What’s Going on in “Holding Your Breath”

Holding Your Breath is a story about Little Rooney, the youngest of the three Rooney kids, who turns the game of Sardines on its head—rather than staying put so that the kids collect in a tight, packed group, he abandons the group and continues to hide.

It may seem like a fun twist on the game, but there’s something emotional at stake here. After all, there’s usually an emotional stake in how kids behave, and for Little, it has everything to do with his mother.

So let’s start there.

If you’ve read other pieces about Roz (Friday Dinner) you’ll know that she’s a depressed, neglectful parent, leaving her three kids to take care of themselves, as well as her, too. She doesn’t show up for them in so many ways: she isolates herself, she doesn’t cook or clean, and in Holding Your Breath, we learn that she stops talking to her kids for weeks on end.

How do we make sense of her silent treatment when Middle Rooney is stung by paper wasps while Roz herself is MIA? It’s as if she blames them for Middle’s accident, holding them responsible for keeping each other safe. Yet Roz is the one who is both responsible and notably absent. Rather than taking responsibility for her absence, she blames her kids. As with the A Key Technique Therapists Use to Figure Out Kids, she tries to push her guilt onto others.

Her punishment is to withhold her talking, and thus withhold her love. Her kids experience this as a rejection, which only makes them more needy of her love, attention, and caring.

We know this is Little’s experience because we see it play out in the game of Sardines.

Little has a plan: he’ll desert his hiding place, along with the kids who have found him, so that they’ll have to renew their search with increased vigor. He’s essentially reenacting the relationship he has with his mom, inviting the kids to feel both his own abandonment and hunger for connection.

Initially, this makes for an exciting, challenging game of Sardines, but it takes a twist in the end when Little stays hidden. While he hates to hear his sister cry, he doesn’t reveal himself and alleviate his sister’s fears. Instead, he encourages everyone to feel his absence, knowing his mother will likely react by doubling-down on her rejection, punishing her children with her silence because, in her own absence, the safety of one of her kids was jeopardized.

Why would a small child provoke such a terrible consequence for himself and his siblings?

The beauty of stories is that they can often resist easy explanation. (No, this is not a cop-out; I’ll offer a few possibilities or speculations—and I’d welcome hearing your thoughts, too!)

Perhaps Little is furious at his mother for her rejection, and he wants her to fear his own absence. Or, perhaps her active rejection is better than her passive neglect. Perhaps he gains an increased sense of bonding with his siblings when his mother rejects them together. Perhaps to counter his overwhelming sense of helplessness, he wants a greater sense of control in determining, like his mother, how and when he disappears and reappears. Perhaps it’s all or none of the above.