Homing Instincts Read online

  The twenty-week photos are more detailed, and in one the baby’s skull is visible in her now-big head, in another her heart is a black blur, and in some her arms and legs are reaching and stretching. Her butt is a butt, her belly is a belly. At this ultrasound the technician presses the wand into my belly, curves it around with a divinatory concentration, and says, “It’s a girl!” My breath halts, and then I look at Jorge and say “Una niña!” in scratchy words half caught in my throat. In the parking lot I call each member of my family and announce, all choked up, “A girl!” This has been my intuition all along, but I haven’t voiced it. Now I feel my heart clutch with new love for her, as if she has made me proud by confirming my instinct. With a name, the Elena we’ve had in mind from the beginning, she comes a shade closer to personhood. We call Jorge’s mom on Skype from a Whole Foods in Columbus, and Jorge shouts via this crackly connection to his mountain village, “Una niña! Qué? Una niña! Niña! Es niña!” His mom still doesn’t hear and people are staring at us as they browse the piled oranges and I am holding my belly as if it hangs in the balance and finally Jorge breaks through with an “Es niña!” and I hear laughter and clapping.

  It occurs to me several days later that the baby, now feminine, now Elena, feels far more concrete than I do. As she has accrued substance, as she radiates from the center of me, I have become more scattered, less imposing, less of the world while also more a being of purely physical awareness. Motherhood, I grow to realize in these first months and years, is the experience of everywhere-and-nowhere-ness. It is to be the only answer to a very specific set of physical needs and it is also to be a psyche, a cosmos, an aura through which another being sees, passes, exists. The waiting of pregnancy is the liminal training period for this reality, preparing me in its timeline and timelessness, in its dissipated attention and porousness, in its tentative knowledge of the body and the heart, for the new paradigm of motherhood. Waiting sands down my acute seeing into a quieter absorption of interior shifts, and at the same time it builds my baby’s fingernails one by one, her fine silk eyelashes, and one day, while I sense myself as little more than the low blue fog of morning over the pastures, she opens her eyes and gets her first glimpse of light.

  —

  Despite my increasing waddle, my widening and tautening belly, I can’t believe that this gestation is moving forward and will end. I wake up thinking, I have two months to go. I have six weeks to go. And yet knowing where the day fits in the scheme of days counting down to June 12 makes no difference. Each day is also just one among many, and no matter how closely I follow their orbits from sunrise to sunset, how aware I am of the day before and after, their essential monotony is more apparent than their progression.

  The biggest surprise of pregnancy, however, is not this relationship to time but the revelation that in the monotony lies a kind of release. Waiting has become an art, a state of suspended grace, an alternate way of living. For the first time in my life, I understand the concept of home. Home is not only a refuge, a locus of warmth and routine and familiarity, the spot where the placenta will be buried beneath the old oak tree, but a sense of peace with contradiction. It is a giving in, an acceptance, the place where I finally strip life of all its decor of aspiration and regret and let it be what it is, where it is, and nothing more. It is the space in which I forgo both anticipation and nostalgia, the space to which I let myself belong. It is a space whose defining chronological units are not days or weeks or months but the moment and the broad sweep: the first acutely felt in its passing, the other almost annihilating in its breadth.

  I used to have a romantic, Polaroid-derived notion of moments. I thought of them as dramatic cinematic swellings, with me as their star. There I was on the boat deck in Borneo, and there atop a Patagonian peak, and there dancing at 4:00 a.m. on a beach by the south Indian sea. In them I was not so much myself but rather a Sarah an admiring audience would see: a character, exotic and intrepid and wild. They were crystallizations of an already perfect nostalgia.

  At the same time, I longed for a secret that would be mine alone. This wild exteriority, imagining myself as a character, sometimes made me crave a sort of still pool within myself. I don’t think I fully understood this longing until I was pregnant, and my interiority became all-consuming. Then I recognized—warily, with uncertainty—the secret I’d longed for, the still pond only I could visit. The secret was not just the baby inside me but my whole life, the mystery of it, its contradictions, its ultimate insignificance, its absurd particularities that only I can know and observe and appreciate.

