2 Breathe by Bernice Olivas

1981

I am born breathless blue. My little body contorts, fist flailing, back arching, I open my mouth and nothing happens. The doctor clears my throat, thumps my diaphragm and I breathe, but my first sensation in this life is deprivation of oxygen. They clean me off, my mother feeds me. In her arms I drift off to sleep and I die for just a moment. My mother shakes me, and I breathe. But I die again. Then again. And again. I forget to breathe.

In twenty-four hours, my mother is frantic, wild-eyed, and sleepless. The doctor is frustrated. Finally, the he lays it out on the table, “Don’t get attached,” he says. “The only way to keep her alive is to keep her hooked up to baby monitors, without constant supervision while she sleeps. She will probably die.”

My daddy is the big man, el Jefe, at a potato farm but even the big man doesn’t make enough money for full time monitoring equipment in 1981. It costs more than he will bring home in a month. We leave the hospital without it. That night my father places me on his chest so that our hearts touch and I sleep with the sound of him breathing beneath my ear, when I slip he feels it and nudges me gently. In this way I survive the night, and the next and the next. I sleep on his chest for five years.

***

1986

In pictures I look like a small pony, not a cutesy T.V. pony, but a half feral Shetland pony. I am short, stocky, my curly black hair flops over my eyes. I am stubborn. On this day I am wearing something pink. I know this because my mother color-coded us, Sylvia in yellow, Genevieve in blue and me in pink. My baby sister has no color yet, she is a rainbow baby. Her crib nestles in the corner of my parent’s bedroom. On this day I packed a suitcase, tossed in books and clothes, my favorite blanket, and my pink jelly shoes.

“Daddy, I’m moving out,” I say.

“Where are you going,” he asks.

“I’m moving in with Gene, okay.”

“Okay.”

“I love you.” I say.

“I love you too.”

***

1986-1996

I grow up in Paul Idaho until I am thirteen in a renovated schoolhouse, complete with industrial kitchen, basketball gym and full-size stage. My parents keep the place hopping. Friends, family, and strangers like Luci are always coming and going. My mother found Luci at the edge of a road, the hood of her Woody station wagon popped open, smoke billowing. Luci is in tears and her two sons sit in the back, pale and exhausted. I don’t know what they are running from. My mother takes her aside, wipes her face, and they talk. Spanish rolls like waves from Luci. Mom pulls the boys into our blue beast van and we all go home. They stay with us for nearly a year.

Dad is just as bad; he brings us Red, a big man in his sixties, with the mind of an eight-year-old. Red is a diabetic my father finishing a cart full of aluminum cans and old, ripped stuff toys. Red’s people cash his social security checks and let him sleep in their garage. The day dad brings him home my mother burns his clothes; my father bathes him, washes and trims the tangles out of his hair. Mom dresses him in clothes an uncle left behind and washes the one-eyed brown teddy bear he sleeps with. Red stays with us until my father can no longer make him take his insulin, until his mind becomes foggy, and he swings at us kids in moments of fear and confusion. We find him a place, the best we can, make his people give up his checks to a social worker

***

But my parents are not saints, my life is not a picture book. We are field workers, and laborers in Idaho, we are brown, short and our black hair gleams in the sun. We are Mexican, native, and beautiful. All around us are people who resent our existence, racism happens. The first time I hear the word spic it is from a full-grown white man. He spits on me, calls me down, I am seven and dared to tell his son to stay in his place in line at a carnival ride. I spit back. Later, I see the boy away from his big imposing father and rub that boy’s face in the dirt. Violence and trauma beget violence and trauma. Make no mistake, we give as good as we get, and we take what we’ve earned.

My people know to stand back to back against any attack. We draw into each other, lace hands and pull strength from the feel of each other’s fingers, the heat of our bodies radiating around us. We put our heads down and let the winds push us even closer together. We withstand. This method has worked for generations. It helped us stay strong in the borderlands of Texas and Mexico and helped us navigate childhoods in the shadow lands between being part Mexican, part Indian, and all-American.

My people are people who play music loud and late through the night even though they would be back at work at 5am. We dance for comfort. Wild and free we spin and dip and whirl. Our feet pound and sweat away the rage and pain of it all. The Doors, mixed with Cumbia, mixed with Hank Williams. God, even our music is in identity crisis. Music will always be a mixed bag for me. On one hand I feel that rush of abandon that would take over the house on those nights and on the other I feel the loneliness of having a just one family under my roof.

