babies, and in so doing, they had become almost unrecognizable to me.

I still, at this time, thought of midwifery skills as just that: skills. The task of decoding a baby's position through skin and muscle and fluid was to my mind a series of four actions — named, like most things I was learning, for a dead white man. Leopold’s Manuevers. It was a practice my brain had to learn and force my hands to do. Suturing, resolving a shoulder dystocia, stopping a hemorrhage: all of them algorithms I needed my executive functioning brain to memorize and then send as instructions my hands could bear out. A matter of will, mastery, control. But I think there was some small part of the person who wrote that post and said PS These are hands that catch babies! who was beginning to comprehend that this was an at best inadequate and at worst erroneous understanding. Although I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it at the time, I was beginning to sense how becoming a midwife was more than professionalization, more than memorizing procedures and instructions and carrying them out, more than using a brain to assert dominance over not only one’s own body, but the physiology of birth. What I was beginning to sense was that my hands were ceasing to belong to me at all, at least in the way we conventionally understand ownership of our bodies, that they were becoming more conduit than anything else. I was beginning to sense the way midwifery was going to force me to confront every misconception I had about the singularity of bodies, the singularity of the world we inhabited, and about the authority any of us had over any of it.

A couple of years ago I held a baby at a postpartum visit, chattering to her about her experiences in the wide world in the weeks since her birth. As I asked her some rhetorical question or another, then listened to her babbles, observing her face, her mother exclaimed, “Robina! You’re making the same face you made when you were feeling my belly during prenatals!” I’d laughed, then, but she’d continued, “No, really! I always loved watching you when you tried to feel her position because you always cocked your head to the side and looked up, not down at my belly, as if you were trying to hear something in the distance.”

“I was trying to hear something in the distance,” I replied. “Trying to figure out a baby’s position always feels more like listening to me than feeling.”

Hands are like that: they don’t just help us discern through touch myriad stimuli of the world — the differences between the warmth of a smooth, sun-baked stone or the softness of fur or the coldness of snow — but help us hear each other. Studies have shown that, more than any other isolated body part, people can recognize each other’s emotions simply by visualizing their hands.7 In other studies, people have been able to accurately discern feelings of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, sympathy, love, and gratitude when communicated via touch by someone they have never met, even without being able to see or hear them.8

This is what I didn’t know back in 2014: my hands were going to come to transcend what I had come to understand as their purpose, their function, their role. I did not know that resolving a shoulder dystocia would be less about the brilliance and discipline of my brain and the way it could understand and impose skills onto my hands but about the opposite, that it would be about relaxing the grip my brain had on my hands so that they could listen and understand what the baby was telling me themselves. I did not know that I would have to loosen, to soften; that “managing” a shoulder dystocia would be less about rigid adherence to something pre-scripted and more about suspending my brain’s disbelief and listening to what my hands knew without thinking. I did not know, then, that what I would need was to allow all those centers of executive functioning to slow down to a barely humming whir, so that I could return to the place where I was always-already made up of someone else.

*****

In May I witnessed three babies being born, each of them different, each of them born into different family structures and neighborhoods and stories, but each of them born into the hands of their mothers while the sun shined through the windows. One of them did not breathe, not in the seconds after birth, and not in the minutes either. Her birth was not long, nor traumatic in any way. Her heart rate never wavered in labor. But she came out still, her skin pale, her eyes closed. Her mother had given birth standing, and so I loaned her my hands as support as she lifted the slippery baby to her chest, our fingers so close they may have well been intertwined. So close my hands could have been hers; so close I hoped they were barely perceptible, that they were in fact perceived simply as her own. As quickly as they were there, they left again. She held her baby close, heart to heart. I stood up from where I had been perched below her while I was awaiting the birth, observed the baby’s pale face and closed eyes and limp body. I gently asked her mother — my client, a woman I have cared for in three pregnancies, whose husband often sends me political memes that make me laugh out loud, whose son tenderly touched a scrape on my own son’s face during a prenatal visit once, whose own mother is a midwife — if she wanted to offer the baby some breath. She did. The baby responded with a slight grimace, but nothing more. I asked if it was okay if I tried to offer some myself. I did. Another slight grimace, but no breath. No cry. I did the things I always do. I asked my assistant, Jessica, to place the doppler on the baby’s chest, because I knew, because my hands heard it, because my gut felt it, that we would hear a strong heartbeat thumping and I hoped it would reassure everyone. I adjusted the baby’s body to try to get the breath I offered through her airway, first on my client’s body, and then, when I couldn’t quite manage to get her in the right position, on the resuscitation board. I helped her mother perch on the end of the bed next to the board, still connected to her daughter via umbilical cord. I encouraged her mother to talk to her. My hands eased air into her body and I made each breath an invitation. The baby became slightly more pink, slightly more toned. She grimaced and twitched. I could feel her responding to each breath I gave her. But still, she did not breathe. Still, she stayed quiet. Her eyes did not open.

I was standing in my client’s bedroom. The dark blue paint, the poster of the forest, the cat under the bed, the music wafting in from the bathroom, my client’s husband’s socks balled up and thrown into the corner (ten minutes earlier, anticipating a rush of blood and fluid, I had to said to him as he stood behind her, supporting her hips you might want to take off your socks). My client, her long brown hair up on her head, her naked body glistening with sweat, her cheeks rosy with the force of the universe. I was there, with it all, with them all. They spoke to me. I spoke back. And also I was somewhere else, some third space, where it was just me and the baby. I was asking a question. I was asking it of her, and I was asking it of the universe. I was listening for answers. There were no blue walls or posters or cats or socks. There was no sun shining through the window; or maybe all there was was sun, washing everything else out. There was a hush as holy as a cathedral, a still like the air in a minaret before someone enters to call out the adhan, a suspension like the moment before a key is turned in a lock. Look, I’ll show you: there was a world out there, a world of smooth, sun-baked stone and the softness of fur and the coldness of snow and the warmth of a hand in your own, but also a world of brutality and extraction, a world being burned, a world of melting ice caps and forests on fire. Look: there was a world, and it could be terrible. There was a world, and it could be beautiful. There was a world, and it could be. I turned my head toward that wide, expectant distance to listen.

“Is she okay?” my client asked.

“She is okay,” I said. “Look —”

There was not really any reason, not any logical reason, not any algorithmic reason to do what I did next but I had heard enough to try. I lifted the baby off the board. I placed her back on her mother’s chest. Her mother stroked her back. Her mother kissed her face. The baby opened her mouth and cried.

If you don’t already know, this is not an unusual topic of conversations among New Yorkers: there are relatively few places to live in NYC where you won’t, if you have a car, spend an inordinate amount of your precious brain space on finding someplace to put your car when you are not using it, or strategizing how to avoid using your car when you know you will not be able to find somewhere to put it either when you return. My heavily gentrified neighborhood is now particularly bad in this regard. But once upon a time, people would just…park. Usually they would even find spots in front of their own houses and not blocks away. Walter, who has been our mailman for almost as long as I’ve lived on this block1 remembered that time.

Walter and I weren’t really talking about parking, though. We were talking about the seemingly endless development specifically on my block, and in my neighborhood generally. Currently, right across the street from me, they are building 40 luxury condos in a space where a churchyard with 200 year old trees used to be. Two houses down from that, they are knocking down yet another of the roughly one hundred year old houses on our block to build another building of condos that look like they were constructed by a middle schooler in Minecraft. Much like the ones they’re building where the Grand Prospect Hall used to be, or the one that now exists where Eagle Provisions once did. Simple boxes with huge windows. Maybe some balconies, or maybe not. Probably gray. Sharp angles and efficient modernity. The botox of architecture, expressionless and the same.

The city lists my house as having been built in 1910. But it appears on land surveys as far as back as the 1880s, so when it was actually built is something of a mystery. In the years between its birth and when I moved in in 2001, a series of additions were attached to it with what appears to be Elmer’s glue and popsicle sticks by the assorted Italian families that once lived in it. There are no gleaming lines and reassuringly efficient angles. The floor plan is decidedly weird, thanks to all of these additions: something like an L, or maybe more like an uneven U? The seams where the additions were connected tend to spring leaks even though we’ve repaired the roof too many times to count. When we renovated our basement to make room for my home office, the architect pointed out that the walls had been finished by someone pressing a door into the concrete again and again, sideways, and even now, even with those indentations covered by sheet rock, I think about the wall of sideways entrances nearly daily. The architect later tapped and walked slowly around an enormous, uneven column in the middle of our basement, a befuddled look on his face. It was not in a location that made sense from a structural perspective, he told us. “I can’t quite figure what this thing is doing,” he finally said, “but we are absolutely not going to try to find out.” We would build around it, continuing with the tradition of odd, inscrutable shapes.