  I am reading in the armchair, bored with reading, bored with the plod of the everyday. I ask our German shepherd to shake. I toss her ball and she plunges after it, clumsy in this tiny cluttered space. Jorge scoops it from her clenched teeth, tells her to sit and stay, positions himself on a rug opposite her. He places the ball between his feet. She is on high alert, her huge ears perked and eager. He narrates in a Televisa voice-over.

  “Se prepara la fuzzy. Se prepara el jugador. Se prepara. La fuzzy. A ver si se puede, a ver si aguanta, la fuzzy, la fuzzy, la fuzzy!” and he shoots and the dog lunges to the left, but the ball whizzes past her outstretched paw and slams into the back door.

  “Gooooo­ooooo­ooooo­ooooo­oool!”

  I laugh. The fuzzy drools. He repeats. My whole life swirls into this moment like a penny down a wishing well.

  This is not the glorious encapsulation of pursued romance, observed admiringly by an imaginary audience, but rather a fleeting feeling of wholly inhabiting my life, sensing at once its scope and smallness. That is grace: not having to see from the outside and label, not seeking or glorifying or expecting, instead peeling back layers to reveal a baseline mystery where everything is connected and where nothing matters as I once thought it did.

  —

  At other times, pregnancy remains a grating tedium, a seemingly interminable haul. I slog through the pastures, the mud sucking at my muck boots, and feel an irritated dullness behind which pulses insight, unvoiced. The woods are a sloped bulletin board of pinprick trees, and my eyes can weave through that gray winter space between them on and on. It is impossible to imagine a green density filling all this in, obscuring the stark lines of trunks and pressing fleshy into the paths.

  In March, at the beginning of my third trimester, my mom sends me a time-lapse video that’s gone viral on YouTube. A singer took a photo of his wife every day of her pregnancy; she stands facing him in their bedroom, in the same position throughout nine months, and we watch her belly grow, her arms bulk out, her posture shift back slightly, the singer crooning to her all the while from the present on the other half of the frame. Finally, she turns, waves good-bye, and reappears with baby in arms, and she and the singer unite and embrace. It is thrilling to see time at our command like this, captured like an exotic cat in a cage. We make it perform tricks—nine months flipping by in three minutes—and we recoup our control over that long murky period of gestation.

  I want, in a bout of impatience, to witness spring’s blooming on camera. I suggest to Jorge that he make a time lapse of the greening, setting up a tripod in the pastures. I want this transformation to be sped up and made visible. I want to replace the slow gradual unknowing of the everyday with a clear trajectory. But my husband slacks off, and the season goes on in its incremental, gradual way. The cherry trees sprout their first buds, and one day the daffodils have opened, and then spring beauties spread like scattered white confetti around the newly green grass. Spring comes quiet and piecemeal: a ripening, a rehearsal for the full riot of summer. This is why I have always preferred fall, which is sudden and short and violent in change and color. Spring demurs constantly to winter, warming and then cooling again, sprouting bits of white and green amid mud and gray.

  I sit on the rock by the creek and try to imagine the opposite slope a riot of ferns, canopied with the lanceolate leaves of shagbark hickories and the green teardrops of the beeches. Try to imagine walking up the cr
eek in the heat, a baby in arms, sweaty tangles of vines and flowers clamoring up the banks. But my imagination, or my desire for projection forward or back, fails, and I sink again into that state of porous consciousness. Waiting, fringed with boredom. If I can push through that boredom, I sense, I can get somewhere, I can reach a different type of understanding. I fidget within it even as part of me marvels. I still want delineations, satisfactions, the stakes of past and future, the purposefulness of linearity, but all I can do is sit on that rock by the creek and wait until I see that all we’re ever doing is waiting; the rest is an illusion.

