LIQUID LOVE

A HOMEBIRTH WITH HOME COOKING

by Anna K. Lau

In Chinese families, an important qualification for being a pregnant or new mother is having a passion for food. When Alex and I shared the news that we were pregnant, our parents were overjoyed. The first grandchild on both sides! In Vancouver, Alex’s mother Sandra promptly and effectively began to fatten me up with a variety of Cantonese delicacies: “For the baby,” she’d tell me in Cantonese, “eat more for the baby.” And of course, I would. Who wouldn’t, when presented every night with fresh grouper in ginger-scallion oil, or for the vegetarians out there, garlic-sautéed Chinese broccoli and rice resplendent in its aromatic steam? From California, my mother, Mei-lang, proposed coming to live with us in Vancouver for the first months after the baby was born and conducting a traditional Taiwanese yue zi, or new mother’s convalescence. An important component of the yue zi is a time-tested sequence of nourishing soups and medicinal broths to build up the strength after the yin depletion of pregnancy and labor, and to bring in milk for the baby. So it looked like Baby and I wouldn’t be going hungry any time soon!

Less enthusiastic was their response to our decision to try for a homebirth. “It seems like a step backward,” fretted Sandra. “We moved all the way here where there are top-class hospitals and technology; why would you go back to the old ways of birthing?” In Sandra’s world, the word “midwife” smacked of her childhood in Canton. Sandra herself had three babies by natural birth in Western hospitals, although she professed to have almost no memory of these experiences. As Alex and I explained how patient the midwives had been with our questions up until now, how hospital births had a much greater chance of medical intervention, and how we wanted to bring the baby into the peace and comfort of a home, not a hospital, the worried crinkle at the edges of Sandra’s eyes did not go away. “A hospital is more safe,” she said. She continued to hopefully repeat this opinion for many days afterward, in case it helped Alex and me to change our minds.

If Sandra had no memories of her births, my mother Mei-lang had too many memories of her own. “I don’t like it,” she told me, “there could be complications.” Then, in her gentle, accented English, my mother told me the familiar story of my own birth. When she was almost fully dilated, her American doctor told her my forehead was failing to present, and wheeled her off to the ER for a cesarean section. A recent immigrant from Taiwan with very little English on her tongue, my mother had numbly gone through the operation, only to go into an emergency operation for her ear a few hours afterward. To this day, she has to wear special earplugs when she goes swimming. On top of that, she had to nurse the newly arrived infant: pink, squalling baby Anna. “Maybe Daddy understood the consequences more than I do,” she told me, “but it was a shock for me. I didn’t understand there could be complications.” I remember, as a child, being slightly afraid of the raised scar that grinned on her stomach. As a pregnant mother planning a homebirth, I felt guilty for causing her that kind of pain, and for so rudely disrupting my parents’ ideal birth plan. At the same time, perhaps the story of my own birth registered as a cautionary tale. The hospital had been a place where she had had little information and no control over her decisions. And yet, even she was uncomfortable with the idea of a homebirth. How would we deal with unexpected emergencies from home?

To their credit, after expressing these initial reservations, both our mothers eventually let go of their attachments to hospitals. An important part of this detachment came from discussions about our eccentric decision with their friends and family. After getting off the phone with one of her dear friends, an accomplished Cantonese opera singer in Hong Kong, Sandra said, “Did you know she was one of the top midwives in Canton? She’s delivered more than one thousand babies, most of them in homes.” And after talking with my grandmother, Mom told me, incredulously, “All of us were born at home. I never knew that. Maybe not me, but all the rest of us, for sure.” My Taiwanese grandmother, it turned out, had birthed all eight of her children in the loft apartment above the family bookstore (except for maybe the youngest, my mother, by which point Grandma seems to have lost track). These comments were uttered in unsure voices, but they were blessing enough for us. Alex and I happily forged ahead, picking names, gathering birth supplies, interviewing doulas, taking a series of “Birthing From Within” classes, and monitoring the progress of my ballooning belly. We would try for a waterbirth, we decided. But we kept the decision low-key, not wanting to start another family debate on the pros and cons of our birth plan.

One final wrinkle in our homebirth plan had yet to be ironed out: Alex and I had no home. We were in the midst of a woefully behind-schedule renovation to the place we had chosen as our Vancouver home, and had spent the last six months of my pregnancy living at Alex’s parents’ house (this allowed Sandra many convenient opportunities to ply me with food). My parents were hoping to be with us for the first two months of the baby’s life, and so we had found them a sublet apartment for the winter. Being the pushy kids we were, we had also secured an agreement from all four of our parents that perhaps we could have our baby in their homes. If that didn’t work out, a friend had generously offered her home, which came enticingly equipped with its own hot tub.