I don’t know the story behind the column or its even larger base of assorted, haphazard seeming bricks. I don't know who all the additions made room for, or who made all the indentations on the wall. I do know that beyond all my frustrations with these idiosyncrasies, I have an attachment to their mysteries, a sort of incalculable pull towards the people I don’t know who left their residues in this place that now houses my own most intimate moments. My own babies were born here. Possibly — probably, in fact, since most births in 1910 in New York City were still happening at home — others were too. In what sounds like a story from a horror movie, after my third birth and before we finished the basement, I dripped a small bit of blood down my leg and onto the floorboards when I arose from bed for the first time, and Andy, a few days later, found a drop of it in his basement office. We had laughed at this gruesomeness and joked about how of course this would happen in our old house, but I think about it often, wondering what cells still live beneath my floor. Whose cells. My house feels like an alive thing to me. It is both comforting and terrifying that my family might be the only thing tethering its life to this place, that it seems almost inevitable that, were we to leave, every story held within it would surely be knocked down and disappear.

****

Recently, one of my clients asked me what people typically do with their placentas after birth. Unsurprisingly, she was mostly interested in how often people ate it or encapsulated it into pills. “What happens to the placenta if people don’t consume it?” she asked.

“Well, ” I answered, “I think it often ends up buried, or even more often, sitting in people’s freezers waiting to be buried. Otherwise, we just get rid of it.”

“People bury it?” she asked. “Where?”

I told her the stories then: sometimes people had a yard. Sometimes they brought it to their childhood homes. Other people had second homes upstate or out of the city. One couple brought it to the site of an outdoor music festival that held emotional significance for them, and buried it there. More than one had found a corner of Prospect Park to bury it in, undetected by cops. I took care of another couple who had given birth for the first time in the Netherlands, and they had also buried it in a public park there. Once, a client asked if she could throw it into the East River.

“I never found out if she did,” I mused.

The client found all of these stories hilarious; it had never occurred to her that one might bury a placenta. “We’ll just throw ours out,” she said. But the truth is that treating the placenta as medical waste is actually the outlier perspective. Most cultures for centuries have believed the handling of the afterbirth was sacred and attached to the overall future well-being of both birthgiver and baby. In 2010, medical anthropologists Daniel Benyshek and Sharon Young studied placental traditions across 179 societies; among the 109 communities demonstrating ritual around the disposal of the placenta, they counted 169 different disposal methods, including incineration, consumption, hanging, and drying but most frequently burying.2 Placental burial was and is often thought to link a soul to the earth, ancestors, or both; the indigenous Hawaiian, Navajo, and Māori, for example, believe burying the placenta binds the child to that land and, therefore, their ancestral heritage.3 In fact, in Māori the word for land is placenta: “whenua” means both.

After birth, when I am taking people on a tour of their own placentas, showing them the hole in the membranes that reveals to us where the waters released, or how large this shared organ is (and, therefore, how large the space whose open vessels their uterus is trying to compress now that the placenta has released), I show them why people often refer to the baby’s side of the placenta as the tree of life. “People see this as the trunk, and these as the branches,” I will point out. “But,” I will say, flipping the placenta inside out to show how the birthgiver side attaches to the uterine wall, and how the membranes stretch to hold the baby and the amniotic fluid, “the more I look at placentas the more they resemble to me a whole universe. I can almost imagine them as the baby’s night sky alight, a mystery they gaze into from their little sea.” And I do. I can see how those vessels, pulsing with life, flowing with the air the babies do not have to breathe themselves and yet are still oxygenated by, might sparkle like stars, might whistle in like a myth of things they have yet to know.

****

When I was a new mother in my late twenties and early thirties, I felt like I was constantly reading what I came to think of “Dear John” letters. These weren’t to partners, but to the city in which I lived, and were penned by bloggers (many of whom had built a readership because of living and parenting in New York), acquaintances, colleagues, and, occasionally, friends. All followed a similar form. They began by waxing nostalgic, thanking the city for all its good times, for being the location of so many youthful foibles and lessons. “But,” the conclusion always seemed to be “it’s not me, it’s you.” New York City, they would say, was not a place to live longterm, not a place to raise a family. It was too much: too congested, too loud, too expensive, too stressful, too busy, too trafficky, too inconvenient, too smelly, too depressing, too hard.

Now, I want to be clear at the outset here: New York is all of those things. It is an indubitably difficult place to live, in countless ways, and despite the recent study that claims New York City is the happiest city in the U.S. (and 17th in the world, the only U.S. city anywhere in the top 25; Minneapolis is number 30). I do not begrudge anyone, not then and certainly not now, for not wanting to live here. Hell, sometimes I don’t want to live here myself (see: every single morning at 7:00 on the dot, when my house begins shaking and becomes filled with the beeping and rumbling of construction vehicles due to the aforementioned 40 luxury condo project across the street).

Still, the letters physically pained me to read. Even as I understood rationally why they were written, they filled me with an irrational, bereft sort of rage. It wasn’t the leaving. It was the tone. It was the way they read like an overdetermined performance; a disattached, removed convention. It was the way each letter presented its conclusions as obvious: New York City was a place for young, careless people, not a serious place where one could raise a family, not a place anyone would ever put down roots.

To someone who had been raised in New York, to someone who had deep roots in and attachment to this city and was raising a family there herself, this was not such an obvious conclusion. What was actually obvious, to me, was that these letters rested on a narrative of erasure. Each one obscured, as if pressing repeatedly on its backspace key during their composition, the many families who had in fact put down roots in the city. Even more importantly, they elided the fact that it was often the letters writers themselves who had played a role in displacing those families, in driving up prices and changing the cultural and racial backgrounds of the neighborhoods where those families had lived. I knew the letter writers were probably surrounded by plenty of families raising children in New York; it’s just they had escaped noticed because they weren’t white and didn’t conform to the platonic ideal many Americans have to what putting down roots as a family should look like. To those letter writers, having 30 people live in a tiny little row house in Brooklyn, as my Pakistani family had, was unimaginable. I had understood this intimately, had been a child during a time when the (mostly ethnic) white families around me moved to the suburbs, had come into adulthood during a time when young white people started displacing the brown families who had remained. I watched as the old timers who sat on their porches and chatted with neighbors passed away and their houses were razed and replaced by apartment complexes most of the people who once lived in my neighborhood could no longer afford. The doors of these new buildings revolved with young people who stepped over me and my children as we drew with chalk on the sidewalk, and I made a game of guessing who would acknowledge us as they walked past, and who wouldn’t. I was rarely wrong. It was obvious, to whom we were invisible, just part of the backdrop.

It wasn’t the revolving door that grieved me so much as the sense that, for many, the city wasn’t a living, breathing organism with whom they were in intimate relationship while the door wasn’t revolving. It was the sense that the city comprised simple scenery, the setting for young Main Character Moments that could, once it had served that purpose, be discarded in search of the next backdrop. This was, it seemed to me, not the way we were meant to relate the spaces in which we lived — places with deep histories and ecosystems, places of real people and genealogies, places where things had died and survived. We were meant to have a sense of place, and to feel our place within it. We were meant to feel a sense of investment in where we lived, to be curious about what it meant not just to us right now in this one moment, but to the people around us and to the people who had come before. We were meant to discover where our cells fit in in those deep histories and ecosystems and genealogies, to notice not just how we were being changed by the space around us but how we were changing it ourselves. We were meant to notice the holy miracle of the dirt in our tiny backyards or community gardens or playgrounds, the little dandelions and huge old trees that grew in that dirt and peeked through the cracks in the sidewalk or broke its concrete with their huge roots, the smell of rain on that concrete, the way the rain became waterways, and the way those waterways held histories and possibilities and violences and cooperations and migrations and deep dark animal worlds. None of that was backdrop to me. It was integral to me. It was, in fact, me.

