The Labor of Breathing – Cecily

She had thought it would be different than this. She’d imagined some scene like one of the ones on the endless hospital shows she had been watching for the last two months. She’d be in the yard, getting the mail, and suddenly she would double over in pain, screaming for Brandt. He would rush to her side, and the two of them would race for the car trying to beat the clock to the hospital before Little Ally arrived. She had imagined a rush of exhilaration, the inescapable sense of being alive that she had been expecting to accompany her pregnancy. The sense of being alive that, in fact, she had felt quite the opposite of for the last nine months. And, now, she was craving the memory of that feeling. She’d expected her pregnancy to feel like the day she and Brandt had hiked to the top of a mountain. A big mountain. Mt. Whitney. It was actually the highest point in the continental United States, she was told. They had started early, before the sun even came up. And when they reached what was the halfway point to the summit, they’d already been hiking through hard trails for five hours. She didn’t really think she could keep going, between the altitude and the exhaustion and the knowledge that the next part of the climb was even harder. But Brandt, in his typical Superman style, had told her that if she just got into some kind of zen space and focused on nothing other than each step in front of her, she’d be fine. And she had been fine. Alright, actually she had been tired and barely able to walk by the time they reached the top, but as soon as she stepped out onto the summit, she’d felt like the most powerful person in the entire world. She felt like she was actually a piece of the sky, but not a vaporous cloudy piece of the sky. A sharp piece of glass, like in a mosaic, but embedded in the center of the sky. From the summit, she could see the desert and the surrounding mountains. And she was sure that if she jumped she wouldn’t go tumbling to her death but instead would just soar, cutting through the softness of the sky with her hard glass edges, all the way to some farmer’s field in China. And she’d stay there, learn how to speak Mandarin and wear natural fabrics and grow soy and appreciate a rainier climate for ten years. Then she would find a tree and spend six months carving herself a perfect walking stick and take off into the world, working her way house-to-house until she got to India, where she would soak herself in the Ganges until a beautiful Indian prince came and pulled her out and taught her how to ride elephants. He would want her for his queen, but she would need to move on. So she would take her prized elephants and ride them through to the Mongolian desert. Each day would be centering as she felt the slow and steady thump and pace of her heavy, stable elephant beneath her. In Mongolia, she would trade the elephants for a camel and supplies, and ride until she had found a fertile valley with wild reindeer and a cool cave with a fresh water spring. And there she would live out her days. That’s how it would be if she just leaped from the mountain.

That’s how she had felt when she stood on the summit.

But she hadn’t leaped. They’d stayed on the summit for about ten more minutes and then started the hike back down the mountain. It took them six hours to get down. Step after step. The sun going down and making it dark. Back to the feeling of descent instead of ascent to the sky.

When she had found out she was pregnant, she had thought that the power of a new life in her would create the same unfettered and endlessly possible feeling that the top of Mt. Whitney had. She had been wrong. Instead, she had spent nine months feeling more trapped in her body than she could have imagined was possible. The little girl inside her was demanding. Eat more, sleep more, move less, shift positions, pay attention to me when I kick, eat more, sleep more. Me, me, me, Little Ally seemed to cry over and over again. By her fifth month, Cecily was huge. The doctors suspected that Little Ally would actually stop growing soon, otherwise she was going to be a ten pound baby. Well, at last check, it seemed that Little Ally would in fact be a ten-pound baby. She must have inherited her size from Brandt, thought Cecily. He was big. A man’s man. So Little Ally must have gotten her size from her father and her seeming inability to ever be satisfied from her mother. Cecily wasn’t quite sure how that combination would work out.

In her seventh month, her ankles started to swell so much that it was physically painful to walk, so Brandt and her doctor acquired a wheelchair for her. It was just turning June then, and fortunately the school year was out, so none of her sixth grade students needed to see her trying to teach in a wheelchair. Cecily could only imagine how that would have gone over. Instead, on the last day of school, as her class filtered out the door, almost each one of them touched her stomach and wished her good luck with the baby. They would be seventh graders next year, and their classes would be in a different wing of the building, but when she came back to work, they all wanted to see pictures.