A week before my due date, on a sunny November day, my parents came to Vancouver for their long “Welcome, Baby” visit. Baby and I must have been waiting for them, because the next day, my water broke. Alex and I had meant to pick up my parents from their sublet apartment and take them for a casual lunch, but there I was in their living room, my pant leg wet, and starting to feel a spreading pain in my lower back. Alex got on the phone with our midwives as I went to the bathroom to clean up, shaking a bit. I remember thinking, with mild panic, “This is it.” I had been counting on having a few more days to take care of some final preparations, but here was my first lesson (of many!) in the parental necessity of flexibility. Within the hour, Joy, the midwife on call, had come to check on me and confirmed that I had not somehow peed myself but was probably in labor. She recommended food and rest. Food, my mother felt confident about. She had already whipped up some hot rice and a few stir-fries that were surely delicious, but I could only force down a few bites. Mom made Joy sit down and eat a late lunch too. The midwife gratefully obliged, since she had been running around town between mothers, and hadn’t had time to sit down and catch a bite. Providing warm meals for under-nourished midwives, doulas, and anyone else involved with the baby’s life became a firm goal of my mother’s for the rest of her visit with us.

Now that we were off to the races, I became deeply attuned to the need to have the baby delivered in my mother’s house. This involved a lot of communication and setup: informing the midwives and our doulas, informing Alex’s parents, and getting my birth supplies transported to my parents’ place. When the supplies came, my labor project became setting the stage for my perfect homebirth. A few crucial items were missing. Bendy straws! Lemons! A squeeze bottle! Mom sent Alex and Dad rattling all over town to find these (as it later turned out not-so-important) items. With the men out of the house, and things set up for the labor, Mom got me into her bed for some rest. I slept, intermittently woken by contractions, which were swelling through me like ocean waves. Outside, it began to rain.

By 1 a.m. I was not able to sleep anymore for the discomfort. The room was dark except for a few candles burning, the beeswax lightly scenting the room. I focussed on the clear bell tones of a Tibetan Crystal Bowl CD we had found in the landlord’s bedroom music system. It was a relief to find my mom by my side. She had sent Alex and my father to get some sleep, in preparation for what could be a long night ahead. With my mother next to me, I felt confident that my body could manifest this baby. Hadn’t Mom delivered me, and before that her mother delivered her and before that her mother delivered her and before that . . . ? I felt myself directly attached to a long, long line of strong, successful women, innately capable of childbirth. When a contraction came, I looked for positions that would allow the feeling to ride through my body with the least possible discomfort. On my knees. On my side. Bent over a pillow, big belly higher than my head. The midwives had told us to call them when the contractions were one minute long, four minutes apart, for an hour. Until then, we were on our own. So whenever I moaned, or arched my back, Mom’s anxious whisper would come: “Is it a contraption?” I knew what she meant, and would just nod, or whisper back one-word answers: “Yes,” “Done,” “No.” And she’d carefully record it in her generous scrawl. But after a long, drawn-out cramp, when she asked for what seemed the three hundredth time: “Is it a contraption?” I gasped, “Contraction, Mom, con-TRAC-tion!” We laughed together, my mother’s English being a fond old family joke—a light joy briefly, deliciously, occupied my body.

By 4:30 a.m. the contractions were long and tangled, and some of them made me throw up. When I felt pain or fear rip through me, I tried to force myself to be calm. I did not want my tension to reach my partner in this birth, the brave little baby who was blindly following instinct, battling his or her way into this bright world. Even so, though Mom and I had been aligning ourselves with the Tibetan bells, chanting long and calming OM’s to ride through each wave of contraction, it was starting to feel like we were floating rudderless in a big ocean. Finally, Lolli, my doula, came into the room, and this marked a turn in the labor for me. Lolli had been present for more than a thousand births, and I had faith in her ability to guide my baby and me to safety. Lolli was my lighthouse. “I want you to visualize the pain,” Lolli said. “Give it a color.” An effervescent blue formed in my mind, a flickering blue like the center of a candle flame. “Now visualize that color passing through your body, never to come back again.” I felt the flame leave my body—my body had a flitting normalcy—before the next spasm took it over. And so we worked for the next few hours. With the beginning of each new contraction, it especially helped me to let my breath out, pushing the pain away with my hand, while I repeated, “I can do this. I can do this.” Repeating the gesture, I knew my words to be true. Meanwhile, Mom had silently absented herself from the room, taking Lolli’s instruction to get some rest. Later, I found this note from my mom in the baby’s journal: “Dear Child, Your mother is so ready for you, each pain, each interval, are like confetti, shower the path of your arrival.”

List of “contraption” times recorded by Anna’s mother.

As Baby and I were weathering our internal storms, unbeknownst to us, a storm had been gathering outside, railing in sympathy. The rain, which had been gathering throughout the night, grew so intense that streets were flooded and drains backed up (a few days later a raging wind knocked down dozens of ancient trees in Stanley Park). In the murky light of dawn, Lolli asked Alex to prepare a warm bath for the final stages of the waterbirth we had planned for. When the water came out of the tap muddy and brown, it was surprising, but in a night of such out-of-body experiences, this seemed like just one more sign of Mother Nature’s might. Lesson number two in flexibility and parenting. Scratch the waterbirth.