I understood why the city didn’t feel like a place to put down roots for many people. But also, I couldn’t help wondering, was any place? Many of the people who were leaving New York weren’t going back to the places they were connected to in any real way. Few were moving back to where they had been raised. Most were simply following jobs, or calculating various data points about other places in the hopes that they would find what they were looking for. Many would move again. And again. Behind the remove with which they talked about the city, behind the breezy nonchalance, I could hear it: we had lost our connection to place. We called it freedom, but it was severance. As a culture, we were floating, untethered, our cords cut, and calling it a choice. We were imagining place as scenery, as static in the background, rather than a living organism that we were part of and that was a part of us.

Global capital relies on this severance. Industrialization has relied on us being untethered. When we are unattached to our homes, our roots, the communities around us, the earth beneath our feet, we are vulnerable. When we are in extractive relationship with the places we live, we are in a better position to be extracted from.

Art critic John Berger wrote “Today, as soon as very early childhood is over, the house can never again be home, as it was in other epochs. This century, for all its wealth and with all its communication systems, is the century of banishment.”

Banishment, but we were calling it mobility.

****

Recently in postcolonial lit class, we read poetry, and one of the pieces was “Postcolonial Love Poem” by Mojave and Latinx poet Natalie Diaz. We talked mostly of the way Diaz writes about land with intimacy, the way she imagines intimacy as land. Wren pointed out that the way Diaz begins the poem — “I’ve been taught bloodstones can cure a snakebite, / can stop the bleeding—most people forgot this / when the war ended” — sets up a the outset that the reader will spend the entirety of the poem confronted by all they don’t know. Diaz presents indigenous and colonial imaginings in opposition and also in union, destabilizing any easy binaries and with it our very footing. It pulses with all we have lost, and also, all that is still alive, in the gems and plant life and canons of our bodies and the way we use to them to “wage love and worse.” We are the snake and the snakebite and we hold and also have forgotten the cure.

Earlier that same week, when our homeschool coop visited the Henry Street Settlement House, before I talked to Walter about parking, our tour guide asked the children what they knew about migration. We had laughed: more of the families in the group are intimately acquainted with it than not; a family where both parents are not immigrants or first generation is the tiny minority. In an earlier meetup with the group, we had found ourselves in one of those seemingly inevitable “Is it time to leave the United States?” conversations that are so frequent these days both online and in person, and one of the American parents talked about trying to get their German citizenship to flee. “It’s not that easy, though,” I said, “to be an immigrant.” My friend Angelica, who emigrated from Spain when her first two children were little, agreed. And then she said, “it’s not even that easy to return.”

“You are reminding me,” I told Angelica then, “of this one little conversation in a book I read as a teenager that always resonated so deeply for me.” And then I quoted it, because that’s how many times I have thought of this passage of Maximum City by Suketu Mehta:

My father once, in New York, exasperated by my relentless demands to be sent back to finish high school in Bombay, shouted at me, “when you went there, you wanted to come here. Now that you're here, you want to go back.”

It was when I first realized I had a new nationality: citizen of the country of longing.

At the Henry Street Settlement that day, we citizens of the country of longing all sat on the floor of its entry way and watched a video about its history (which you can also watch, here; if you’re not familiar with the settlement house movement, you can get a little background on that here). The Henry Street Settlement was borne, as it turns out, of a birth. Lillian Wald, a 26 year old nurse, was teaching a homemaking class to a group of immigrant women on the Lower East Side when she was summoned to a tenement where a woman lay dying of a postpartum hemorrhage after being abandoned by her doctor because of her inability to pay. “The misery in the room and the walk through the gritty streets,” the video narrator told us, was a “baptism by fire.” It didn’t surprise me. Birth is a portal that way. (The hemorrhaging woman, by the way, survived.)

“The thing is,” Angelica leaned over to whisper to me as we watched all the other ways the Henry Street Settlement went about its work trying to not only provide health care but address the social determinants of health, “it’s the descendants of these immigrants who came over without any process and were living in these conditions who are now yelling about building walls and getting ‘illegals’ out of the country.”

“That is exactly what I was thinking!” I exclaimed. And it was (alongside a vague wonder about whether Lillian Wald was one of the public health nurses who basically eradicated Black, indigenous, and ethnic white midwifery out of existence).

We are the snake and the snakebite and we hold and have forgotten the cure. When the inevitable conversations about leaving this city or this country come up, I understand them. But there is a defiant rage in me, a part that does not want to cede this place to people who would only extract from it. That refuses to be banished.

I want to be careful here to point out that to have roots someplace is not the same thing as to have ownership over it. I am not indigenous to this land, and I do not think it is hyperbolic to say that the future of our planet probably depends on land back movements. Whatever roots I do have here are borne of the simple improbability that I exist at all, that the waterways made this place what it is and my father could fly the 7000 miles between Lahore and New York City to fall in love with a woman whose grandparents had sailed the 45000 miles between Naples and Sicily and New York City. Whatever roots I have here are a tangle that weave and tunnel underneath oceans. But still they exist and exert a pull. It is a pull that still bleeds every time an old tree is severed from its roots to make way for condos that will not last as long as the tree had.

“The way Diaz describes bodies,” Wren said in postcolonial lit class, “is in a landscape unfamiliar to me.” I had wondered, then: what sort of landscape of the body would feel familiar to this daughter of mine? What poem would she write? I have intentionally tried to instill a sense of place in my children, have dug my hands in the dirt and buried their placentas here, have read to them about this place’s History and also all the stories that came before History or have been precluded by History. I have taken them to ancient glacial rocks and waterways and hiked in search of spring ephemerals. I wanted to foster a relationship of intimacy with the place around them because I could not imagine a sense of health coming without it. How do you feel whole without seeing yourself as part of a whole? But I do not know in what language they feel that intimacy or, even, if they do at all. They are, after all, children still, and live in a world of possibility rather than groundedness. They also are growing up in a very different New York than I had, one that is razed and rebuilt with rapidity. How do you become a person of place in a place that is always changing? I barely know the answer to that question myself.

Here is what I do know. I once wrote something like, I know the streets of my neighborhood like the lines on my palm when writing about the devastation in Gaza and how losing place is a casualty we often gloss over when we, understandably, focus on death tolls. But the truth is, I actually know the streets of my neighborhood better than my own palm. If you were to show me the cartography of my own hand, I would never recognize it as easily as I would the street map of this place where I have loved and cried and birthed and grieved and laughed and hoped to die and lived anyway. This place where my cells have become part of the floorboards. I know that for sure.

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Comrades, I am delayed in sharing my April playlist, but here it is, better late than never, and now that I’ve finished my book proposal (!!) I’m hopeful to be able to post here more frequently than I have been, and will have the May one up for you soon enough!

The cape was unlike any Superman costume I’d seen before or have seen since, and I still find it hard to describe. It was not simply a cape that tied around one’s neck — though it did, of course, incorporate one — but a stretchy polyester vest that covered both the chest and back of the person who wore it. There were no sides to the vest, and it tied with a sash around the waist. The open sides made me wonder at its original purpose and how it had been (or not been) coordinated into a larger costume. It was also, decidedly, sized for an adult woman. But Illy loved it, and from that day on wore it over his clothes pretty much every day, for months.

I loved it, too. There was something about walking around with a small, cherubic child wearing a cape long enough to almost trip him everywhere he went that meant we were the recipients of the best kind of human attention. Truck drivers would lean out their windows and delightedly call out, “Hey, Superman!” Every person we passed smiled and waved. Small considerations, like letting me go first in a line at a store, were more common, and usually accompanied by some quip about how Superman needed to go about his business saving lives.

All of this attention should have dissuaded Ilan from wearing it. He was, after all, my shyest kid, my child who would sometimes stand in the hallway of any gathering that involved my loud, large Pakistani family for infuriatingly long times, afraid to step into the noise and fray. He was cautious, sensitive. And yet he walked around like a celebrity about town in that cape, receiving the attention with a grin, his huge eyes wide and delighted by the improbability that anyone would mistake his tiny body for that of a superhero’s, would believe that he was someone who could keep everyone else safe. I do wonder if it was that sense of safety that made him wear it; that somehow, playacting as a superhero gave him a sense of security he didn’t usually feel, even as it brought attention upon him that usually intimidated him.

