The Lamaze Of Life

You tie the knot with the love of your turbulent life. You bask in the glory of it all – marital bliss and happily-ever-afters. You are reminded of the Barbara Cartland stories you suffused your high school brains with. Months and a year pass and you’re still cooing in the waves of ecstacy and euphoria because the fruit of your love looks so endearingly sweet – little fingers, little toes, a little more, heaven knows – goes the Johnson’s baby product ad.

"How that baby took over the house..."

Indeed. Now who ever dreamed that children are capable of setting up storms in the family?

The kids. How fast they grow! You are confronted with personalities emerging both to your enchantment and disappointment. As your eldest son tries to pull off one of his wiry stunts, you find yourself suddenly suffering from amnesia: Who could he be? Who is this stranger yelling back at me? Is this the same child I nurtured inside my womb years ago? Or could this be the child who’s responsible for all my stretch marks? Oh, he’s just a child. Everybody goes through this phase. Even I, as a child, was a little mischievous too. Parenting requires a certain degree of patience. And diplomacy too.

"Where was it written that a child was always compatible with his parents?"

And here comes another stranger who does not share your kind of idea: You are spoiling the brat! A little spanking was all he suggested but what you heard was lethal injection. Marriage, you realize, requires a certain degree of compromise or you will forever quarrel over your children and be forever angry at each other. The stranger, after all, is your husband.

Reading Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler elicited the foregoing reality-biting reflections. Abandoning my work for the day, I allowed myself to get lost between its pages. It didn’t exactly transport me to another world, although I must admit I took an extraordinary detour as the story of the Morans unfolded before me.

The book centers on the everydayness of married life. The couple, Maggie and Ira Moran, are just like two ordinary couple living in a comfortably routine marriage. A line in the book poses like a mirror reflecting any given domestic setting: "Maggie and Ira gazed at each other bleakly across the living room. Maggie blamed Ira; he was too harsh. Ira blamed Maggie; she was too soft."

But the author’s poignant insight delivered through the inner turmoils of Maggie is striking. "The mere fact that her children were children, condemned for years to feel powerless and bewildered and confined, filled her with such pity that to add any further hardship to their lives seemed unthinkable. She could excuse anything in them, forgive them everything. She would have made a better mother, perhaps, if she hadn’t remembered so well how it felt to be a child."

An experience almost spasmodic seizes me as I journeyed on with the heroine because I began to involve myself. Now Anne Tyler had just articulated what I often feel as an adult grappling with my roles as mother and wife: "I mean you’re given all these lessons for the unimportant things – piano-playing, typing. You’re given years and years of lessons on how to balance equations, which Lord knows you will never have to do in the normal life. But how about parenthood? Or marriage, either, come to think of it. Before you can drive a car, you need a state-approved course of instruction, but driving a car is nothing, nothing compared to living day in and day out with a husband and raising a new human being."

Tough course it would have been! Imagine having to answer a quiz on "How to Comfort an Angry Husband When It Was He Who Committed the Mistake in the First Place?" Whew!

The reality of married life is grasped by Tyler in Breathing Lessons and she capsulizes these experiences with her comical twists and tear-jerking plunges, prodding one to inhale the richness of her thoughts and exhale the hilarity of her impressions. Now and then she would thrust a glossary of terms, so to speak. "Same old song and dance," for instance, was how Ira and Maggie’s son, Jesse, would refer to marriage. It meant: "Same old arguments, same recriminations. The same jokes and affectionate passwords, yes, and abiding loyalty and gestures of support and consolations no one else knew how to offer; but also the same old resentments dragged up year after year, with nothing ever totally forgotten: the time Ira didn’t act happy to hear Maggie was pregnant, the time Maggie failed to defend Ira in front of her mother, the time Maggie forgot to invite Ira’s family to Christmas dinner..."

... The time when I was accused of being insensitive, the time when I refused to apologize even if I was the one at fault, the time when we were supposed to have waited a year before having a baby so we could get to know each other better as a couple, the time when...the list is endless. It becomes a cliché after a while...the same old song.

But alas! Tyler’s book does not offer concrete solutions. It illumines. It articulates. It touches. It mystifies. It humors. Subtly teaching you a lesson or two, affording you to poke fun at your own miserable encounters, and transforms an otherwise ordinary life into something magical. Ordinary characters become heroes in their own offbeat little way, this I hail Tyler for! But how these characters brought forth a breath of inspiration into my own ordinary life is something else. How often do we wish that we will not lose the wonder of it all? That despite the fact that we have learned all there is to know about our spouse and our children, the familiarity, something new is unravelled everytime? How many times were the tireless rantings of what-ifs and if-onlys are miraculously answered by a warm hug or a sincere apology? How often do we realize that as we fumble for words to assuage a pain, silence in its stead becomes more eloquent? Although deep inside we know that the ghost of the past is not buried in oblivion with the things which we thought were the answers to our questions, we learn to embrace the obscurity and continue to celebrate life. Because the realization that it is the ironic combination of mystery and familiarity that keeps us going, makes every suffering tolerable, and imperfections acceptable.

As the reader flips through the last page of Breathing Lessons, a comforting thought dangles in the head: At least I am not alone in this conquest. Everybody now... Inhale... Exhale...