Cecily wondered if by September of the next year, they wouldn’t need to see pictures of her, too, to remind them of what she was like before Little Ally took over. She felt like her body was being taken over by aliens, each cell being systematically morphed into something decisively non-flesh-like. Something more like jelly. And Little Ally was oblivious. She continued to play, doing summersaults and trying to touch her toes, in the safe, warm home Cecily had made for her. Meanwhile, Cecily felt her eyes dissolving every day until all she could see around her were blurry watercolors. She felt like she was living in a pointalism painting and cursed George Serat every day for trying to convince people that that was a beautiful way to view the world and not just the resulting vision of insanity. Cecily was quite aware that her new, blurry version of the world was in no way as stunning and emotionally powerful as the sharp colors and defined lines she’s looked out on from the top of Mt. Whitney.

When school let out, Brandt’s mother came to stay with them to help out. Summer was high time for real estate sales, so Brandt couldn’t take extra time at home, especially with the new expenses created by Little Ally looming over them. Cecily would have preferred her own mother, but Cecily’s mother spent her summers in the cooler climate of the resort towns of upstate New York and begged off that she wouldn’t be much help if she was suffering in one hundred degree heat each day. Brandt’s mother was, in every way, too helpful. Too considerate. Too aware of the fact that Cecily and Brandt needed space and she couldn’t be overbearing. This, to Cecily, was almost more infuriating. She resented the need to have the woman there, resented that it was not her mother, and resented that Brandt’s mother walked around the house with a perpetual smile on her face, listening to songs from the fifties on the iPod Brandt had given her last Christmas. If Cecily had been in better humor, she thought, she might have even smiled and laughed at the sixty-two-year-old woman in her bright pink track suit with a trendy lime-green iPod strapped to her arm scrubbing down the front windows of her living room. But Ceciliy was not in good humor. And the thing she resented most that was she couldn’t even resent her mother-in-law for being there because the woman had a seemingly perfect disposition and went to every effort to accommodate Cecily and her bad mood.

Cecily was sure Ally would love her grandmother. How could she not? The woman was a walking senior-citizen version of Barbie. Little girls loved Barbie. And come to think of it, with professional Barbie and wheelchair Barbie and doctor Barbie and nature hiker Barbie, why hadn’t there been a senior citizen Barbie? Cecily pondered this for an entire day one day as she lay on her back on the bed in the guest room.

Until mid-July, the guestroom had become Cecily’s retreat. In her and Brandt’s room, the furniture was heavy cherry wood and the walls were a very adult, Pottery Barn, shade of beige. Now that she was home all day and unable to move, she hated napping in there. If felt like she was in a hotel, down to the non-descript painting of a mountain spring scene hanging over the dresser. Brandt had bought that for her after their Mt. Whitney hike to remind her of how much she’d loved the mountain. Cecily had thanked him and planted a loving kiss on his cheek, but behind the alien covering on her eyes, she had wondered if he could ever really understand her. The entire thing that she had loved so dearly about that hike up the mountain was its proximity to her. She felt like she was right there, running her fingers through the sky and feeling an electric shock of life every time her foot hit the dirt of path or a patch of snow. This painting was the opposite of that. It was this flat, sad, facsimile of a feeling. It was something attempting to capture a feeling instead of create a feeling, and Cecily was sure that feelings were not meant to be captured. She came up to bed that night to find Brandt proudly hanging the painting above the dresser so that it would be the first thing they saw each morning when they woke up. He was so proud of himself, and her stomach turned.

And so, when the summer started and she began to spend the days laying on her back anticipating the day when Little Ally would either consume the rest of her body or finally make her break from inside Cecily, she moved into the guestroom where the walls were painted light blue and the curtains were pale yellow and in the pointalism world of Cecily’s vision, you could almost believe you were floating in the sky. And though Cecily wanted to soar, she would settle for a comfortable float. After all, it wasn’t exactly like she was the picture of aerodynamic right then.

But in July, Brandt and his mother started tearing the guestroom apart to turn into a nursery for the baby. The two of them came in and sat on Cecily’s bed one evening while she was sucking on ice cubes trying to stay cool and kill some of her cramping. They wanted to know what kind of theme she wanted to do the nursery in? Pink for the girl? Yellow for sunshine? Clouds on the ceiling?

