Nancy Huggett
Breathing Lessons
–(after my daughter’s stroke)
Learning how to breathe — in / out — from the trees. In the park we walk past the bins and you dare me to inhale their fetid scent — in / out — to make you laugh, every time. Like you’ve tricked me. That’s breath. Your power. Once your breath came hopeless as teeth, pulled from your lungs and punched back in. A pulmonary pump —in /out — while I breathed with you — calm / ease — used that magic mantra to tether us back together after you left, for a while, your body. After you left your brain, or it left you. Or how can I say, this absence on an MRI, white spots sputtering. How my breath left, or came too quick. A sucking sound, a starfish dying, a gasp for air. Or, was that your birth? The measured breath that brought you home to us. In / out — fast / slow —shallow / pant-blow. It is so simple, this thing called breath, called breathing — In / out. How I lay with you at night not knowing — in / out — that your terrors were the perfect storm of tendrils strangling your brain of blood. How breath could anchor but not sustain —in / out — your echo. How you won’t be held. How I crouched in the closet and closed my eyes when your brain revised its filters and your fists flailed against my soft body and I turned my back. Breathing — in / out — fast / fast / shallow / slow — and you followed without consent. Not knowing I’d led you there. Not knowing how to breathe the breath that brings you back. I listened, after your stroke, through the long long nights to your exhalations. Each sigh a signal that I should breathe. My shallow breaths mere water molecules floating. In / out — almost calm / almost ease. Breathing your body back to me — in / out /calm /slow — Then learning how to let you go. Like breath into chaos.
Back to “Motherhood and the Body”
Nancy Huggett writes and caregives on the unceded Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada). She has won some awards (2024 RBC-PEN Canada New Voices Award) and a gazillion rejections. Find her work in Best Canadian Poetry 2026, Literary Mama, Literary Review of Canada, Poetry Northwest, and Whale Road Review. Her first poetry collection‚ Maybe, Cicadas‚ about caregiving, is forthcoming from University of Alberta Press, spring 2027.