life breath or fungus

I am stupified again.

A thirty second phone call and I have the cure for an 11 year old fungus. I am almost euphoric at how simple it was. 30 seconds!!! 30 damned seconds!!!

… and now my chest is heavy, just heavy. The tears are verging on my eyelids. I realise my paralysis. And when I realise my paralysis, I want to cry.

How can life be so hijacked that it takes an intelligent woman 11 years to make a 30 second call to a pharmacist?

Stupor! thinking that you live when your reality is permanently a stupor.

This is the stupidity of a terrorised mother, a woman who froze, died, disappeared, just vanished, evaporated for the love of a wonderful beautiful baby boy.

11 years ago he was born and 11 years ago I got the fungus.

And for 10 years I fought gangsters for my sons Paradise, his own paradise, which would not be their “Gangsters Paradise”.

So I couldn’t deal with the annoying, incessant growing fungus. It was there, but I just didn’t want to see it. It popped up on my leg just a few months after my son was born.

But I couldn’t see, hear, smell or acknowledge anything, let alone my fungus. I hardly even saw my son. I just had to hear him breathe. I had to hear him breathe.

No thought for an inconvenient fungus.

24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 11 years, I had to hear him breath, and if I didn’t hear him breathe, I would pace up and down for hours, until I heard him breathe again.

And when he came home, I couldn’t see him, because I had to hear him.

You see breath is life, as long as you hear breath, you have life. So when life could disappear, when it could be snatched at any minute, you obsess about the most minute sign of it — breath.

I became an insomniac with hyper-acuity. I wouldn’t sleep. I refused to sleep. I was operational. For 5 years, I lay in a waking slumber. I had to be awake. I had to hear him breathe. He slept in the bedroom 5 metres away. Gregg, my husband and “protector” snored in bed beside me. Walls and snoring are no obstacle for a hyper-vigilant mother. I would close my eyes, take a deep breath, and zoom in on his breath.

Ah, I heard him. We were safe. The most serene sound, his little chest, inflating and deflating, breathe streaming from his nostrils. It was my lullaby. I was grateful. Just grateful to hear him breathe.

Now after 11 years, there is more freedom in his breath. So I can phone the pharmacist and treat the fungus.

I can let it go for a second, I can stop wondering about his breath just to speak to the pharmacist.

After 11 years, the fungus is almost all over both legs, I can’t ignore it.

The fungus came when I decided I had to disappear. And if I disappeared so did my body, my mind, my existence, and therefore, the fungus.

Except I didn’t really disappear and neither did the fungus.

And it just grew and grew and I could not even say “I need to get to a doctor, I need a prescription for anti-fungal cream” I couldn’t bring myself to recognise that I had a need. My only need was hearing Kevin breathe.