Cecily’s first thought was that she couldn’t care less what the nursery looked like. The fact of the matter was that Little Ally was going to take Cecily’s room away from her and fill it up with diaper changing tables and dressers and cribs, and then eventually she would want to paint it pink regardless and put a canopy bed in it, and then years after that she would cover the walls with posters and stuffed animals that her friend had given her and put her name in goofy letters on the door with a big “Ally’s PRIVATE Room” sign and stay in there with her phone and her computer all night long. So it didn’t really matter what Cecily wanted. But she told them anyway, “I want to do it with a cow jumping over the moon nursery rhyme theme.” And she said it because Cecily wanted to jump the moon, and if she was going to have to stay in the room while Little Ally demanded her time and milk and sleep, she could at least daydream while she was in there. And who knows, maybe even that young Little Ally would realize that nothing could make her happy, and she’s already appreciate the idea of flying over the moon and running away with the spoon.

Brandt and his mother attacked the project with the type of enthusiasm that was endemic to Brandt’s family. Like his mother, Brandt was hopelessly optimistic, and sometimes Cecily thought he had fallen in love with her because he was so sure that his inability to feel anything even remotely approaching sadness would somehow eventually dispel the halo of numbness around her head or the perpetual weeping in her eyes. Brandt’s family was a family of enthusiasm. Family picnics were held every other month with the same atmosphere of celebration as a wedding or the Fourth of July. They all had “projects” all of the time. In the month of July, his sister was making a mosaic mirror, his younger brother was building an extension on his deck, his sister-in-law was running a young scouts program in the neighborhood, and Brandt and his mother were thigh-deep in the nursery. They spent hours looking at tiny pieces of paper from the Home Depot picking out the exact shade of blue for the walls. Cecily felt like screaming that the shade of blue the walls were already painted was perfect the way it was, but Little Ally seemed to have reached up and tightened a fist around Cecily’s vocal cords. Brandt and his mother went searching for baby furniture every night for a week. They would bring back pictures on the digital camera for Cecily to get her opinion. While they were gone, Cecily would lay on her back in the beige room with the ugly painting of the mountains and try to cry. Laying there, on her back, unable to turn, Cecily was sure that she would never move again. That her life would be a beige room with a painting of a mountain she once was able to climb. She tried and tried to cry, but Little Ally must have been thirsty and drunk away all of her mother’s tears.

Furniture was settled on (a light pine wood so the room wouldn’t be too dark), a local artist was hired to come in and paint a mural of the cow jumping over the moon. Brandt and his mother got into a two hour discussion of whether it would be cuter to have sheets with moons and stars on them or sheets with a cow print on them. In the end they decided on both, and they’d change them regularly. While they were having this discussion, Cecily realized what the problem with the beige room was. In the blue guestroom, she had felt like she was floating in the sky. In the brown bedroom, she felt like she was being covered by earth until she was buried. She closed her eyes and dreamed about sailing a raft across the Pacific Ocean. Just her and a raft with a tent and endless days of feeling the sensation of the water. When she opened her eyes, Brandt and his mother had moved the conversation on to plans for the party they’d have when Little Ally arrived.

When the room was finished and the paint fumes were gone, Brandt helped Cecily into her wheelchair and wheeled her in to see. And Cecily could not deny that, like all projects Brandt’s family took on, the room was beautiful. And entire wall showed the cow jumping over the moon nursery rhyme. The light pine wood furniture had been the right call, and the room really did feel like you were sitting in a children’s book. Next to the window, there was a rocking chair for Cecily to sit in while she was holding Little Ally. Brandt stood next to the chair proudly, and Cecily knew what he was going to say before it ever came out of his mouth.

“I made the rocking chair myself for you and Little Ally! Surprise!”

Cecily knew should she be overwhelmed with gratitude for this man, who approached life with the excitement of a child and who, on top of working and helping to take care of her and getting the nursery set up and the stroller ordered and the party planned, had sneaked out to the garage every night while she was sinking further and further into beige and painstakingly crafted a beautiful rocking chair for her and their baby. And while she smiled and hugged him and thanked him over and over again, she secretly hated him for it. She wished that, just for a little while, he could understand the sadness of the world with her. To him, it was all as simple as the moment of completion when he put the final pieces of the chair together, or when he sold somebody a house and knew that they would be very happy in it, or when he hung that awful, hideous painting above the dresser and looked up at it with this happy sense of satisfaction. She wished that just once he could know what it felt like to to not have any of those things be enough. To do those things hoping they would make you feel that way, and then find out that when you get to the summit, the only real thing to do is to turn around and walk back down. But she realized he’d never understand that. Which means he’d never understand her. And the way that Little Ally fussed and moved and demanded more and more each day, Cecily suspected that he’d never understand his first daughter, either.

