Gratitude

As I sat down to Thanksgiving dinner with my queer little family this year and we reflected for a moment on the many things for which we are grateful, I couldn’t help but flash back to Thanksgiving Day three years earlier. There I was, thirty-six weeks pregnant, lying back on our queen-sized bed like a beached whale, bulbous belly in the air. The tantalizing odours of roasting turkey wafted up the stairs and teased my nostrils as the acupuncturist placed a needle in each of my baby toes.

“Breathe in,” she said gently, “and out…”

In plunged the needle, followed by the intense tingling sensation as it hit its mark. She then took the purple candle flickering on the bedside table and gently tiled the flame towards my toes, oh-so-carefully applying heat to each needle without burning my skin – a form of “moxibustion,” a practice used in traditional Chinese medicine. A treatment a day for five days in a row, to coax my breech baby to turn.

Just earlier that week, we’d been poised to buy our home birth kit. We were at the midwives’ office, going through the list of items required. Alcohol swabs, peroxide, plastic drop sheets for the mattresses, disposable underpads. “Be sure to get the twenty-four pack,” the midwife reminded us.  Amanda and I exchanged a horrified glance – the twenty-four pack?!

Like many queer-moms-to-be in our orbit, we were drawn to home birth for a whole host of reasons. After a very clinical conception process, we felt strongly that our son come into the world the most “natural” way possible, with minimal medical intervention. Also, a home birth meant that we wouldn’t have to deal with the awkwardness that comes with being a queer couple in a hospital setting – where you’re either invisible ( Amanda being mistaken as my mother or sister) or conspicuous (curious nurses asking , “So – was he a test tube baby?”). Most importantly, I wanted to give birth where I felt the least inhibited – in the comfort and safety of my own home, surrounded by my partner, queer-friendly doula, and team of warm, competent lesbian midwives.

There’d been a slight glitch in our plans a couple of months earlier when I’d been diagnosed with gestational diabetes. Determined to avoid insulin injections or worse, a dreaded C-section, I’d followed the prescribed diet and exercise program to a tee. It paid off – I was discharged from the diabetes clinic early, at thirty-six weeks. The home birth was a go again, and we were jubilant. But as the midwife felt around my belly to check the baby’s position, her face clouded over with concern.  Was that his little head pointing down towards my pelvis – or his butt?

An ultrasound the next morning confirmed her worst fears: my son was breech, and unless he turned over on his own within a week, I was looking at a painful, invasive procedure called an External Cephalic Version (ECV), where a team of doctors would literally grab my pregnant belly and manually wrench the baby around to the desired position. And if that didn’t work, we were looking at the very C-section for which I’d given up sugar to avoid. (No easy feat for a chocoholic, period – but for a pregnant woman with intense food cravings? Herculean.)

The time clock was ticking, and over the Thanksgiving weekend, we could think of little else. Over turkey dinner at my sister-in-law’s, we toasted absent friends and family, expressed gratitude for the little life inside me, for the son we’d be welcoming in a matter of weeks – but please, oh, please, we prayed (alternately to God, Buddha, the Great Goddess…) could he turn around on his own, so he could come into the world the natural way? Profusely thanking these various Higher Powers, of course, for an acupuncturist willing to do house calls over the holiday weekend.

In bed every night, Amanda rested her head next to my belly and had a little mother-to-son chat: “Baby, I know you’re comfy in there, sitting right next to your mom’s heart,” she whispered in a sing-song voice. “But it’s time to turn over now, so you can come out and see us really soon.”

We did everything known to man (or woman) to entice him to turn. When the acupuncture didn’t work, I tried homeopathics. Massage. Meditation. On the advice of my doula, I placed bags of frozen peas on my belly, and shone a flashlight at my lower uterus to “guide” my baby to the correct position. I soon graduated to special chiropractic adjustments. Headstands in the shallow end of the community pool (garnering interesting looks from lifeguards and other swimmers). Lying in an inverted position on an ironing board – the infamous “breech tilt” prescribed by the Birthing From Within Text, touting an eighty percent chance of success.

I rigged up our trusty, cushioned, metal ironing board in the TV room upstairs, a space soon to be appropriated for our son’s nursery. I propped one end of the board up on the couch and placed the other on the floor, creating a slope of about 30 degrees. I then squished myself on the narrow board, head down, for the full ten to fifteen minutes twice a day, silently willing my son to turn. The blood rushed to my head, making me increasingly woozy as the minutes ticked on. The padding on the board proved to be way too thin, and my neck, back and shoulders soon ached from lying immobile on the hard, metal surface. From this upside down, light-headed vantage point, the whole world turned topsy-turvy. My two black pugs, ever-curious, soon nuzzled through the door, and started circling around and under the board. They sniffed my face with concern, as though to say what the hell are you doing? Have you gone completely mad?

I caught myself then, realizing how ridiculous I must look. I had a flash of my life as a comic montage in a film, quick cutting between various, frenzied images of me trying to get the baby to turn, each attempt more ridiculous than the last. Complete with a soundtrack, of course, blaring to the tune of Disco Inferno: “Turn, baby, turn!”

My chiropractor, meanwhile, reported having a dream that my son had turned. It was so convincing that she was flummoxed  to learn at my next appointment that nothing had changed. I too was sure I felt him turn in the middle of the night, his head sinking at long last into my pelvis, just as the acupuncturist had asked me to imagine in a series of visualization exercises. A follow-up ultrasound the week after Thanksgiving revealed my son still sitting upright, seemingly as content as could be, as though he had no intention of budging.

We grew increasingly desperate, and went ahead with the ECV at 37 weeks, “This is going to hurt,” the Ob-gyn warned me as she rolled up her sleeves – the understatement of the millennium as she and the young medical resident launched themselves onto my belly, using every ounce of their strength to push and twist my abdomen. All I remember are the tortured moans escaping from my throat – could labour possibly be worse than this? – and then the sound of my son’s heartbeat plummeting on the monitor as he went into distress. The nurse handed me an oxygen mask to help regulate my breathing. For a scary couple of minutes (it felt like infinity), it looked like our son would be arriving then and there by emergency C-section. Then, by some miracle, he stabilized, but the ECV was called off.

“Well, you’ve been spared a C-section – for today,” the Ob-Gyn wryly remarked, and then proceeded to book one for the following week, right before Hallowe’en.

Still we prayed, coaxed, and cajoled my son to turn, right up until the inevitable day he was born by planned Caesarean. As my surgery loomed, one of my students gently tried to put things into perspective. He recounted how his own daughter was born breech and in distress: “She actually had the cord wrapped around her neck when she popped out,” he told me. “She’s now eleven – smart, fun, and gorgeous.” He acknowledged that these things seem worrying and all-consuming at the time, but gave me a much-needed reality check: this stuff happens a lot and often works out just fine. Or, as my naturopath put it – at the end of the day, does it really matter whether we enter the world head first, or bum first?

We were still so caught up in our own vision of how we wanted our son to arrive that we couldn’t truly wrap our heads around this just yet. This proved to be our very first, important lesson of parenthood – to accept that there are some things over which we have no control. We also began to truly understand that, in spite of our best intentions for our son, he’s ultimately his own person. We can surround him with love and support, and help create positive opportunities and experiences for him – but we also have to let go and let him find his own way, even if it’s sometimes (literally) ass-backwards.

This Thanksgiving, we were able to look back at our Great Breech Saga and laugh at ourselves, at least a little bit. And as my son turned three the other week – a healthy, happy boy with two loving moms – we were flooded with gratitude for the stuff that does matter.