The Tu B’Shvat Branches That Held My Son’s Birth
Because my placenta began to quickly deteriorate during the thirty-sixth week of my pregnancy, my son George Chaim came into the world through an emergency c-section. He did not cry when he came out of my womb.
I had dreamed of becoming a mother since I was very young. At age ten, my pancreas stopped working; Type 1 diabetes forces you to take over all of the duties of that organ. Before my diagnosis, I’d never given a thought to pancreas.
In my late 20s, healthy and in a solid relationship, I considered getting pregnant. I weighed the risks carefully and was encouraged by my doctors to go ahead; I had the commitment to my diabetes control that was needed to carry and deliver a healthy baby.
For nine months, I did all I could to make that dream possible: exercising, doing prenatal yoga, taking vitamins and eating healthy meals, along with nonstop adjusting of my insulin dosages based on my blood glucose levels. The technology for today’s continuous glucose monitors was not available then–instead I pricked my finger twelve to fifteen times a day, watching a droplet of my blood indicate my next move.
During my last trimester, my doctor tracked my baby’s heart rate three times a week, the protocol for moms with diabetes. I would stop by a clinic and get hooked up to a fetal monitor for thirty minutes. It was a time-consuming routine–I was still working–but I understood it was part of the deal. I usually brought a book along and took the time to read.
On the day before George’s birth, the tech’s face changed when she saw the baby’s heart rate numbers on the screen.“Let me run and get the doctor,” she said.
He came in to take a look. “You’re not in the ‘danger zone,’” the doctor told me, calmly. “But you should go home and rest. Keep counting the baby’s kicks. Call if anything feels off.”
Many times since that day, I’ve jumped back in time, put my arms around my younger self, that hopeful woman who was thirty-six and a half weeks pregnant. Then I grab that doctor by the coat, tell him: Don’t you dare send her home!
But in that version of the world, I listened to the doctor, went home, and tried to rest. When I woke up early the next morning, I couldn’t feel the baby moving at all, no kicking. I went downstairs and made a bowl of oatmeal–that always got Georgie going. Nothing happened. What I remember: screaming to my husband to wake up, my husband skidding over the icy roads to the hospital, the elevator ride to the maternity floor that took at least a thousand years.
From my hospital room, hooked up to monitors, an IV full of saline shooting into my veins, I looked out the window at snow falling on the trees. Thank God the doctors heard a heartbeat– but they also told us that the baby needed to be delivered immediately but immediately had to wait for five hours because I’d eaten that damn oatmeal and they couldn’t give me anesthesia for a c-section.
My husband held my hand; he was chanting Buddhist prayers. Staring at the trees, I remembered that when I was looking at my Jewish art calendar the other day, I noticed that Tu B’shevat, a minor holiday celebrating trees, was coming up. I counted days on my fingers…today, the day George was coming into the world, was Tu B’shvat.
A few years before, a friend had invited me to join her Rosh Hodesh group for a Tu B’shevat seder. We sat on pillows on the floor and lit candles. One woman led a meditation, inviting us to imagine a favorite tree. Then, half-glasses of wine were poured to sip on and we said blessings. Four glasses to represent the seasons: white for barren winter, white with a drop of red for spring, next red with a drop of white for the fullness of summer and finally a full red cup for autumn. We read poems by Mary Oliver and passed platters of pomegranate and nuts, olives, dates, pieces of avocado, berries, figs and grapes. It was a magical night.
The trees outside of that window gave me some focus, grounding. I remembered a kabbalistic teaching that was shared at the seder: something about an upside tree, its roots in heaven, branches reaching down to earth.
The hours dragged on cruelly, nurses and residents rushing in and out of my room. Even with my husband beside me, doing his best to comfort me, I began to feel desperate and ashamed. This was not the way I’d visualized giving birth.
When it was finally time for the cold needle of anesthesia to enter my spine, I held my husband’s shoulders, winced only for a moment. During my c-section, I discovered that the mother exists in a liminal space: her heart beating, awake, hearing all that’s around her, guts open as a doctor untangles her baby from her womb. Not pushing the baby out of her, into the world. The only power I had, lying back on that sterile pillow, was my imagination. I held onto the branches of that upside down tree like I was in a storm. I held tight, for my child and me.
The doctor lifted George out, someone cut the cord. He was rushed away to the NICU where he would stay for ten days. I didn’t get to hold him. My placenta had started to deteriorate, they told us after his birth, and he wouldn’t have survived if we had waited at home any longer.
“Shit happens,” the NICU doctor told me, not meanly, just matter of fact, when I asked him why he thought my placenta broke down when everything had been fine up to the day before George’s birth. Shit happens. Imagine what that NICU doctor has seen.
Shit. Leaves. Mud. Compost. Trees. Dreams. Babies. Tu B’shvat was once a tax day, then a thousand years later mystics felt branches reaching down to them from heaven and then on the day of my son’s birth, those branches reached down to me, helped me hang on and give George his life.
For my husband, the potent symbol is the lotus, the beautiful flower that can only grow in mud. Over ten days, George’s lungs developed, his blood sugar stabilized, I held him and learned to feed him. Every night, I wept on the car ride home when we had to leave him in the NICU.
It was a bright and freezing winter day when George came home with us. Every day after that, I wrapped him in his snowsuit, held him in a pouch against my chest and we walked along snowy streets until January became February. One day it was March and we saw something yellow against the snow. “That’s a forsythia,” I told my child, my Tu B’shvat baby. “You were born in the winter and soon it will be spring.”
Gabrielle Ariella Kaplan-Mayer is a writer and spiritual director based in Philadelphia, working on a memoir about intuition, ancestors and grief. She works as Ritualwell’s Director of Virtual Content and Programs and writes a weekly Substack called Journey With The Seasons. Learn more at gabriellekaplanmayer.com.
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