Truth be told, it made me feel safe, too. I’ve never felt as secure in my neighborhood as I did walking around with Superman at my side, knowing we would all pretend together. Knowing everyone around me was enraptured by the tender imagination of childhood. Knowing we all agreed it was worth protecting.

Now I live in a world where we know what it looks for a man to cradle the head of his decapitated toddler and some us not only look the other way but justify it.

*****

Just over a year ago, I wrote, “I didn’t start a newsletter to write about genocide, or what it does to those of us witnessing one in real time.” But, I continued rhetorically, how can you write about anything but genocide during a genocide? It is a year later, and I still have the same questions, only amplified. I didn’t start a newsletter to write about genocide or the United States’ accelerated slide into fascism. I didn’t start a newsletter to quickly and breathlessly provide my take on the dismantling of a government, or McCarthy-era-style kidnappings. I did not start a newsletter to write about the stock market. I started a newsletter, and here I’ll quote myself again, “to write about what I have the most to offer about — growing, birthing, and nurturing our children, the oppressive systems and institutions that surround those processes and attempt to strangle them out of their liberatory potential, and all the ways we can reclaim it.” Even though I know that, in actuality, writing about those things is as important — if not more important, because they remain our foundations even in systemic collapse — as it ever was, it all feels so comparatively small, so insignificant, so lacking in urgency.

When I was prepping to teach Martyr! (by far my favorite read not only of this year, but in some time; please pick it up if you haven’t already) earlier this semester, I found myself reading interviews with Kaveh Akbar, and I felt a small hot spark of recognition in his answers in one of them, something I don’t always feel when reading about how other authors describe writing.

Why do you write?

I love it. Being an addict in recovery, I’ve lost my privileges to all my favorite highs. I’m not allowed to do any of my favorite drugs anymore, but writing is the only exception. I can get high as shit off writing. It sounds corny, but for real — If I write in the morning, all day I’ll be walking around like I’m floating…

In that same analogy — writing as almost a replacement drug — what does writer’s block feel like for you?

I’ve never experienced it.

Woah. Really?

I mean, I have project block — sometimes I can’t finish this essay, or I can’t finish this particular thing — but writing is just sticking words to each other. Nobody says that they have Lego block; these are my materials and I’m just playing with them.

I’ve never experienced it, either. I’ve been blocked from writing by the constraints of my life, sure, but there has never been a time where my brain does not crave to write, and when given the opportunity, cannot begin. If given the time to write, I will write. I just will. I’ve never not. Even in the moments where I’ve sat down anticipating that I won’t be able to, I have. I just start picking up the blocks and clicking them together. Sometimes — really most of the time: I’m a prolific writer but I’m an even more obsessive rewriter — the form those blocks will take isn’t quite right, and I will need to rearrange them later, but I can always begin building. Nor am I a slow writer; I write prolifically, relatively quickly (you might remember here how this summer I wrote AND edited 153 pages of my book in the equivalent of two forty-hour work weeks).

But I didn’t become a journalist for a reason. I don’t write slowly, but I write about slow things. I don’t want to churn out content about Breaking! News! And yet I also find it hard to imagine putting any writing out into the world right now that isn’t a response to all that is being broken. The instagram-ification of Substack isn’t helping with that, of course, nor is the fact that I do have limited time to write and most of it is, as I shared in a note recently, being devoted to the book project.

But some of it is also that I cannot help but find myself wondering if there’s still even a place for my writing in the world as it is currently being restructured. I mean this in both the do I have anything worthwhile to say to people in polycrisis? way and also in the will the publishing industry even be able to publish books like mine? way. As I slowly and arduously approach the finish line of the book proposal I’ve been writing and rewriting over the last four and a half years, it occurs to me that four and a half years ago I had never, not for one minute, thought there was a chance it would not be published because it was controversial in any way. Any of my doubts were about my own self-worth as an artist, or the ability of the publishing industry to see me as sufficiently capable of making them money. Now, I live in a world where people are being kidnapped for writing simple college newspaper articles about a genocide we are all witnessing in real time, and it would be naive to not consider what that means for all of our futures. (Though I hope it need not be said that what is happening to Rümeysa Öztürk is worth caring about regardless of what it portends for the rest of us, because she is a human being, and human beings should not be stolen and held hostage in cells without the medicine they need to survive.)

A couple of weeks ago in High School homeschool lit class, we read Audre Lorde’s essay “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” I assigned it because we were also reading the short story collection Fairy Tales for Lost Children by the Somali-British author Diriye Osman, and he refers Lorde’s speech more than once. The teens and I sat around the table with cups of steaming chai and I delightedly listened to them deconstruct phrases like “we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live,” phrases I had also deconstructed as a teen. When I first came across Audre Lorde then, in the late nineties, “intersectionality” was not a term I had yet learned - I wouldn’t, actually, encounter Kimberlé Crenshaw until graduate school, and so my nascent understanding of her work was intimate rather than structural. In particular, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” which I now understand as much as an indictment against the structures that silence — and those who comply with that silencing — as it is a clarion call for people to speak their own truths, mostly captivated me as a teen for its the framing of silence as a kind of cancer that can destroy oneself from the inside out. As a teenager growing up long before the #metoo movement was even a dream, internalized shame had kept me silent about my own history of sexual violence, and I turned the phrase “your silence will not protect you” around and around in my mouth like a smooth, tart hard candy. It was compelling, but it also made my mouth pucker. To me, my silence was protecting me, controlling what people thought of me. But it was also threatening to devour me whole, not only because I was haunted by unacknowledged trauma that overdetermined so much of how I moved through the world, my relationships, and my own sense of self, but because, literally, my insides were devouring themselves; I refused to feed them much else. The discipline I subjected on the body I felt had betrayed me was its own form of self-silencing, an attempt to keep myself tiny, acceptable, and so untethered I could possibly disappear, light enough to be carried off on the wind. The idea that silence was something to be resisted, the idea that it would be liberating to make myself and my pain visible, was a revolution, and it would be many years before I even tried.

It was strange to return to this speech in 2025, and read, “Your silence will not protect you,” only to find myself thinking of Rümeysa Öztürk or Mahmoud Khalil, and surprise myself with the wonder, “but won’t it?”

Being silent nearly killed me, and yet.

*****

One of the birthgivers I write about in my book is someone I cared for when I was doing my residency in midwifery school, a woman for whom I use the pseudonym “Rana.” Rana was a refugee of the Syrian Civil War, though I never learned much about her journey or how she managed to get to NYC when most fleeing Syria at the time found themselves in overcrowded, under-resourced refugee camps in Greece or Turkey. She was always accompanied by her aunt, who had emigrated many decades earlier, and always declined my offers of an official translator, choosing her aunt to translate for her instead. There wasn’t, in truth, much to translate. Rana was always evasive, demurely answering “Alla hu Akhbar,” a phrase for which I needed no translation, and lifting her eyes at the ceiling, whenever I asked her any questions about Syria, or her husband who was still in Jordan, or how she liked New York, or, really, anything at all. Her Aunt would roll her eyes often in response to this, and tell me, “she still thinks the walls have ears; she grew up in Syria, you know” as though Rana’s affect were not a reasonable response to having resided in a country whose government made people disappear for the slightest perceived disloyalty for decades even before the war. I’ve thought about Rana and her aunt, and the phrase “the walls have ears” frequently in the years since, but especially now I find myself often returning to the way her aunt nudged me as if we were sophisticates, cosmopolitans who would never have to worry about such things, as if such fear were beneath us, as if living in a place where you would be punished for your political views and allegiances was as remote a possibility as us living on Mars.

In my middle grade lit class, we recently read The Lost Year , a book about the Holodmor, or manufactured famine by the Soviets in the Ukraine in the 1930s, and a major theme in the novel is people being sent to work camps, or simply executed, for speaking against “Papa Stalin.” A major theme, too, is the way in which Walter Duranty — the lead American reporter covering the Soviet Union for the New York Times — simply regurgitated Soviet propaganda in order to maintain his proximity to power, denying not only the famine but many other of Stalin’s atrocities. It portrays ordinary people speaking up and fighting these narratives, of telling their own stories despite suppression, as heroes. The book is, in its own way, a middle grade version of the idea that our silences do not protect us.

