I had a challenging and long labor before being rushed to an emergency cesarean. My body was not progressing and the umbilical cord had a true knot which was likely the cause of my son's decreasing heart rate which sent us to the emergency room. I honestly wasn't surprised, he had been doing somersaults and flips in my belly for months. He's always been active and now that he's outside of my body, he does flips and summersaults and climbs all over my body instead of inside it. My son has ripped the knees of so many of his little stretchy pants in his three years of boisterous activity. Around his 3rd birthday, the knees on my nice linen pajama pants—ones I had treated myself to shortly after his birth—also ripped open. It felt perfect to make our birth braid out of the fabric worn for our daily morning snuggles. Our crawls around the floor in the early hours when only the two of us were awake. Those endless days stuck inside during the stretches of Sheltering at Home during the COVID-19 pandemic. There are numerous knots throughout the braid, reminiscent of our tight bond—both literally and figuratively.
Christine Mitchell Adams