  —

  One afternoon, we go for a walk in the rain. We wind up into the woods, which are softened and rendered woolly. I have in my pocket a Babybel cheese, hard and round, and I strip off its red wrapper. I have to be conscious now of eating regularly or I start to shake. As we walk I peel a boiled egg, scattering fragments of shell on the path. I eat the salty white cheese with the egg, followed up by a Ritz cracker. The trees cluster and thin. We cross the creek, we start up through the evergreen lycopodiums. What I like about hiking is this steady forward movement with no real purpose, one step after another, eating cheese, rising and descending, picking our way over logs, traversing a shelf with a view of distant ridges. All of it mimics the passing of days, and this bare, easy metaphor gives me comfort. “Days are where we live,” wrote Philip Larkin. In hiking I accept this without pretentions or justifications or decoration.

  Stopping to pee, squatting in the leaves, I can for the first time imagine being eighty. Can imagine my whole life blurring by to eighty, and beneath all the change and the difference this same feeling of being in the woods in the rain with the smell of wet leaves and the sky an infinite textured gray.

  —

  I am waiting for my baby, waiting for summer, waiting for knowledge, but the waiting itself becomes the knowledge and then, even as I am so hungry for transition I am practically clawing out of my skin, I begin to mourn and maybe to fear the fading of this particular consciousness: the Zen state, the acid trip of gestation, and its changed relationship to time. I wonder if I will remember that time swirls one day into the next no matter all our measurements and machinations, and that an awareness of this heightens certain moments—the giddy tittering of a boiling egg, a cool rock at the side of a creek—to the level of liberation.

  At the beginning of my pregnancy and my time on the farm, I vowed to learn the names of the trees, the insects, the wildflowers, and I stacked guides a foot high on my desk. I imagined the woods as a site of mastery. In the course of a year I would walk through here like a park ranger, pointing out details to my sister with a confident expertise: the mayapples, the spicebush, the rich beds of decay that nurse morel mushrooms. But I haven’t mastered anything. Not because I haven’t tried, or have failed, but because I have come instead into the awareness that mastery and knowledge are perhaps two different goals: one linear, a progression, and the other circular, a repetition. In the course of this year the obsession with mastery has given way instead to an awareness of how slow, incremental, experiential, and back and forth knowledge is. How it comes in fits and starts. How in its rawest form it is incredibly hard-won and difficult to put to use. How it is kneaded like dough by the impalpable, sometimes maddeningly slow and boring roll of days, and then how it rises abruptly in one moment. How we forget the taste of that moment and have to learn again in the slow kneading. It is as much a random gift—hard cheese in the rain—as it is the intention of the seeker, the cataloging of small creatures.

  —

  Waiting at the bend in the driveway for Jorge to return with the mail, trilliums blooming now, spring peepers seeking mates with their insistent singing by the pond, one evening among many. I watch his slow return, step after step. I release the dogs and they caper around him in leaps and yips.

  “Anything for us?” I ask, and he shakes his head.

  The gravel drive bites into muck boots. The sky is shaded rose-violet behind us. Spring rolls into summer into fall into winter and over and over again. At some point I will get sucked back into human chronology, obsessed again with dominating it. But I hope to remember the strange delicacy of this year, hope the knowledge has penetrated deep enough that it will remain even when I can pretend I am no longer waiting. In the meantime, there is the high gurgling love song of frogs, the new thickness of the grass around my ankles.

  MILDRED, MILLIE, GRANDMA MENKEDICK

  THE STORY I TELL most about my grandmother is one I did not know when she was alive. It is the most dramatic and evocative of all the stories about her, and the shadow of its implications falls over her whole life and consumes her. The story begins with her husband dying a prolonged and painful death from meningitis. She was left with two sons, ages two and four. It was 1952.

  When the nuns came to her door, she was facing a life of single motherhood and the scrutiny and pity of her working-class neighbors in Cincinnati. I picture the nuns as long faced, one short and one tall, all dour inevitability and efficiency.

  “Mildred,” they said, “we’ll take your boys.”

  And my grandma, standing alone on that threshold, replied,

  “I will never give up my sons.”