Cecily wondered how you would even explain to somebody like Brandt that each day, when he felt like it was a miracle the sun had come up and his coffee had been delicious and the Astros had won while he drank a cold beer and laughed it up with his buddies and then kissed his pretty wife and fell asleep in a big, soft bed, that she felt like all of the sadness of the world was seeping in through her pores. At the school one day, about a year ago, before Little Ally firmly implanted herself inside of her mother, Cecily had stayed late to grade some papers. She rarely stayed late at the school, preferring to take her work home with her and do it at the dining room table after she and Brandt had had dinner and caught up on the activities of their days. He always asked questions about her students, and she often ended up feeling like he cared more about her sixth graders than she did. After dinner, they would load the dishwasher together and put the leftovers away, playfully arguing over who would get the lion’s share of the leftover food for their lunch the next day. Then she would curl up on the couch or spread out on the dining room table and grade papers or prepare lesson plans or whatever was required for the next day while he watched tv or went to the garage to dive into some new project.

But on this night, she had stayed late at the school. She had had to meet with a parent after classes were over, and so Brandt had decided to go to a local sports bar to watch the game and eat huge, monstrous sandwiches with his friends from his softball league. Since there was no dinner to prepare and Brandt wouldn’t be home anyway, she had decided to stay at the school, grade her students’ spelling tests and pick up a burger from In and Out on the way home. It was a break from their pattern, and in some strange way that gave Cecily a bit of a spark. After she finished grading the papers, she redid the classroom bulletin board and even checked her shelves of books for the kids to correct any book that had accidentally gotten placed out of alphabetical order.

By the time she was actually ready to leave, it was well past six o’clock, and most of the other teachers were long gone. She could hear the faint echo of the middle school basketball team practicing a long way away, but the only people who would still be here would be teachers and students who sponsored or participated in a late evening extra curricular activity.

And, of course, the janitors.

During the school day, Cecily barely noticed the janitors. It was all she could do to keep track of her thirty sixth-graders. Every once of her attention was devoted to pulling the boys away from each other when they started to fight or the girls away from each other when they started to pull hair or waking up students who weren’t paying attention. The janitors moved, unnoticed, behind the busy scramble of her day.

But on this night, as she walked through the quiet hallways with the smaller-than-average-sized lockers for the middle schoolers, Cecily turned the corner and came upon the nighttime janitor. He was probably in his mid-forties, but he looked older. Deep lines in his face and a beard stubble. Dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans with some old sneakers on his feet and a ball cap. Grey in his hair. He was mopping the floor in the hallway. Moving slow and steady down the shiny, tiled floors of the hallway as he slowly moved the mop in large, sweeping circles. Mop, mop, mop, mop, mop, then lift the mop and soak it again in the big yellow bucket on wheels. He didn’t hum or whistle while he did this, and suddenly, Cecily realized that she had always, in her head, imagined that janitors cheerily hummed or whistled or sang while they cleaned.

When the janitor heard Cecily’s flat, hard loafers making a clicking sound on the floor, he lifted his head up from his work, nodded a greeting at her and said, “Careful there Mrs. Jasper, the floors get real slick when they’re wet like this.”

And when he looked her in they eyes, Cecily felt as though she were falling down a well and all around her were the sounds of weeping for the world. She had to catch her breath before she smiled and thanked him and kept walking. She didn’t even know his name. He knew who she was, which means he must have worked there for quite some time, but Cecily didn’t even recognize his face. To her, each day, he must just fade into the background. And she kept moving forward across the shiny flat plane of the wet floor, because she knew if she stood still she would not be able to shake the feeling of diving head first down a long, dark well. If she stood still, she would keep diving until she hit the dirt floor at the bottom, breaking all of her fragile bones so that she was forced to just lay there in the narrow darkness listening to the crying until, eventually, somebody would start shoveling dirt into the well until it covered her up entirely.

