Secret Slumber Party

There is a single night from my childhood that defined motherhood for me, at least motherhood done well.  This moment encapsulated the wisdom, power, grace, and love that children long to see in their mothers, and that I believe mothers hope to have.

I was nine. It was sometime after midnight and I was dragged unwillingly from sleep to consciousness, unable to breath.  As I lay in my bed, curled up on my side, my airways had constricted and my lungs struggled to suck in air.  I began to grow more alert, slightly alarmed, and I put all of my body into filling my lungs.  I forced my stomach to expand, arched my back in order to make my chest bigger, and tried to pull air into my body through the narrowed bronchial tubes, but it was like trying to breathe through sand.  

I sat up in bed.  The house was completely still.  No voice, no lights, no television.  My brother was asleep in his room across the hall, and I could tell by the darkness and silence my parents were long asleep.  I was getting air, but only through concentrated effort.  My stomach hurt from my attempts to breath and I was growing light-headed.  I had the moment that all asthmatic children have shared: I knew from the labored rhythm of my breathing that it was time to take another breath, but my body didn’t want to do it.  My stomach, my lungs, my shoulders – every part of me that was working to breathe was tired and aching and wanted to rest.  But if I let them rest, there would be no air.  I forced another breath.

I got up out of bed and felt my way down the hall.  I had a strange awareness of being the only conscious person in the house – a rare occurrence that only emphasized to me the strangeness and wrongness of the night.  This was not normal.  My body wasn’t working the way I needed it to work. I couldn’t get oxygen, and I was scared.

I made my way past my brother’s room, past the bedroom, into my parents’ room where I made a straight line to my mom’s side of the bed.  I shook her.  “Mom, I can’t breathe,” I said.  My voice was high and frightened.

My mother stirred to consciousness.  “You can’t breathe or it’s hard to breathe?” she asked.

“I don’t know. It’s hard I guess. But I can’t get air.” 

“Ok, shhh….” My mother sighed and threw back the covers.  “Don’t wake your dad up – you’re going to be ok.”

She put her hand on my back and guided me back down the hall to the bathroom I shared with my brother.

“Don’t turn the light on,” she said, not wanting the light to wake the rest of the house.  “This will be like a secret.  Sit down here for a minute and try to relax and breathe while I get it ready.

My mom turned to the bathtub and began to run a hot bath.  She added something to the water that smelled of eucalyptus.  I began to feel better almost immediately just knowing that my mom was taking care of it, and that I was going to be fine.  She didn’t seem worried or scared, and I had confidence that she had tapped into an infinite source of mother-knowledge and that whatever the problem was, she could fix it.

She helped me get into the scented bath in the darkened bathroom and instructed me to sit up tall, but to relax and slowly breathe in the moist air and let it open my lungs.

And then my mom did the thing that made this moment stand out in my memory – the thing that distracted me from my worries and made me feel that not only would I be ok, but that the night was somehow special.  She lit tea candles and placed them all around the bathtub.

“See,” she said, “it’s like a secret slumber party.  Just sit there and relax and breathe deep and we’ll talk.”

And the lights twinkled and my mom sat with me while my tension eased and my breaths got deeper and deeper, until I forgot to think about breathing, and I forgot why I was awake, and we were just having a special night, just the two of us.

This is the standard. A moment when my mother gave me everything I could have wanted from her and nothing more. It was the Platonic ideal of motherhood, a perfect example of what a mother is, and an example that no human could achieve day in and day out through the distraction and the strain of life.  But I saw in that moment what the word mother is supposed to mean, and could mean in another world.  And I am lucky that as a child, I had my mother’s love conveyed to me in that moment so perfectly and purely, and yet so concretely that I need never doubt it.