Breathe

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There is a grown-up party downstairs. I am little. These adults — their tinkling laughs, their clinking glasses, their swells of convivial sound — tell me just how small I am. I need my mother right now, but she is one of Them, these party-goers. She doesn’t smell like herself. She doesn’t look like herself. Her face is painted. But need her I do, so I sit in a small tight ball on the top stair as I try to work up the nerve to wade into a sea of painted, raucous tall people. I need my mother because I can’t breathe. No, that’s not right. I can breathe, but my breath is coming ragged and short. Breathing is automatic until it isn’t, and at the divide there is a moment when it seems to be wholly dependent on one’s own self, and how is one to breathe in, breathe out over and over and over again, a hundred times in a minute or two? I am frantic. It all seems overwhelming, even impossible. And I tip over into a state of anguish: I will simply forget to breathe, and that will be the end of me, crumpled up on the top stair with my thumb in my mouth, still wearing my cotton candy pink blanket sleeper with its rubber feet.

I determine that I can’t stand this for one more second. Fear begets nerve. I run down the stairs and rush headlong into my mother’s legs. I am sobbing, my face surely red, surely wet with snot and tears. My mother looks surprised, but to her credit crouches down and runs her hand through my tangled hair. “What’s wrong?,” she croons, in a full-throated, lush vodka voice.

I realize that I should have broken into this party long ago. I love my mother’s voice like this.

I stammer out the story of my fear, and she explains to me that people’s breath comes fast and funny when they’ve been running, or when they’re excited, or nervous, and that it means nothing, nothing at all.

I am relieved.

When I am in the hospital after birthing my first child, I will suffer a hormone-induced panic attack, and I will flash back to being five or six years old and waiting, afraid, on the stairs, while the grown-ups partied, carefree and loose.

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Lately my breath is coming fast and funny. I am worried all the time. This feels sensible, actually. The upcoming election, the girl shot by the Taliban, the nanny stabbing her young charges in the bathtub, the storm that’s supposed to hit this week and leave us without power, the trial on Monday for which I will serve as juror and sit in judgment of another human being, the polar bears that have to swim longer and longer to find a bit of ice on which to rest, the garbage spilling out the tops of our landfills, the pesticides and carcinogens… Well. It’s a toxic world, but it’s also the only world we’ve got.

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I will celebrate a birthday on Friday. When people ask me how old I will be on my birthday, I answer with a joke: “Forty-five, still alive.” Like most jokes, it’s not really a joke at all.

I’m trying. I am, but it’s hard. I’m trying to forget how to breathe so that I can remember how to breathe.

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15 thoughts on “Breathe”

  2. I spent so many years with my stomach in knots, afraid of…life. I was an anxious child and young adult, who, thank god, matured into a not- so-anxious adult. I’ve never had a panic attack but I have heard how absolutely horrible they are. I hope you feel better soon. Autumn’s darkness wreaks havoc with our brain chemicals. Get outside and tip your chin to the light. XO

    • I was going to comment, but couldn’t have said it better than this. “Tip your chin to the light.” Beautiful.

  5. Lovely post, Sarah. I remember a night like that once as well. I’ve thought about it many times over the years, and wonder if I just, in the midst of a moment where she seemed so removed from her primary job of being my mother, needed reassurance that the person that was supposed to take care of me hadn’t disappeared.
    I keep it in mind now, every time my own two little girls watch me put on lipstick and enter the world of adults.

  6. Yup, the only world we’ve got. In grad school after I’d just had my first baby Hurricane Katrina hit. I felt despondent over the world I brought a child into as I watched the trauma unfolding on CNN. I voiced my fears in a class at school and an older man said exactly that “Life is the greatest adventure, and this is the only one we’ve got.” He said it with total sincerity and with pure joy on his face, and I still call on the memory when I feel overwhelmed with the awful in the world. One by one, you words are like seeds fortifying the good. Just so you know.

  7. Orwell’s notion of doublethink often comes to my mind when I’m struggling in this way. Something I haven’t mastered, though life seems to demand it of us. Forty five, still alive – no joke at all, Sarah, no joke at all.

  8. Sometimes, breathing seems so…futile, like a small contribution to a world that needs so much. But, it is when we over-think the breathing that it becomes hard. Sometimes, as you said, we have to not think in order to do. I hope your breathing comes easier.

  10. yes.
    just yes.
    (i also had a panic attack after birthing my second. didn’t know what it was until after. thought i was having a heart attack. i was so relieved once i realized it was a panic attack. strange. to think that would bring relief.)

  11. I know all this so well. I’m overwhelmed that you have put all this into words and they could be mine. It’s beautiful. I can still see myself on the top step, but I was calling out for my mum and she couldn’t hear me.

  12. As you often do, you have put into beautiful words a feeling many have but cannot express. The older I get the more often those breathless moments come, moments where I feel helpless about the future of my beautiful grandkid, terrified about my own.
    Let us all take a deep breath together. And carry on.

  13. I know you get told this all the time, but this is just beautiful. I love the delicacy yet intimacy of your writing. My heart goes out to both little and adult Sarah.

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