On the car ride home, all Cecily could think of was the reality of the world. How many people were there like the janitor? Millions. People who weren’t like her. Who hadn’t had parents who paid for pretty prom dresses and a car when she was sixteen. Who weren’t as pretty as she was, or as smart, or as lucky. Who always wished that they had had more friends. Who had never been the star, and at some point they got a job. A job like being a fast food cook or a bus driver or a janitor. And while there should be dignity just in doing a good day’s labor, most of the people she knew didn’t see it that way. And when a man like that janitor was out at a bar or somewhere, and somebody asked him what he did, he would have to answer that he was a janitor. And he would never have a shot, no matter how amazing of a person he might be. He would never have a shot for the pretty girl, or the smart girl, or the person who might be able to help him catch a break and move up in the world. And Cecily wondered what that janitor thought about when he was alone in the evenings mopping the floor. Did he lament his life? Did he daydream about being a real estate agent like Brandt, out driving around in his nice car in his nice clothes slurping down designer coffee beverages all day before he went to get his workout in at his nice gym with its sauna and steam room and towel service? Or did he think about the unfairness of life that had led him to mop the floors up after hundreds of messy schoolchildren while somebody like Brandt was on the treadmill watching Fear Factor on his personal treadmill television? Or, maybe, in the best-case scenario, the janitor had some wife whom he loved very much. Probably a woman who waited tables or worked at the cash register at the drug store. And she was home making a late dinner for them, and he was thinking about how nice it was going to be to eat dinner and then sit down on the couch and watch TV with her when he was done mopping the girls’ bathroom up. That, Cecily thought, is what she hoped more than anything he was thinking. Because if she believed anything else, it might just break a chunk off of her heart.

This was before Little Ally started stealing her mother’s tears away so that that Cecily could only feel sadness without letting it go, and so Cecily cried the whole way home from the school. And when Brandt got home, she was still crying. When he asked her why, she lied and said it was because she had seen a very sad show about a dying mother on Lifetime television, and he put his arms around her and told her she was a darling. She never told him why she really cried that night. How she felt like the endless sadness of the entire world was a little black ball that she had swallowed and that now sat permanently, indigestible, in her stomach, weighing her down every day. She knew that he would never understand how the janitor, the look on his face, the bristling reality of the unanswered for chasm between his life and hers, should make a person feel sad. Brandt would hear her description of the janitor and ask her how she was sure that the janitor wasn’t happy daily, getting to be around children and having a nice pension and probably getting to hang out and joke each afternoon with his work buddies. But Brandt couldn’t understand. He’d never seen the well that she daily had to fight not to dive into.

And so, when they had found out that Little Ally was on the way, Cecily had hoped that the excitement of the new life in her would provide for her the same feeling of exhilaration and all things possible that she had felt during their mountain hike, but it had, in fact, been quite the opposite. Ally had sucked all of the energy to try to fight off the sadness from Cecily. And part of Cecily already resented Little Ally. Little Ally would grow up lucky and with every opportunity, just like her mother had. And probably, just like her mother, Little Ally would always feel like nothing was ever enough, even though she had more than almost anybody in the world. Yes, Cecily could feel it. Little Ally would grow up to be just like her mother. And Cecily hated them both.

But somehow, Cecily had held out hope that when the time came, the moment in which Cecily would actually add a life to the big, blue world, she would get that rush. She had imagined a flood of excitement, hormones and adrenaline and an uncontrollable love for the daughter she was about to have sweeping over her. It had, however, not happened like that. She and Brandt had been laying on the bed watching the baseball game, his mother down the hall in the room she had taken over, presumably reading. Cecily had felt not anything even resembling a sharp contraction, instead just a dull, unrecognizable wave of nausea moving up through her stomach. She had almost ignored it, but Little Ally was due within two weeks, so she mentioned it to Brandt.

Brandt, of course, jumped into motion, making Cecily describe the pain to him in detail. Then he called their doctor to describe it and get some advice. Could it be early labor? But even as he was talking to the doctor on the phone while gently rubbing his thumb back and forth on Cecily’s wrist, she felt the wetness break through between her legs, soaking through the beige sheets until she was surrounded in wet. “Brandt, my water broke,” she turned and said. And she was deadly calm, and not feeling any other kind of physical sensation at all. She hadn’t expected it to be like this.

