Oddly Grateful

June 2003

Mat and I went on a date to the movies last night.  Walking in, we began laughing at the time we went to see X-Men United (or X2) and I kept getting up and going to the bathroom.  Although I was very pregnant with my third child and Mat knew all about how the baby rests on the bladder, he finally leaned over and asked me what was up.  I responded that I felt like I was going into labor and was feeling restless.  Later that day, I felt slightly annoyed that I had missed so much of the movie when all the contractions went away and I was still uncomfortably pregnant.  After all, I had two other children.  I knew what actual labor felt like, and I was not one to mistake the signs.  If anything, I was the mom who liked to hang out at home as long as I possibly could before sounding the alarm that the baby was coming.  This cycle of experiencing more than the normal Braxton Hicks contractions and being convinced I was in labor repeated itself a few other times as the due date neared and passed.  My third child, it seemed to me, could not make up his mind.

As Mat paid for our movie tickets, yesterday, I started thinking about the fact that had I actually gone into labor that day, Isaac would have been born premature.  This may have contributed to him experiencing more health complications than he experienced by being born with Down syndrome which caused plenty of issues to present themselves.

Standing in the movie line, I suddenly felt grateful that Isaac's legs had been tangled in the umbilical cord, stopping labor from progressing that day, and beyond, allowing him extra time in utero to develop and grow.  Even after his due date passed and they induced me, my labor would not progress past what could be forced by the drugs they gave me because he was held firmly in place and could not drop into the birth canal.  He eventually had to be taken by emergency C-section.  It felt like a very odd thing to be grateful for.

That night, as I mulled over those thoughts, I realized that my new insightful gratitude could partly be attributed to the book that I just finished reading.  365 Thank Yous by John Kralik was a great book about a man who, when he hit a low point in his life, got it into his head to write 365 thank-you notes in one year.  As the project progressed, his circumstances and attitude about life improved tremendously.  It is a true story and a great one.  It is one of those books that I would recommend to anyone. 

I love this quote from it:

"Whether or not my life had changed, my experience of it, moment by moment, had been transformed.  When bad things happened, they might slow me, but they no longer unraveled me."

My experience also brought to mind another one of those books, The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom.  In it Corrie and her sister Betsie are prisoners in a concentration camp when Betsie states that she can find things to be grateful for even in their pitiable situation.  When her list of things she is grateful for ends with "fleas,"  Corrie feels her sister has gone too far.  However, later she discovered that it was the fleas that infested their barracks that kept the guards out and allowed them more freedom within those walls than anywhere else in the camp.  This book is also an account written about true events.  

When I remembered that story, I no longer felt strange in my gratitude.  I suddenly found it odd that it had taken me so long to feel grateful for the tangle of legs and cord that extended Isaac's time in the womb, giving him those precious extra weeks to prepare to take on the world.