By 8 a.m., the baby was eager to join us. Audrey and Joy, the midwives, were trying to battle their way through waterlogged rush-hour traffic to make it to our sides, as was another doula, Rita. In the room next door, my father was doing his best to stay calm and out of the way. He wrote in the baby’s journal, “Well, Mom’s already eight centimeters dilated and feeling the ‘urge to push’ so it seems you’re just about ready to transit to the Outside World. So now it’s your birthday. Sun seems struggling to come out . . . its first appearance in days . . . your advent seems to have triggered a change from storm to calm . . . we’ll probably be welcoming you anytime now into the outside world.”

Worried I would tear myself, Lolli and Rita had been patiently keeping me from pushing, even though it was the one thing I desperately wanted to do at that point. Lolli had me sitting on the toilet and that was where Joy found me at 8:30 in the morning. Joy declared me fully dilated, and asked if I was ready to push. Of course, my answer was a vehement “YES!” According to Alex’s entry in the baby’s journal, at that point, “The look on Mama’s face was awesome, like she was ready to open a dam with her bare hands, her eyes tight and face dark from the blood, I don’t know how to describe it, it was like determination was pulsing through her body and her face was exhilarating the surface vibrations of that power.” Let’s just say I was very motivated to deliver the small but powerful life force in me. Mom and Alex were told to come into the room, as the baby was arriving at any moment, although poor Dad was told to wait in the room next door, where he meditated and listened in mightily. The midwives and doulas coaxed me over to the bed, where in two great pushes, I had the baby’s head out. As Alex describes it to Baby, “You emerged, a big tube covered with black hair, and you seemed like nothing but a bundle of hair, until folds of pale-colored skin emerged (your very long forehead) and finally your little scrunched-up face popped out.” I was roaring, and it was very satisfying. I thought, briefly, about how strange these beast noises must seem to the neighbors next door, getting ready for work. And then I decided I didn’t care, and roared some more.

Alex crouched near Joy, waiting to catch the baby. As he tells Baby, “You had been coming out at a bit of an angle, so your shoulders got stuck—I stepped aside for the other midwife, Audrey, to come in and pull you out from the top of your head. It took about two good pushes from Mom to get your shoulders out, and then you were clear and free and in this world, attached to Mom only by your umbilical cord and an eternal psychic bond. Meanwhile, stepping away from Audrey, I could barely hold back tears as I started taking in the power and magic of the moment, Anna’s whole being poised to give birth and a look of determination and confidence on her face which in itself felt to me to justify humanity’s existence.”

Our baby was lifted to my chest, where she lay exhausted. We had asked the midwives and doulas not to tell us the baby’s gender until we asked, but looking at her full, strong face, I didn’t have a doubt that she was a girl. “Hello, sweetie,” I gasped, “good job!” I tipped my head back on the pillows, toward Alex, who was tearfully embracing both of us. I became aware that time, which had stretched itself out like a Dali clock for the seventeen hours of labor, had suddenly sped up. People were very busy around me. Mom was off in the kitchen pulling together some celebratory breakfast. Dad was by our side marvelling at the baby, and then in the next room calling our relatives and friends to tell them the good news. The midwives were bustling about recording vitals, extracting the cord blood we had asked for, and making sure Baby and I were comfortable and taken care of. Then, the doulas began to coax me to deliver the placenta. I was incredulous. Baby was safe and out, my work was done. “Just give a few coughs,” said Lolli, “Just a couple of pushes.”

“Can’t you just pull it out?” I asked, petulant and tired.

But I did eventually deliver the placenta. Rita walked me through Baby’s first latch. With Baby nursing on me, Mom gave me the first soup of my yue zi, a chicken-rice porridge which I sipped through a fat bubble tea straw specially sourced for this very purpose. In a few hours, Sandra would arrive with my father-in-law carrying a huge clay pot of Ginger Vinegar, a traditional Cantonese stew of pork trotters and young ginger marinated in sweet vinegar. Every time we had a visitor, we were to serve them this celebratory delicacy, which would age and get increasingly delicious as the baby grew bigger. In the days that followed, Sandra and Mom would produce a prodigious quantity and variety of soups, some from family recipes, some from recipes they got quizzing the old ladies who worked in the Chinatown herbalists (milk, chicken, and papaya soup, anyone?), and some they simply made up themselves. The water would continue to run muddy for days, but our mothers would be resourceful, finding jugs of distilled water to funnel into their rivers of soup. The soups would rain down on us, literally flowing out the door. A few days after Baby was born, we found a note on our doorstep: “If you left a pot of soup in the hallway, please claim it at the concierge.” But for that morning moment, Baby and I savoured our respective sips of liquid love: our rewards for the long, productive, and truly stormy night.

“Those four women were so strong,” Mom would marvel afterward, talking about our doulas and midwives. “They knew exactly what was happening. It was almost scientific. Even you were strong.”

I laughed. “So were you, Mom.” For the truth is, I couldn’t have done any of it without her. Alex, Baby, and I were lucky not only in that we had our homebirth, but also in that Baby emerged into the warm love of her extended family as well.

Anna Kaye is a writer and editor based in Vancouver. She loves to travel with her young family, especially if the trip involves snorkeling.