But it, like most narratives about the United States, isn’t writing about a United States where a young immigrant from an “undesirable” country, writing letters to expose U.S. complicity in a famine that was killing millions of people might realistically be sent to a detention center in Louisiana as a result.

Is the fact that this is happening now supposed to make us feel safer? Does anyone buy into the farce that these students constitute a threat? What kind of person would you have to be to watch the video of Öztürk being abducted by masked kidnappers in broad daylight and find your body filling with a warm sense of relaxation and ease? I find it hard to believe a single person could ever watch this video of ICE breaking the car window of a mother and forcibly removing her, in front of her children, and feel safer. “You can’t take her just because you want to,” her daughter screams. And yet. They are. Trump says “homegrowns” are next. Is this safety? Does it make people feel secure to think there are people around us who choose to behave this way, who choose to enact these kinds of violences? These actions are the natural consequence of the oppressive systems our country is founded upon, one might argue. Perhaps. But systems don’t kidnap, disappear, and traffic humans. Other humans do. Human beings make the systems; the system is made of human beings. Human bodies, human voices, human wills, human imaginations. “We’re not monsters” one of the ICE “agents” who helped transport Öztürk said to her. But knowing that his is a version of humanity that exists in the world is not something that helps me sleep at night.

In all the conversations about detention and deportation and criminalisation of dissent that are happening right now, I’ve noticed that one of the foundational conceits that never seems to be questioned is this idea that “strong borders” are a form of security. While people may disagree on the way that they are enforced, few seem to question the idea that they should exist in the first place. But it seems to me that there’s a case to be made that it is, in fact, the very idea of borders, the need for them to be delineated and constantly maintained, that make us less safe to begin with.

*****

Earlier this month, in the span of a week, I cared for four different people in labor. One of them experienced what is known as pROM, or premature rupture of membranes. As I’ve written about a bit before, most of my clients choose to “expectantly manage” pROM, which means waiting, sometimes interminably long times, for labor to start. This is an approach that is supported by evidence (a good resource for consumers on this is here), but it is very much not the norm among the western Medical Industrial Complex, who regularly induce such labors at 12 or 24 hours — which is to say, a majority of labors involving pROM because in my experience, most people do not go into their own labor that quickly if they are truly experiencing pROM, or membrane rupture without any labor, rather than water that has broken in an as-of-yet unrecognized early labor. When my clients experience pROM, we check in every day and listen to their baby’s heartrate and take vitals while we we wait for labor to start; at one of these visits earlier in the month, another client, who was waiting outside the office for her visit to begin, asked if she could interrupt our visit to use the office bathroom — she was, after all, 40 weeks pregnant. As it so happened, she was also someone who had experienced pROM in her first labor.

When she walked through the office, the person experiencing pROM now asked, “any words of wisdom?”

“It’s going to be okay,” the second responded. “Trust your baby, and your body. And trust Robina. Labor will come.”

She was right.

Supporting people who are experiencing pROM is, to me, one of the biggest exercises in both facilitating and embodying faith in a calling that is actually, at root, all about facilitating and embodying faith. I profoundly trust in these cases — and profoundly trust that trying to force contractions often does more harm than good — in a culture that is insistent we must force the body to comply with our timelines. In a culture that believes the body to be a risk to itself that must be managed, no matter what harms come from that management. The amounts of time that I reliably wait for labor to start would almost certainly be called Very Dangerous by many providers within the MIC, even though the main risk when it comes to pROM is infection, and the main risk for infection is vaginal exams, something I do not perform at all in these labors. In fact, there’s actually very little evidence to suggest that infection is a strong risk in the setting of pROM without vaginal exams — both because the evidence we have suggests it simply isn’t, but also because robust evidence simply doesn’t exist; only 3 out of thirty-odd studies on PROM even consider people who have not had vaginal exams. This is though it’s been well established that frequency of vaginal exams is the single largest factor that increases the risk of infection: 3-4 vaginal exams double the odds from having “less than 3” (note that the control is not zero, or having no vaginal exams at all), while having 8 or more makes it 5 times as likely. And yet the very first thing many providers do when someone is admitted with pROM, even if they are standing there looking at a person who is obviously and clearly Very Much Not In Labor, is perform a vaginal exam as a “baseline.” It gives them no usable information, and is entirely unnecessary. It does nothing but start the clock on infection risk. And yet.

Supposedly, this is the safer way to deal with pROM: to do the very thing that makes it “risky” in the first place.

During the week where I took care of this client and three others, I helped fill birth pools by hand and raced up the FDR in dusky light and helped older siblings with bags of freeze-dried mango and answered when they asked why their mother sounded “sad.” I listened to baby’s heart rates when they were inside their mothers’ bodies, being oxygenated by their mothers’ bodies, then listened to them once they were outside and had begun breathing for themselves. When one of them came out limp and pale and stunned, I paused and took him in, asking whether he needed my help, before gently holding him like a football, hovering just over his mother’s skin, to help him clear his lungs of fluid. He coughed, then cried, and I returned him to where he belonged. I weighed and measured and waited and made small talk. I, also, celebrated my third child’s birthday, hosted 40-odd members of my family for Eid, and grieved the unexpected loss of my Aunt Ellen.

My aunt was unusually petite, a little sprite of a person who bubbled effervescently. Improbably, three out of those four babies who entered the world the week she departed were uncharacteristically little girls, two of them just barely 6 pounds. Synchronicities like this are where I find my sense of safety in the universe.

*****

In many ways, the book I’m writing is at root about safety: how the concept is weaponized in order to justify harm; how we reclaim and build for each other safety in the face of violence and trauma; how it is often found, paradoxically, in vulnerability; and, importantly, how binaries like “safe” and “unsafe” are figments of our imagination in the first place, constructions that never exist purely in opposition to each other.

When I sit around the table with my high school homeschoolers, all of us teary-eyed when we discuss the way in which postcolonial authors talk about intergenerational wounds and the capacity to heal them, or when I watch their neurons firing rapidly, as they finish each other’s sentences about W.E.B. Du Bois’ understanding of “double consciousness” in relationship to the concept of the colonial gaze, I feel as secure and at ease as I ever have. It occurred to me, sitting around the table with them a few days after I published my last, I-guess-we-can-call-it-viral-because-the-IG-version-had-almost-a-million-views-(wtf) essay about building community: I had not, not explicitly, mentioned these teenagers in it. But they are, in fact, an integral part of mine. They are who I’ve spent my days with over decades. They are who I’ve grown with in parallel — them from babies into children and teens; me from new mother into mother of four, from academic to midwife — and they have taught me as much as any of my peers. I would trust them to hide me from the Gestapo as much as I’d trust any of the adults I know (if not more than many I know), and it is no exaggeration to say I would lay down my life to protect theirs’. They are, in fact, part of why I homeschooled in the first place; because I wanted my life to be one of intergenerational community, not one where people are segregated according to age but intertwined, all the time. I wanted to build a world that was imprinted as much as it could be by walking with Superman, seeing the world he made possible. Who wouldn’t?

When I was a fresh-out-of-college editorial assistant at a children’s publishing house, one of my tasks, along with all the other young-and-underpaid staff of said publishing house, was to periodically stay past 5 to sort through all the fan-mail we had received from children and respond to them, an activity for which we were paid overtime. It is so strange to me, in retrospect, that a giant corporation would devote any resources at all to such a thing, and yet they did. My favorite was to open the envelopes addressed to Frog and Toad and to try to write back in a voice that sounded like them rather than simply fold up and mail back the xeroxed canned response we were given.

When I think back to all the hours I spent in the windowless offices and conference rooms in the year I worked at that job, I remember very little of the actual work. It’’s a sea of hazy memories, of stark fluorescent lights and photocopiers and being so bored I could barely stay awake some days. I vaguely remember interactions with the guy in the food cart from whom I got my morning coffee, and how surreal it was to have a guy in the food cart from whom I got my morning coffee. But besides the fact that I was there, at only my second day of work ever, on the morning of 9/11, and that — I swear this is true even though it sounds like a bad novel — my boss told us the best thing we could do under the circumstances was focus on our work, my only truly distinct memories are of being Frog. Of being Toad. I wasn’t condescending to the kids who believed they were writing to characters in a picture book. The world they lived in, it seemed to me, was no more imaginary or irrational than the corporate world I found myself. I valued it as much, if not more, than that one, and I wanted to protect it.