***

Even though my childhood will be touched by pain, fear, poverty and abuse over the years, it is from years of sleeping safely as my father stayed awake and being allowed to move on without question that teach me what it means to be a parent. It is my mother’s determination to give us more than she had that teaches me endurance. It is Luci and Red that teach what it means to be human. I dropout in of the eighth grade to work alongside my family. Everyone works so everyone eats. I leave home early, in my late teens, I live my messy life, meet my husband, get married, and have my son. He changes everything.

***

2004

Gareth takes almost thirty-six hours to be born. He gets stuck on my pelvic bone and each time I push I feel him move a painful, grating inch forward. I am ripped and bleeding, the epidural failed, and when each contraction eases and stops I feel him slide swiftly back in. I fight for our lives with my sister and my mother acting as midwives, their hands holding me, their voices calling my son into this world. When it is over, and I hold him, a fierce resolve almost drowns me. This child will have better, he will have options, he will have an education. Later, this resolve becomes a goal because I know that the best way for him to go to college, is for me to go to college.

I learned that from my mother. My mother is sweet and soothing, love personified in one moment, and heat incarnate in the next very next. She can be dangerous, she can be hard, and she never hesitates to give out a needed ass kicking. My mother gave me passion, she gave me rage and then she taught me to blend them into fuel. Most importantly she gave me the memory of her fight to get her GED. When she married, she had a third-grade education. When I was a small child, she decided it wasn’t enough. So, she went back. And one of the memories that has been a great shining light on my path is my mother at her GED graduation, in her robes, getting hers.

***

2005

My son is six-months old when I start BSU. I live in Boise and CWI isn’t a thing yet—it’s BSU or nothing. My husband brings me the paperwork and pushes the pen in my shaking hand. I am terrified. School is not easy. I fail at many things. I succeed at others. In 2007 I join the McNair scholars. In 2010 I graduate with honors and awards. My first semester is endlessly frustrating and terrifying. I am more prepared for the academic aspect of college than I am the social aspect. Learning who to talk to, how to talk to them, is deeply disconcerting. I find a home with the creative writers and take writing class after writing class. After I join McNair, the scholars become my home base—my cohort are like siblings and my mentors are the core of my support system. We meet twice a week, we travel together, we share our work and writing. At home my husband and his mother encourage me, help with the kids, and help me find time to do school and work.

But nothing comes without a price. In the five years it takes to get my degree I become isolated from my family, going home only two or three times a year and the space between us grows. Mostly I ignore it, let it slip under the onslaught of everyday life but five years away from home I sound different, I think different, my worldview has widened. In the quiet of the library during long nights of study I’m lonely for the sound of their laughter and booming voices.

On random nights my mom calls to ask the hard question. “How are you?”

“I’m holding strong.”

“I dreamt you last night, I dreamt you were swimming alone, you went under, and you seemed to be holding yourself in the water. I couldn’t reach you and you wouldn’t come up. How are you?”

“I’m tired mama, I’m terrified, I’m away from my kids all the time and I’ve forgotten how real food smells. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Aye, mija, you know the only thing holding you in the water is you. Come up, baby, come up and breathe.”

She’s right, she’s always right.

“Come home soon. I’ll make tortillas, and your daddy will make the rice. We miss you.”

***

2019

Now, I joke that when I write that book it will be called “GED to PhD in 10 11 years.” But that title doesn’t say anything about how I got to Boise State or to University of Nebraska, or to the tenure track at Salt Lake City Community College. The truth is that being the first person in a family to try to move from working class to middle class, from uneducated to PhD, means that I am often scared shitless, I doubt myself. I feel overdressed or underdressed at events and presentations. I worry about how I sound. I live and die by a simple Maxim: If you cannot dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. I pretend to be confident. I wake up breathless blue from nightmares. But then, in the dark I hear my father’s heartbeat, my mother’s laughter, I feel the heat of my siblings standing back to back against anything and remember how I did it. I stood on the shoulders of giants, of my people, and I grabbed. I hold on for my sons. I don’t think there is any other way to do it—we all stand on the shoulders of our people and we all hold on for the next generation. And every morning, when the sun settles on my skin, I come up and breathe.