They tried to time her contractions, but she was barely feeling them, so they figured they should head to the hospital regardless. And here she sat. Big as a bathtub, on her flowered living room couch with her pre-packed roller bag next to her while Brandt and his mother rushed through the house grabbing things they would “need” like the camcorder and Brad’s lucky Astros hat, and Little Ally tried her hardest to sneak into the world without any fanfare.

Brandt, almost vibrating with excitement, gingerly helped Cecily into her wheelchair and rolled her out to the car, where he and his mother laid her down in the back seat. Cecily wanted to sit up, she thought she might get car sick laying down, but she was so big that even with the seat as far up as it would go, she couldn’t fit comfortably. So she lay down on her back on the backseat, holding her belly to try to massage out the dull pain she was feeling. She had started now to notice the sting that told her she was having a contraction. Her mother-in-law slid into the driver’s seat, turned around and smiled at her and said, “How ya doing girlie?”

“I’m okay,” answered Cecily, “I thought…I thought that I would feel more than this, you know?”

Brandt’s mother laughed out loud, her big Texas laugh, and said, “Cecily Mae, you just thank your lucky stars that it seems like you’re going to have an easy labor. Someday I will tell you about Brandt and his brother and sisters. I would have been paying a million dollars on those days to be laying in the car saying I was surprised I didn’t feel it more!”

And Cecily smiled and closed her eyes. How could Brandt’s mother understand that Cecily had meant something entirely different when she said that she’d thought that she would feel more?

The trunk slammed shut as Brandt put the last of the bags in, and he nearly sprinted to the front seat. As soon as he was in, his mother started the car and they were off. Brandt twisted around to face Cecily and said, “It’s time to start the breathing exercises. They say you need to do it now so that you’ll already be in a pattern when the labor gets actually laborious!”

Cecily nodded, and Brandt started counting breaths for her while she followed along.

Short, short, short, short, long.

Short, short, short, short, long.

Short, short, short, short, long.

Short, short, short, short, long.

Now rest and breathe normally. The sky raced by through the window she was facing.

Short, short, short, short, long.

Short, short, short, short, long.

Short, short, short, short, long.

Short, short, short, short, long.

Now rest and breathe normally. They were stopped at a stoplight.

Short, short, short, short, long.

Short, short, short, short, long.

Short, short, short, short, long.

Short, short, short, short, long.

Now rest and breathe normally. She propped herself up so that she could look out of the window, and she thought about whether Little Ally would like her nursery or resent that fact that she didn’t get to pick the colors out herself. Would she hate sky blue just because her mother loved it?

Short, short, short, short, long.

Short, short, short, short, long.

Short, short, short, short, long.

Short, short, short, short, long.

Now rest and breathe normally. “Brandt,” she said, “I’ve been inside for months now. Is it really August? Everything looks really green for the middle of high heat summer.”

“Baby, it’s the weirdest thing. We’ve been having strange rainstorms all week long. I’m surprised you didn’t hear the rain on the window. Today is the first day there wasn’t one. Everything’s grown just like it was the winter rain season. All the news shows have been talking about it! I guess God just wanted to make sure the world was clean when Ally got here!”

Short, short, short, short, long.

Short, short, short, short, long.

Short, short, short, short, long.

Short, short, short, short, long.

Now rest and breathe normally. Inside, Cecily knew that if God had wanted the world to be clean, it would be a different looking world.

“Maybe we should change her name,” she said, “Maybe instead of Ally we should call her Rain because of those summer storms?”

Even as she said it, she liked it. Rain felt a lot more like the personality of the baby who was inside her. Rain, falling down, making the sky grey, never finding completion because it just went straight back into the sky to futilely fall again. Yes, she wanted to name her baby Rain.

Brandt looked at her with a funny face. “Rain? Baby, that’s such a depressing name! Don’t do that to her. I love Ally. You love Ally. I can tell, this girl is an Ally!”

And Cecily closed her eyes again. No, she wasn’t an Ally. You could put as many Ally’s as you wanted in the world, but it wouldn’t mean that the rain stopped coming down and drowning anybody in the well.

“You’re right. Ally’s a good name. I’m just not thinking all the way right now.”

Brandt reached back and gave her hand a squeeze as he smiled at her.

Short, short, short, short, long.

Short, short, short, short, long.

Short, short, short, short, long.

Short, short, short, short, long.

Now rest and breathe normally. The sky raced by through the window she was facing.