I never did have even the slightest hope of responding personally to all the letters; there were just too many. Eventually, as the clock started to wind down, I’d start stuffing envelopes with the canned response and the little keychains that we were meant to send along with them. But there are a handful of children in this world, who are now grown-ups, who at some point in their lives received a letter from me, barely more than a child myself, writing them back as though the characters they loved were real. And they were, because I was.

There are so many things we can think of when we think of safety, and that is one of mine.

Love,

Toad

I know it’s mid-April, dear readers, but I did want to share my March playlist! The first of March coincided with the first day of Ramadan this year, and my aunt passed at the end of the month, so the feel of the playlist is heavily inspired by both of those portals, by the sense of what is normal being interrupted and turned on its head, and also, by the sense of us being stripped down to our most essential. I hope it grants you some of the comfort and inspiration it has me.

And if you happened to miss my January and February playlists, they are here and here. I’ve been very much enjoying making these each month, and hope to both keep up this practice, and to keep offering it to you; do let me know if you are enjoying them.

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Because, after all, becoming a parent transforms us, and with it our relationship with the world. With children serving as, in Jennifer Silva and Allison Pugh’s evocative phrase, “witness and tether,” we see it, inhabit it, interact with it, and invest in it differently Relationships and priorities may change. Perspectives may shift. Empathy and sensitivity almost certainly grow, at least on a neurological level. We experience time in a wholly new way. We live in a set of different possibilities, many of them contradictory. And one of the many contradictions parents experience is exactly this deeper investment in making the world a better place while simultaneously having a material reality that leaves Doing The Work required of such better world-building completely out of reach. Long work hours, limited childcare, and household responsibilities make finding time for organizing meetings, or even the right organizing meetings to go to, let alone participating in direct action that might get you arrested, feel virtually impossible for the average parent.

This post is not, in fact, an answer to any of the many questions I get about organizing and protesting and participating in direct action while being a parent. Though, perhaps someday, I’ll write that post, too.

But while I won’t go so far as to make any kind of grand statements about the best use of one’s time and energy as a parent of young kids, I will say that for most parents with young kids, organizing with the kind of consistency and commitment that can lead to any sort of tangible “win” feels virtually impossible because it is, in fact, virtually impossible. With rare exceptions of groups that have thoughtfully centered parents as organizers, it’s simply out of reach for the average parent unless their life has been very intentionally (and usually non traditionally) structured to allow for it (or who are perhaps, independently wealthy and have unlimited resources for childcare and paid help for household tasks).

More so that bringing your kids to the occasional protest or attending an organizing meeting sporadically as your childcare situation allows, I dare say it’s potentially more valuable, at this stage of life in particular, to commit oneself to the practice building deep, intertwined community to begin with — and the unlearning required to do it. Not only is this a kind of radical work that is possible with young children in tow, it is work that is deeply meaningful and changemaking because it forces us to confront and disrupt the colonial capitalist paradigms we have internalized on a tangible, material level. It is the kind of work that will get us ready for the world to come, the world we or our children or our children’s children will have to build on the remains of the unsustainable empires that now teeter on the verge of collapse, because in the end it is the only world that can be. You know the phrase, “we keep us safe?” This is the work that allows that to be more than a slogan. Because all the organizing in the world is for naught if at the end of the day we don’t actually know how to care for each other.

To say it in another way, learning how to radically be in community is in and of itself a potent political act in an industrialized, capitalist culture that has eroded collectivism and connection in favor of individualism and isolation, that has siloed us into “nuclear” families who are responsible only to ourselves. Learning to be responsible to and for others not in our immediate families is something that has been colonized out of too many people. Finding our way back to interconnection is part of how we heal.

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It’s not coincidence that most of the list — workout, walk, sing, stretch, make out, and even, I’d argue, “practice uke” — were bodily endeavors. Part of why I wanted to “feel better” in the first place was because I could feel a familiar ghostliness setting in: a sort of distance between me and the world, a disconnect between me and me, a feeling that I was floating just a millimeter above my body observing my own performance. Robina was doing everything she should, which is to say, she was spending most of her energy and efforts projecting a bubble of steady, safe energy around her. She was making things okay for her kids, setting out long rolls of paper on her kitchen table to doodle on, keeping them well fed with groceries she stood in lines for hours to procure, soothing her newly teenaged daughter’s nightly tears about missing her friends and her newfound independence and addressing unanswerable questions about when those things would return. Robina was on zoom calls reassuring clients about their own resilience when they wept about how this wasn’t the world they expected to bring their babies into, and standing forehead to forehead with laboring people from behind one of her three donated N-95s — even as she was also obsessively wiping down surfaces and taking off her clothes outside her house, as if it could undo their hot breath on her cheeks as they desperately held onto her neck — and answering more unanswerable questions. But despite projecting that bubble of safety, Robina — just barely, so subtly it would have been imperceptible to anyone but her — was also going to a familiar place she had learned to go when she was not safe, when unsafe things were happening to her. Which is to say, in the language of trauma specialists and your favorite IG therapy memes, a disassociated space.

So she made a list, one that could have also been called, “how to feel less like a ghost.”

*****

There is no other way to describe the current moment other than to say that we are living through a coordinated terror attack from the powers that be. All of that has been unleashed — attacks on trans rights; ICE raids; communications freezes at federal agencies like the CDC, FDA, and NIH; tariffs; nazi salutes; withdrawing from the WHO; threatening to annex Gaza; and on and on and on and on — is done so in an attempt to flood us, to overload us so much so that our ability to process and respond is compromised. To encourage us to numb out. Israel’s onslaught of Gaza the had a similar ethos: destruction for destruction’s sake, but also for terror’s sake, for encouraging people to turn the other way simply because they cannot bear to watch. It is a tactic calculated to leave us disassociated and protecting ourselves from despair and hopelessness by not feeling at all. That encourages us to feel untethered to the world; as if we do not make it and it does not make us. As if all that happens is someone else’s problem, some mythical person from the future we can’t imagine, even as they very well might be people we meet: our own children, our children’s children. We are encouraged to ignore them, to disassociate from the reality being thrust upon them, these opposites of ghosts.

*****

I came down with the flu on January 13th. It was a week before the inauguration and the night after I had attended a birth. The baby had been born quickly; I didn’t make it. The placenta took its time. The dad fed us pistachio croissants in between directing the window repairmen who he had forgotten were scheduled to show up that morning. And that night, as I curled up in bed, I began to shake so violently Andy needed to lay almost on top of me to get the trembling to settle enough for me to fall asleep. I woke up with a fever and body aches so bad I could have wept if I had the energy. Looking at my phone was impossible; none of the letters made sense. I begged Wren to take the baby, offered to pay her. I did not get up, except to pee twice, for 10 hours. Later that night, as I laid in bed listening to my kids and husband chatting animatedly on the other side of the door to my bedroom, I convinced myself I had died and was haunting them. “Am I ghost?” I asked Andy when he came in to check on me and offer me food.

As someone who usually bounces back from illness quickly, I was stunned by how long recovery from the flu took. I was desperately tired for two weeks afterwards: a bone crushing, sleep 12 hours a night kind of exhaustion worse than the bone-building depletion of the first trimester. The exhaustion was likely compounded by the the fact that I ended up at another birth exactly a week after the first, several days after my fever broke and when I was starting to feel slightly less acutely terrible but a 3 mile walk to the art store with the kids still drained me beyond my comprehension. This second birth happened in a snowstorm, and I made it before the baby arrived, but just by a half an hour. “I don’t think I like labor,” my client confessed. “I don’t think anyone likes it til it’s over,” I responded.

Maybe it was the forced slowness of the flu, or maybe it’s that it’s winter, or maybe it’s just that I remember the last time too well — the frenzy, the breathlessness, the constant strategizing and protesting of winter 2017 — but I have spent the last few weeks consciously resisting being flooded. Although it would never be in character for me to ignore the terrors, and I haven’t, I have felt myself instinctively moving toward certain outlets and not others to stay appraised. In particular, I have been turning away from social media like Instagram, with its breaking news and hot takes and meme-ification. It’s a platform I’ve used for writing for years and yet somehow, in this moment, my brain is not speaking the language it requires. I cannot think in short catchy soundbytes and exacting, beautiful turns of phrases, not right now. Right now my brain feels like a seedling germinating under snow. What will bloom? Or, more importantly, what is the right seed to germinate? I do not yet know what this present moment requires, but I do know I want to generate and not simply react. I do not want to do what it is expected or what I have already done. I do not want to return to the tactics I already tried, as though I’m being haunted by something I can’t escape.

