I was born a April baby in 1991. When I was about 4 years old I told my mother that when I grew up I was going to be a mommy just like her. I was going to have a c-section, and a baby girl. Just like her. My thoughts on the matter of motherhood never changed as I grew up. When I was sixteen I met my husband and I knew I had found the father of the little girl that I had always dreamed of having. We chose her name, we talked about getting married. But, we were crazy kids and it didn’t quite work out that way. Not right away.
Fast forward 10 years and I found myself once again engaged to the same man from my romanticized teenage years. We moved fast this time. He took me to the top of a mountain in Jasper National Park and asked me to marry him. The next year we eloped to Jasper and said “I do” in a private ceremony. We knew we wanted to have our family complete- especially after suffering a miscarriage prior to our wedding. Santa came quite early in 2017 as we discovered right before Christmas that we were expecting. We shared the news with everyone Family Day in 2018.
I loved being pregnant. I didn’t love EVERYTHING about being pregnant, but I did love the natural and feminine power that I felt carrying a brand new human inside my body. I had decided I wanted an all natural home birth. My childhood desire to have a cesarean like my mother was long forgotten. I was suddenly all flower crowns and flowy dresses. I was Earth Mother incarnate, and no evil western medicine was going to ruin my daughters special day if I had anything to say about it.
The doctors had given us a due date and we had it marked on the calendar. It happened to be the same day as my husbands birthday, so there was extra special excitement about it. The days kept ticking by. She was happy in there; moving lots and dancing around. There were no worries. No concerns. Even though I measured consistently a week or so ahead of schedule, none of the doctors seemed worried. It was a beautiful, textbook pregnancy. Right up until it wasn’t.
I went to the doctor for a checkup at 37 weeks. After measuring and feeling around my belly, the doctor very quietly booked me an appointment for an ultrasound. We arrived, nervous but excited to see our little girl one last time on the monitor before she was Earth side. The technician was silent the entire time. She wouldn’t tell us anything. My anxiety was through the roof. We really didn’t even know why we were there.
With a heavily shaded printed picture of our baby girl in hand we headed home to do some more waiting. A few days later I received an urgent and panicked call from the doctor who had sent us for the ultrasound. (She was not our regular doctor, and considering how she handled everything, I am glad that she wasn’t.) She hurriedly broke the news that my daughter was breech and that she was going to be booking me in for a c-section ASAP. I froze. I panicked. And the cool, calm, Earth Mother serenity that I’d had the last 38 weeks snapped like a twig in the forest.
I listened silently, rejecting every word that came out of the doctors mouth. I didn’t want to hear any of it. It didn’t help how unprofessional she was. After the call with her, I broke down. I was home alone. I sobbed for hours, holding my belly. I was terrified. I knew nothing about breech babies except that I had been one myself. I hadn’t spent even one minute researching c-sections the last 38 weeks because I believed in positive thought and not entertaining ideas that I didn’t want to come true.
I went with little hope to the appointment with the OBGYN that I had been referred to. This poor woman...how I feel for her. She had to meet with a very pregnant, very stressed, very hormonal mom to be that was desperate to avoid being laid out and cut open. She begrudgingly agreed to wait until I was full terms at 40 weeks to see me again and at that time we would book the c-section if nothing changed.
My doula calmed me down, gave me advice and I began a two week journey on trying to flip my baby girl from her breech position to head down and engaged. I did everything natural under the sun that I could think of. Acupuncture, massage, reiki, inverting myself on the couch, doing handstands in the pool. I did hypnosis and meditation, we used the rebozo strap and moxa heat. I went to the chiropractor, and my husband and I both verbally begged the bump to flip. But it was no use, and it was too late. We had not found out early enough about her position and now she was too big and too stuck.
All I could do was pray. I held on to the hope of some stories I read where babies flipped last minute right before birth. The due date came and went with zero signs of labour. Zero. I knew we were overdue. I knew we were WAY overdue. But I am a stubborn Aries and I knew that I had an even more fiery Leo baby girl growing in my belly. I wanted my daughter to come on her terms, in her own time. I refused to do any sort of induction techniques. If she wasn’t coming out on her own, there was a reason and I had to trust in her. Until there was no time left.
So, we booked the c-section for July 31st. (Also, my mother’s birthday.) One day before ‘technical’ 41 weeks. And I cried. And I cried. And I cried. (Thanks hormones.) Then, one evening, after a talk with a mom friend who’d recently had a c-section of her own it all changed. I was standing in the shower- trying to escape from the July heat; and I found peace. I found my motherhood strength.
