Don't Forget to Breathe

A tantalizing theme I picked out from among the many in the latter part of A Life’s Work was the connection of parenting to the recurrent notion of breathing. This seems a normal, involuntary function of the body to most, but in this context it becomes more than this—it is the realization of the dramatic and perpetual metamorphosis humans undergo when they become responsible for sustaining another life and become conscious of the delicate but continual signs of that life’s existence.

For example, in the chapter labeled Breathe, a mother friend of the author named Miranda admits that she lies awake at night listening to her son’s breathing over a baby monitor to make sure he has not died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. This concept has so paralyzed the mother with fear (as have many of the books she has read which Cusk claims not to have been so affected by), that “now she couldn’t think about anything else,” and only can begin to go to sleep as her child awakes hungry and in need of attention (198). In this way Miranda has become a sort of slave to her infant living in captivity, a metaphor Cusk explores and analyzes throughout the chapter: “rigid with responsibility and worry, so full of anticipation…I forgot to breathe […] It was as if at these times I just stopped living because I was so taken up with looking after someone else […] my feeling that I was shut in a box, that I couldn’t breathe” (200-01). The sense of claustrophobia comes to mind; the inability to navigate in any space of one’s own (to bring up a previous trope).

This theme of parenthood and its relation to the process of breathing is curiously taken up elsewhere. In Hell’s Kitchen there is a poem by Coleridge depicting a parent and a child at midnight amid a deafening silence in which he can hear the very frost harden outside “so calm, that it disturbs / And vexes meditation with its strange and extreme silentness” (139). Cusk is taken with this descriptive parental moment, a rare moment in which, thankfully, her own child is sleeping and she has time to reflect on the deeper meanings of motherhood, the “elemental greatness”:

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the interspersed vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My Babe so beautiful! It thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee.

This is a place in which Cusk has had time to not only breathe, but to meditate on the objective greatness of mothering and of taking joy in the life she has created. It marks, I think, a sharp contrast to most of the other moments in the book. She states, “For a writer such a love can represent the attainment of narrative authority over life itself…it is the means by which the self’s limits are broken open and entrance found to a greater landscape” (141). Thus, the notion of “breathing” is not merely connected to lack of air or space or oxygen, but is here enmeshed with the inexplicable, conflicting, resounding love of the mother or father for the breathing child.