****

In retrospect, my list in April of 2020 was a quaint list. A simple list of simple, easily accessed pleasures. Less than a year after I made it, I could have made another miles longer and unequivocally more labor intensive, because in the fall of 2020 I ended up attending some of the most traumatic births of my life, and in their wake I was left battling panic attacks for the first time in my life, followed by my first COVID infection (which I also contracted, masked, at a birth), then a weeks-long episode of insomnia so extreme sometimes I was only sleeping 6 minutes out of every 24 hours (“micro-naps” was a term I didn’t know until the torture of this episode; that the answer to “can you die of insomnia?” is yes was another). It’s still unclear to me whether that episode could be attributed to some long-COVID attack on my nervous system, or simply the result of both chronic and acute PTSD that was compounded by the circadian disruptions and, also, trauma of contracting COVID as a healthcare provider who had managed to avoid it for almost an entire year just days before I was due for my first vaccine. By 2021 my list would have included, in addition to the above, a half dozen herbs and supplements, rigid circadian rhythm practices (strict wake up and sleep times; walks/movement at certain times of day; eating on a schedule; sun on my eyes immediately upon waking; blue blockers and low lights starting at dusk; specific bedtime routines, and so on); regular acupuncture; cold dips in the ocean, regimented workout schedules, “grounding” every morning, and on and on: all things I continued until Hanif was born and much of it became inaccessible again (though, blessedly, I had recovered enough by then that losing those practices did not destroy my health).

In the depths of those insomnia days, I did not feel like a ghost; I was a ghost. I dutifully did the things I was supposed to. I got out of the bed where I had not slept and swallowed the bitter traditional Chinese herbs I had been prescribed and took long walks in the cemetery around the corner from my house in the morning hoping the early morning sun and movement would help me sleep the next night. I attended prenatal visits and smiled warmly. I attended births and sat on my hands when I was supposed to and leapt into activity when I was supposed to. I took my kids to homeschool groups and read them stories at night as if we were all about to go to sleep. But I peered at the funerary statues in the same cemetery I walked around hundreds of times before unable to make any sense of them, and I could not feel the warmth of my smile spread through my body, and I would stare at the horizon as the sun set at those homeschool meetups and feel a cold chasm of emptiness in my chest where my heart should be. At night, when everyone but me and Andy were asleep, the ghosts in me would howl, scream to be noticed, weep and claw at the walls in despair. “I’m trapped,” they would say, over and over. “I’m trapped, I’m trapped.”

“You’re safe,” Andy would say, but as a ghost I could not believe him. I had, already, after all, died.

*****

This is not a “how to feel better” list. We are, as a nation, haunted by our ghosts. Ghosts of terror, and enslavement, of torture and rape and genocide and theft and exploitation. And no lists of “read / practice uke / workout / puzzles with kids / take a walk / write / sing / stretch / make out” is going to solve that for us. But, in a dying empire that would just as soon ground our bones to dust in its frenzied, snarling descent, it is worth tending to the bodies and hearts that might outlive it, that might build something better. I don’t mean to say I think joy is resistance. I do mean to say that if we are to resist we must survive, and pleasure is a necessary part of survival. Pleasure, I would argue, is also a precondition for imagining, one of the nutrients in the soil that nurtures tender shoots to break through the blanket of snow.

These days, I’m allowing my brain to feel slow, to trust its pace and its gentle unfurling as I try to make sense of all that is being unleashed. I am reading by booklight as I nurse my baby to sleep — 8 books already this year — and writing long things that may or may not ever be held in other people’s hands and taking the time to do potentially frivolous things like make playlists, playlists like I used to when I was a teen, playlists with names and meticulously ordered songs unlike the way I usually haphazardly add songs to quarterly playlists named after the seasons. I am taking the time to connect with friends and ground myself in relationship, inviting people over for dinner spontaneously and bringing them chicken soup when they have the flu. I am making sure there is always chai on the stove. I am daydreaming about ways to expand and connect the disparate communities I have already built, seeing what they can build together. I am resisting the urge to judge my own slowness, my own uncharacteristic refusal to jump! into! action!. I am letting myself imagine. I am not being washed away by the things that would have me consumed. I am planting my feet down slowly, slowly, slowly, letting them sink into the snow, letting them take root, insisting I am of this place and I belong in its future. I am refusing to be a ghost.

Let’s get a collective list going! How are you tending to your heart and body this long dark winter? I’ve been meaning to activate the chat for some time now, so that more of you can connect with each other, and now seems like the perfect opportunity to start:

And here’s the link to that playlist I made when I was recovering from flu:

In the case of obstetrics, Archie Cochrane’s proverbial wooden spoon was given for the dubious honor of being the medical specialty with the least science underpinning its practice, and specifically, for being the least guided by randomized controlled trials (RCTs).

When you read about this moment now, in the 20th century, the common narrative is that it was a pivotal moment, a clarion call for obstetrics to shift from “opinion-based” to “evidence-based” medicine, and that practice shifted accordingly and promptly.1 The narrative is an interesting one to me, though, given that another seismic shift was happening to the field of obstetrics in the seventies: the adoption of continuous fetal monitoring (cEFM), a technology that was never validated prior to its introduction (and which, importantly, has never been since).

In 1968, eleven years before Cochrane awarded obstetrics the wooden spoon, Hewlett Packard produced the first commercially available continuous monitor, which was presented as a scientific breakthrough that would end cerebral palsy. Two international conferences on fetal monitoring were subsequently held, but consensus about the benefits, rationale, or indications for use could not be found, given the lack of studies. Forester King, an OB practicing at the time, remembers the response his UK colleagues had to the tech: “‘those Americans are gadget crazy—it will never take off here, give me a good midwife anytime, and besides, I think cerebral palsy won’t be prevented by Caesarean section, it is more likely to be the result of antenatal brain injury.”2 A large randomized study was designed shortly thereafter but was refused funding on the grounds that the technology should in theory do what it said it would (i.e. reduce neonatal morbidity and mortality), and that to deny half of patients a potentially life-saving tool would be ethically suspect.3 cEFM should also, obstetricians hoped, reduce liability by producing a record of what had happened (as it turns out, the exact opposite happened there, too). Most physicians accepted cEFM inventors’ claims and promises, without any of the rigors of the scientific method, without any RCTs, and without any clearly defined parameters for use. By 1976, cEFM had been subjected to 12 clinical trials versus intermittent auscultation (the practice of listening to the fetal heart rate not continuously, but intermittently in intervals dictated by the stage of labor). cEFM showed no benefit and instead resulted in a dramatic increase in surgical birth rate. But by 1979, the same year Cochrane awarded obstetrics the wooden spoon award, at least one-half of all laboring people were being continuously monitored in the United States4; today, around 89% of laboring people are subjected to it as a matter of course.5 Forester King’s colleagues were wrong too: 60% of UK birthgivers today also are subjected to cEFM.6

In other words, if you are going to argue that obstetrics has become more evidence based in the forty-five years since Cochrane’s damning “award,” you’d have to completely ignore the rapid integration of cEFM. And it’d be a pretty glaring omission given it is pretty much the foundation of all modern obstetric practice, a technology that obstetricians live and breathe by, the second most common reason they perform a cesarean section. In fact , if there’s a super villain of modern obstetrics, cEFM would definitely be in the running, harming more birthgivers and babies than it has ever helped.

