All the manuals told me how to breathe. All of the books, all of the websites, all of the people in my life that went through this crap. The mother hens on my block all said the same thing – leaning on their chipping paint fences, holding hydrangeas and sunscreen and diet powdered lemonade:
“Hannah, this is how you breathe.”
They looked like a fish out of water.
I’ll be thinking how to breathe all right, when I’m done bashing in your face piecemeal, in every scarce dream I get. I don’t want to to be shown how. I just want this goddamn thing over with already.
*
Jonathan wanted the kid more than I did. He saw it as a way to live a great life. I saw it as a mistake. We were happy. Why ruin it?
I meant it ten years ago when I was sixteen, but now? I want a flat, smooth stomach. I got bills to pay. I don’t need this.
*
Dyspnea. Difficulty breathing. As simply as that can be defined.
Jonathan claims he has it because he’s smoked his whole life. But he doesn’t have someone living inside of him. He said once he heard voices, when he was younger, but he probably just left the television on or something. I hear this thing talking all the time, crying already, as he’s swimming and getting caught up in the thought of existing.
He’s taking whatever breath I have left just to make baby sounds. Gurgling and growling and swimming. I hear him moving and it’s driving me nuts. What you’re saying is not important. You’re just babbling. You’re not forming thoughts. You know no one’s name, not even your own. Stop with the baby sounds.
It’s what I need to say – that’s more important. That’s why I need air. I need it for when I’m screaming in the hospital later, trying to breathe.
*
Jonathan works a lot of overtime so I take myself out for walks a lot. He tells me not to but I can’t sit still. Too much weight.
So I go through the woods nearby, armed with a knife and bug spray. I’ll find a rotten log to sit on and I’ll breathe like they all said, but I still get winded before I can finish a song on my playlist.
It’s here where I count leaves, it’s here where I find the number of reasons to convince the world that I’m not meant to be a mother. I’m up to over a hundred. I’m writing them down on paper. Don’t tell me I’m not serious.
I’ll upload it as a PDF if I have to.
*
I have a lot of mother friends. They turned out to be amazing mothers. They dropped all their dreams at the door to have their kids. They don’t sleep. Appetites change. They don’t drink as much, they’re more on the ball when it comes to paying bills, they’re changing the bedsheets constantly, they have no problem with doing anything their husbands say. The baby and the husband call the shots. When I get together with them, they have lost all sense of risk. They don’t do shit on a dare anymore.
They just…breathe. I don’t know how they do it.
With no danger or fun behind it. They speak their words, but they don’t do a thing. They think about glorious things, but lift not a finger to any of them – the only finger-lifting they do is to fetch their man a beer or grab a toy for the baby.
That’s no way to live. That isn’t for me.
*
Don’t get me wrong – I’m going to have this baby. I don’t believe in the other options, I won’t even say the word for it.
It will be loved. It’ll be fed and hugged and clothed and taught how to read all of those dumb books with the horrible illustrations. It’s going to be taught language, how to ignore it, how to twist it for his own benefit. It’s going to learn how to deceive, how to lie, how to be stately enough to impress his peers. He will grow up to be just like Jonathan and I.
That doesn’t mean, though, that he’s going to be perfect. I won’t let people treat him as such. When people come over to pick him up and pinch his cheeks and coo in his face – that’s when I’m going to step in. He’s not a miracle. He’s not special. He’s a baby. There are dozens like him everywhere. If you want one, you can have one. If you start in March, you can have him in time for Christmas. Expensive, but at least you don’t have to worry about gift-wrapping it.
I won’t let people tell him he’s perfect because he took a lot of my air. He caused me a lot of problems. He made me sit on logs for hours, checking my pulse, a phone call away from the hospital, because I couldn’t say one damn thought out loud.
He took away years I planned to be nothing years and it’s going to stick in my craw for a bit.
I think I’m allowed that right.
I’m just the only one with guts to say it out loud right now.
*
I’m not trying to come off as a bitter, nasty bitch. I know I can be, but that isn’t the point of this. I’m just trying to talk while I have the voice and energy at my disposal.
Jonathan doesn’t listen – he comes home from work, grabs two Lagunitas, and flips on the Playstation. He asks if I need anything and before I can even whisper a pithy comeback, he’s on the couch, immobilized, hacking from his supposed smoker’s cough. So I’m saying all of this to you because it’s driving me crazy. Maybe it’ll get back to him and he’ll care, maybe he’ll even start painting the spare bedroom he said he was gonna do ten fucking times now.
It’s just that I’ve seen too many people have their world come down so far because of something they didn’t want. Or something that they thought they wanted and it turned out to be the exact opposite. I’ve seen enough of it from my mother friends. A few of them have admitted to me that they love their child, but if they could do it over again, they would have just taken the pill, said no, never went on that second date.
One of them even grabbed my hand and pleaded with me to reconsider. Like I said, I don’t believe in the other option, so I just shook my head, ran a hand through my hair and gave a sad look. It’s funny how people get when they’ve done something they can never take back. It’s like they’re finally a real person. I can’t explain it. You just have to see it and if you have, then you know what I mean.
Because truthfully, we have no idea what we’re doing when it comes to this. We swear that we’ll avoid the mistakes that our parents made, or that we’ll never force our kids to do anything they don’t want to do, but you know we will. We want carbon copies of our beautifully fucked up selves. I’ve never seen anything like it, how amazingly frail and egomaniacal we are. We just want to destroy, even in the process of shaping and creating.
I must have said that last line out loud, because I heard Jonathan sit up from the couch and he asked me if I said anything. Like he cares. After some silence, he leans back into the couch and opens the second beer.
I’m going outside on our apartment balcony to try to breathe. The stuffy air from these walls is getting to be too much. You’re supposed to be able to relax at home – that’s what everyone says. Follow the manuals. Follow the websites and the mother hens that suffer from the empty nest. They’ll want to hold your baby. Remember, it’s all about the breathing.
After ten seconds, I realize I can’t relax. My head is swimming.
Sorry, I say to the baby sounds inside of me as I reach behind our potted plant for the pack of smokes I bought a month ago and light one up.
It won’t hurt. If it helps me, I say to my son, it’s going to help you some day.
Kevin Richard White is the author of the novels The Face Of A Monster and Patch Of Sunlight. His work has been previously published by Akashic Books, Sundog Lit, Tahoe Writers Works, Crack The Spine, Dime Show Review, Lunch Ticket, Aji Magazine, Ghost Parachute and Cactus Heart Press among others. He lives in Pennsylvania.