At seven months pregnant, hoping to achieve natural childbirth, I am practicing a technique called Rainbow Relaxation. My husband is a mother bird, propping me up with pillows behind my neck and between my knees. He draws up the quilt. It was a wedding gift, and picking out just the right pattern was a labor of love.
Imagine you are floating on a strawberry-colored cloud, at least a foot and a half deep. Feel yourself sink into the buoyant mist, feel it caress your arms, your midriff, your legs, the bottoms of your feet. Let yourself sink deep into relaxation.
At seven months pregnant, hoping to achieve natural childbirth, I am practicing a technique called Rainbow Relaxation. My husband is a mother bird, propping me up with pillows behind my neck and between my knees. He draws up the quilt. It was a wedding gift, and picking out just the right pattern was a labor of love. He didn’t want anything too flowery, nor I anything with navy blue Nautica stripes. Finally, we agreed on this pattern, pale blue and green with embroidered leaves and tiny blue forget-me-nots, lavishly named Abundance. I still smile to remember him scrunching his face as he peered up at the sample swatch, saying, “I could live with Abundance.”
“Are you comfortable?” he asks.
I am.
“Okay, do your slow breathing.”
I breathe. Inhale to a slow count of four and then exhale to a rapid count of eight. My belly fills up like a balloon, and with each exhalation, I imagine letting go of the balloon and watching it drift off into the sky. My imaginary balloon is always red.
“Breathe in relaxation, breathe out relaxation,” he intones.
I can feel my shoulders and my neck loosening. I didn’t even realize I had been tensing them, but it always happens this way. Secret knots and tightenings all over my body, accumulated while cramped in my chair during my eight-hour workday and my hour commute, while yelling at the dogs to stay out of the litter box, while cursing the cracked angel hair noodles I’ve spilled all across the stove and into the burner, begin to stretch.
Now imagine the strawberry-colored cloud has turned to soft, peach-colored orange. Feel the orange mist wrapping all around your body, flowing gently across your cheeks and forehead and neck. Your whole body relaxes.
As he recites the litany, he draws his fingertips gently down my forearm. Back and forth. Back and forth.
Halfway through orange, I’m dead asleep. The next day, I can’t decide if this is beneficial or not. On the one hand, sleep seems to be the most relaxed of all states. On the other, I don’t know if this is building the sort of psychic control that is supposed to keep me calm and cocooned from pain on The Big Day. Still, we soldier on in the late-evening hours, as the gloaming gathers outside our bedroom window, the only time we can squeeze out of our busy days.
In the quiet evenings, he murmurs. I breathe.
The baby seems to like my deep breaths, and he pushes against me inside the sudden cavern of blue-black space. The skin of my belly feels like a balloon, and I can press my hand against my right side and feel the small hard mass of his body. I don’t know what I’m touching—head, back, feet—but I palpate him all over until he moves away.
I didn’t want this baby. Feeling him—rolling, fluttering, hiccupping—inside of me, part of me, leaves me bewildered.
Still—resentment surges in my throat when our relatives crow over him, claiming him. He doesn't belong to them. He belongs to me. And what right do I have to this prickly anger? Nothing other than the hard weight pulling me down toward earth, growing and nourishing itself from my body. As much as I loathe the intense gravity, the purple swelling, the murky gray unknown of this child, removing him from me will be like severing one of my organs. And what if the pain of loss is too much to bear?
Now see yourself in your mind's eye on a yellow mist of natural relaxation. Breathe in the soft yellow mist of calm with each slow breath that you take. Let it flow and drift throughout your being.
Once, I don’t even make it past strawberry. I am asleep by the second sentence. I never make it past orange, anyway. Embarrassed, I don’t mention it to my husband. I’m afraid he’ll be angry that he’s patiently recited through the entire rainbow, with white at the end for clarity, while I’ve been snoozing.
My husband tells me he’s proud of me, that I’m doing a great job. I feel silly. I’m not doing anything. I am simply waiting (to see what this little blue baby will look like, if there is anything of me in him, if I will love him the way everyone assumes I will, the way everyone else already seems to).
I realize this is a love story in three parts. There’s me, veined with angry red marks across my distended belly; and there’s the baby unknowingly enduring my prodding, my breathing, my yelling, my doubt; and then there’s my husband, softly, faithfully murmuring colors, long into the night.
Jessica Glass has an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte, and a short story of hers was published in Surreal South volume II. Her greatest achievement to date was having a baby without so much as a Tylenol (although, as it turns out, nothing helps a whole lot, and it pretty much just hurts real bad). She lives in Virginia with her husband Chris and baby Holden. Sometimes she writes things.