Cerebral palsy is still the most common motor disability in childhood, and it’s now widely understood that the disability is more likely to be caused by prenatal factors than factors during labor anyway. In fact, not once since its rapid adoption has cEFM been shown to improve the health of babies in any measurable way (Apgar score, rates of brain damage, NICU admissions, or death). The data hasn’t changed since those first few studies in the late 1970s: the only thing fetal monitoring has ever been shown to do is increase the cesarean birth rate which, since its introduction, has soared from 5% to 32%. It’s nothing more than a talisman, a relic, an amulet. And yet it continues to be used as a matter of course, despite the fact that the obstetric community knows this and has published damning study after damning study.7

In my last couple of newsletters, I’ve been exploring binaristic thinking in midwifery and obstetrics — and in particular the popular8 idea that evolution of obstetrics represented a shift toward a rational, “scientific” understanding of birth whereas the “traditional midwifery” it replaced was irrational, faith- and intuition-based and so on. But I’d argue that you need only look at the tyranny of continuous fetal monitoring to understand this kind of binaristic thinking is false; how could anybody argue that its use is rational in any way? Is it rational to cling to a practice that has never been shown to decrease harm but has repeatedly been shown to increase harm? We seem to have equated the simple use of technology we have at our disposable — whether or not it’s actually effective or beneficial — as scientific. But if the basic pretense of science is testing hypotheses in a systematic way and then making conclusions based on those experiments, then I’d argue that the use of continuous fetal monitoring is decisively anti-science. As Sartwelle et al write in an article about cEFM and bioethics, “clinging to obstetrical illusions and myths is merely practicing nineteenth century medicine, which was based on whim, personal belief, and bias, rather than evidence-based, scientific-based medicine. It also violates every past and current concept in bioethics.”9

The truth is, obstetrics, even in 2025, even 46 years after Cochrane awarded it the wooden spoon award, is littered with so many examples of practice defying what we know via “the evidence” that you could throw said wooden spoon pretty much anywhere on a labor and delivery unit and immediately find an example. For example, there’s the fact that we know, without a doubt, that vaginal exams are a primary cause of chorioamnionitis, or infection, particularly in the setting of ruptured membranes10, and obstetric still routinely overuses vaginal exams as a tool even when someone’s membranes are ruptured — only 3 of 23 studies on premature rupture of membranes included in the Cochrane database involve people who were not digitally examined in labor.11 There’s the fact that we know laboring and particularly pushing on one's back is a disadvantage in every way — reducing blood flow to the uterus and therefore oxygenation of the baby (increasing "fetal distress”), decreasing the effectiveness of contractions, closing the pelvis and obstructing descent, and causing more tears — yet obstetricians are routinely limiting people to this position (read more about this in a past newsletter here). There’s the wealth of evidence that “two-step” rather than “one-step” “deliveries” (something I’ve written about at length here) prevents shoulder dystocia, yet obstetricians routinely insist on “one-step” deliveries, thereby often causing the very emergency they are attempting to prevent. There’s antepartum fetal testing (non-stress tests and biophysical profiles), another unvalidated technology that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists admits in its own position statement has “a lack of high-quality evidence from RCTs” to suggest it “decreases the risk of fetal death” yet concludes that nonetheless it’s the best technology we have, and therefore is de facto better than nothing.12

And these are only examples of where the obstetrics blatantly bucks what is demonstrated by its own “evidence.” But only 15-30% of evidence being used to justify obstetric practice is considered “high quality,” in the first place.13 And here’s where we get in really deep: obstetrics is by no means an “evidence based practice,” but even if it were, it would cause harm because what is studied, how it’s studied, and who is studied in and of itself reflects bias at the outset. We culturally hold up “evidence based medicine” as the gold standard — as the opposite of the wooden spoon — and yet, when it comes to birth, it the evidence itself is always-already ambiguous because of what is being studied and how.

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Now, this garage door — a luxury in my area of Brooklyn, where most folks would easily be compelled to sacrifice many a goat to the street parking gods and the alternate side parking gods and whatever other gods might be convinced to give them a reliable spot where they could park without circling for many hours — technically is part of my sister Tahira’s house.1 Her building, built like mine at the turn of the century, contains a drive-through garage (in place of part of the first floor) that once served, as lore has it, as an entryway for horses to get from the churchyard across the street from stables behind the house; this was originally, we have been told, an undertaker’s residence (and, if the lore holds, I suppose place of work).

On this particular cold December day, what was behind the door was siblings, playing: the three of them building a fire under the supervision of my brother in law as part of whatever fantasy they were enacting (I think it involved being explorers, but I was too sleep deprived to really digest what was happening).

The scene brought to mind another a few months earlier, when I drove to LaGuardia airport to pick up my my daughter Wren’s girlfriend, who’d flown in from Cleveland Ohio to visit us for a long weekend in October. According to Wren, Kelly had been to New York City before at least once for a concert, but had only ever set foot in Brooklyn “quickly, to see the Beastie Boys mural” (which, unless I’m mistaken, is actually in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, so it’s possible she’d actually never been to Brooklyn at all). That warm sunny day in two months ago, as we crawled our way from Queens to Brooklyn on the very trafficky Brooklyn-Queens-Expressway, I assumed that, beyond the brief glimpse of the Manhattan skyline, there was nothing particularly noteworthy to capture her attention; a highway bisecting a major metropolitan area is equally unpicturesque in all settings. But as we pulled off the BQE, I began to take in my own neighborhood from the eyes of someone who had never been there. What did she make of that little bright blue row house I thought, or that restaurant’s Halloween decorations? Was it greener or less green than she expected? Was she surprised by the parrots in those trees? As I would do again a hundred times between that day in October and the day I returned from that birth in December, I slid my key in the garage door, turned the bulky lock, and squatted down to lift up the door. Then I got back in the car and drove us through the tunnel. As in December, there was a child on the other side, and this time, too, my sister, putting out laundry with a baby on her hip. The girls got out of the car with Hanif. Wren introduced Kelly to my sister. Then they climbed through the fence between our yards that Andy had constructed so my sister’s family has access to the green space of our yard and we have easy access to our car. And it struck me, so powerfully in that moment, how utterly foreign the whole scene must have been to someone who lives in a big house in the suburbs of Cleveland in a typical nuclear family, how homespun: the 1900s wood-frame, crooked houses teetering on our sloped street; the creaky behemoth of the garage door and the long, not particularly well maintained tunnel behind it; the trembling of the car as we drove through said bumpy tunnel; family putting out laundry to dry in the sun rather than in a machine; climbing up a rickety ladder leaning against a stone wall to get into our yard rather than entering through the front door. It was not just foreign, I realized suddenly, taking in this scene I take for granted with new eyes: it was distinctly Pakistani. I saw, in that moment, just how much that tunnel and laundry and stone wall and creaky homemade gate reminded me of a place I’d often felt so far away from. As someone who often mourns and grieves the distance between the two continents on which she’d grown up, I was astonished to realize, we had built something that breached the gap in ways I hadn’t even appreciated.

Sometimes witnessing a birth feels like that, too: a sudden realization that you had missed some vital element about something that you thought you knew.

Don’t get me wrong. As someone who has been attending births for longer than a decade, I still nonetheless remain in wonderment of it as a general rule. It never becomes less magical, less miraculous, less astounding. It’s not hard for me to appreciate that while this might be the 230th or 381st or 500th birth I have seen , it is the one and only time I will ever witness that singular human being birth that particular, irreplaceable baby. But it’s also only fair to say that as someone who has been around that many births, it never feels foreign or esoteric to me. It’s something with which I am intimately acquainted, from the thousands of hours I’ve sat at a woman or birthing person’s feet, from the days and nights I have spent listening to it — really listening to it, with curiosity and without intent to control. The sounds, the smells, the intensity and the rest, the physicality and liminality of it, are spaces I inhabit comfortably. Even as birth is always the same and yet always different. Even as birth is sometimes scary or stressful. Even as it sometimes require thinking through puzzles and quick action. Even when the waters are uncharted, the currents feel familiar.

But once in a while, something will happen during a birth and it will jar my perspective, as if knocking me askance — as if I’m welcoming a teenager to my home and am suddenly gifted with the ability to see the place I know so well with fresh eyes. This birth earlier in December was like that for me. Not because of the birth itself, which followed a pattern unequivocally familiar to me — in fact, I think I was able to hold my client through all those long hours she labored (82 hours and 32 minutes if my electronic medical record can be trusted) precisely because I find these long circuitous births familiar and, therefore, can normalize them. What knocked my perspective askew, what had me looking at this birth from a different lens, was the fact that another homebirth was happening just a few miles away simultaneously, and I had a window into the way that one unfolded, because my client’s doula was the doula for that one too, and was communicating with her backup the whole time.

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