Breathe Me In

Chapter One


I’m used to people staring at me, judging. They see the tattoos, the dyed hair, the piercings and they have an opinion. Slut. User. Bad mother. So as I grabbed the diaper bag and adjusted Asher on my hip, kissing the top of his downy head and murmuring to him to calm him down, I defiantly met the stares of the other people on the bus. They could judge me all they wanted. Babies cry. A fourteen hour bus ride with a twelve month old blows and I was doing all I could to keep him happy. Did they really think they could do any better? That if in my shoes they wouldn’t have a crying kid at some point?

They couldn’t do any better. They would have a crying kid because they were not Mother Mary perfect. No one was. The attitude, the judgy judgment was bullshit.

I tumbled down the stairs of the bus at the station in Portland and breathed a sigh of relief that I had made it. The hot exhaust from the bus hit my legs, but I felt chilled. It was colder in Maine than in New York and the crisp air made me shiver as I walked quickly to get inside. I didn’t have a coat for Asher. Only his pajama onesie that he was dressed in. I was going to have to deal with that. But first I needed to get him something to eat. He’d had his last bottle four hours earlier and I had just enough money to get to my sister’s house and live off of for a few days. I hadn’t eaten myself in three days and I felt foggy, lightheaded. I’d been awake for twenty-four hours and my mind felt sluggish, like my thoughts were constantly being dragged under in quicksand.

Which was probably how I had managed to leave my purse on the bus. I realized it as soon as I walked into the convenience store in the bus station and felt for it on my shoulder. Nothing but the diaper bag. No purse.

“Shit.” Turning around, I rushed back but the bus was already pulling away. Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out, Jesus. For a second I thought about chasing the bus, but I had the baby and I didn’t think my rubbery legs could gain any sort of speed. For a second, I felt like I might have a panic attack, my breath pushing in and out frantically from anxiety. The street in front of me blurred a little for a split second as the hunger, fatigue, fear overwhelmed me. This was it. End of the line. I had nothing. No one.

But by the sheer force of my will I dragged myself back from the edge of passing out and swallowed the bile that kept crawling up my throat. I wasn’t going down without a fight because I had Asher to take care of. I could do this. I could do anything for him.

The biggest accomplishment of my life is giving birth to my son, Asher. The biggest failure is my inability to keep a roof over his head and put food in his mouth. Part of me has wondered if I should give him up. Let him have a better life with someone who isn’t dead broke and without a true family or really any friends I can trust. But what happens to a twelve month old in foster care? I picture Asher confused, crying, missing me, and I know that no matter what, no one can love him like I can. No one will look at him and feel the intensity of emotion, that deep, straight down to my core desperate love and affection and urgent, violent need to give him the best life possible.

I no longer cared about what happened to me. Whatever. Hit me, rape me, humiliate me, kill me. Just don’t hurt my son. I would do whatever it took to keep him safe. To feed him.

Which was why I decided to go back into the convenience store and steal baby food. Just a couple of those weird pouches of pureed food they had now, that reminded me of the one summer where my foster mother had let me drink Capri Sun. I had sucked on those things for three months, a happy straw-slurping daily treat, glorifying in the obnoxious sound it made at the end, but also hating that the sound meant it was empty. That had been a good summer, the best one, really, where I had felt safe and cared for. Wanted. Somehow it always felt like I was trying to get back to that summer, and yet I was nowhere near to that mischievous little girl any more.

Entering the store, I casually moved around, like I was looking for something in particular, but nothing really. The art of allowing the clerk to see me, but not think too much about me, was hard to do because I stood out in Maine. In New York City, no one paid attention to me, but there, in the low key bus station shop, where only two other customers were moving around, I knew I looked the part of angry East Village singer in a rock band. Which I was, all of those things. I was wearing skinny jeans in black and a Ramones T-shirt I’d had since middle school. My hair was at last count four different colors, and I had a nose and a lip piercing, plus an array of studs in my ear. I should have taken the rings out on the bus. I hated bowing down to convention, but for Asher, I would go mainstream. I just hadn’t had the time or the money to fix my hair or my clothes.