I stopped crying.
I stopped whining.
I stopped feeling sorry for myself.
I (mostly) stopped being terrified.
Enlightenment hit me like a lightning bolt. I had a talk with my bump. I told her how sorry I was for all the stress she’d inevitably been feeling from inside me. I apologized for all the jabs and the exercises that I’d done trying to move her. And I promised her that I was okay now. That I was going to do whatever I had to do to bring her into this world safely. Even if it meant tearing my beautiful, natural birth plan up into a million pieces. Even if it meant risking my life and getting laid out on a table and cut open. (I was accepting, and a little bitter still. But mostly accepting.)
I rewrote my birth plan to include details for a gentle cesarean. And I tried to deal with the numerous messages from random people demanding why I hadn’t had the baby yet, or asking if she’d flipped. One person was even bold enough to ask if I was dilated at all. I was not.
Still, no signs of labor. And no flipped baby when I awoke on July 31st. My husband and I were a bundle of nerves as we prepared to leave the apartment. He turned on our wedding song and we did our best to dance with the bump between us. I reminded myself that giving birth to this child today was the only thing I had to do. It didn’t matter how I did it. It only mattered that I did it. After listening to the most perfectly worded and comforting voice message from Mama Wolff, we headed to the hospital.
I did request one final ultrasound just to check baby’s position, but the decision was made. We were going ahead with the surgery. Our doula stayed with us for as long as they let her, snapping pictures as she went, but she was not allowed in the theatre with us.
The memories are a bit foggy now, almost 9 months later...but I remember not being terrified as I walked into the brightly lit, sterile white room. Scared yes, but not terrified. The epidural fucking hurt. That I remember, and then I remember no pain. They lay me down and the sheet went up, and the doctors went to work.
I didn’t know this at the time, but I guess they forgot my husband outside...so when they finally did bring him in, I was already open on the table and he had to walk past all that. He stayed brave and strong and just held my hand, telling me how much he loved me and how beautiful our baby was going to be. To this day, I don’t know how he did that. I didn’t feel anything painful really...but I did feel them trying to pull her out. Not only was she breech, but she was also up in my ribs. So she was good and stuck. I don’t know how really to describe it...but it wasn’t a pleasant feeling.
Then, the discomfort was gone. And suddenly I heard her. The little cry. It sounded nothing at all like it does in the movies. I felt my heart leap out of my body toward her. At the same time, I also felt incredibly grounded to the earth for the first time in my entire life. I knew that this was what true love was. That this is what magic was. I couldn’t get over the fact that the love of two people combined with nature and science to create a little soul, and a body to hold it. This was real. This was life changing. I knew nothing was ever going to be the same again.
I guess the cord was wrapped around her, but I didn’t find that out till months later. So we didn’t get to do the delayed cord clamping. The nurse brought her around the curtain and that was the first time I saw her. She was perfect. She looked exactly like a 50/50 split of her daddy and I. (Though everyone for the last 9 months has told me over and over how she looks nothing at all like me and only looks like her dad. Annoying; to say the least.) Then my husband went off to cut the cord and the doctor started putting me back together.
One day, I hope I forget this part. As Baby Bear was being weighed & measured, I looked up and in the reflection of the lights above the table I could see where they’d cut me and how they were putting me back together. I couldn’t look away. Like when you see a car accident on the side of the road. Luckily the nurse came to talk to me and distracted me...though that image will probably haunt me for a long time.
But...a few minutes later there she was.
My beautiful baby. 10 pounds 11 ounces and 22 inches long. (In retrospect....thank God that didn’t come through my birth canal breech. According to the doctors, one or both of us would not have made it had we gone the natural route.) The nurse brought her to me and I kissed her. They put her on my chest and she latched. Instantly. Our breastfeeding journey began almost as instantly as our mother daughter relationship did. And we never looked back.
It wasn’t until a few days after we got home that I really stopped to think about the birth. (Probably due to the awful hospital experience we had in the following days), but mostly because I was so in love. And so high off love that I didn’t have time to think. Of how I had gotten exactly what I’d asked the universe for my entire life. You want to talk about intention setting!? I had accomplished things that I never knew I was capable of. I had done things that I had no intention of doing. I made sacrifices for my child before even knowing her. I was finally a mom, and I had a beautiful scar of love to prove it. On July 31st, 2018 my daughter was born 10 minutes before noon.
And I was reborn.