  I could play this story over and over like a chorus. Ba dee da dum, the day the nuns came to her door, ba dee da dum. I have its beat and rhythm down. It offers such a crisp break between past and present, such an intoxicating swell of commitment, defiance, and certainty. This is who I am. This is where I belong. I crave this like salt, with a stark, dry lust. It is the essence of storytelling, one moment that crystallizes and changes everything. It is the story as touchstone: I can almost reach out and stroke its smoothness.

  It encapsulates the fact that my grandmother worked full-time and raised her kids as a single mother in the 1950s, and makes of this fact a decision, an identity, a fate. At her funeral we unspooled all of her life from the thread of that single story: her role as a mother and grandmother, the sacrifices it entailed, her toughness and resilience.

  And yet there was also the woman I knew from the photo albums I thumbed again and again, in search of clues to who I was and where I came from: the woman who stood alone beside a purple seascape; the one laughing out of the blackness of a hotel balcony in Europe; the one who posed with an obscure sense of duty before a swath of gaping wilderness, her hair bound by a thin plastic rag. The one who went to Hawaii by herself, made friends with a fellow septuagenarian from Michigan, and hit up every bar on the coast. This was the woman who, when I asked what were the best years of her life, answered, “My sixties and seventies.” The years we knew her least.

  I used to go to Grandma’s apartment in Cincinnati and drag all of her McAlpin’s boxes of photos and itineraries and travel literature onto her kitchen table, where I’d dig through them and ply her memory for stories. She enjoyed it, but her enjoyment came less from wallowing in the past than from the immediate pleasure of spending time with her granddaughter. She paid less attention to the yellowing photos, the creased missives from the Sycamore Seniors to please bring a hat and arrive promptly at 8:00 a.m., than to the camaraderie of two people sitting together at a table on a winter afternoon.

  I, however, was seeking nostalgia. I wanted to hear tales like the ones I told about South America, about getting to the top of a mountain, alone, and sitting in high grasses and watching the fog rise and being twenty-two and thinking of death, oh! I wanted the formation and transformation of a self.

  “How was this festival, Grandma, with all the flowers?”

  “It was pretty.”

  “What was it for?”

  “Oh, it was a way to make money. You know, they call it a festival and all these tours come.”

  Pause. I tried again.

  “You went to a belly-dance show. Do you remember that? What was it like?”

  “Oh, they just dance around, move their stomach all over.”

  There was no prying it out of her because there was nothi
ng to pry out; she hadn’t mythologized her own experiences. She had not made of her life a story, with moments that revealed who she was and wasn’t, or who she had become. Had she told me the story of the nuns, she would have recounted it with the same stolidity afforded the belly-dance show: the nuns came, she said she would not give up her boys, and she did not. But she also did not see that moment, or any moment in particular, as the catalyst for a forever-changed Mildred Menkedick. She was Mildred before, and she was Mildred after, and Mildred was above all a human being wearing white polyester slacks and beaded sweaters—one day raising children, the next riding the Ferris wheel in Saint Louis. I used to see this refusal of narrative as a limitation, a form of self-preservation or denial or ignorance; only now do I see the emancipation in it, its wisdom.

  Mildred Menkedick had a helmet of snow-white hair, which she had done once a week at the beauty parlor. It was the single expense of her life that might be considered superfluous. She slept with her head suspended off the edge of her bed so as not to ding the immaculate globe of hair; her neck was stolid as an oak. I spent years trying to start an essay with that hair. But each time I’d wander into a labyrinth of anecdotes. Trying to point them toward one conclusion or self felt strained for a reason I couldn’t yet grasp.

  What I’ve come to see in the past year of pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood is the brittleness and fallibility and aspirational tidying up of stories, their weakness for redemption and their tendency to constrict and contain. Staring at the photos of Grandma here beneath a bronze statue of a general on horseback, here beside a cactus, here stern with a hand on the hood of a station wagon, here in a toga with a man also in a toga, drinking champagne, I see not stories but a life lived and improvised in an endless sequence of changes, life as a series of sparks thrown in perpetual defiance of a core self. I see not a tightly braided thread of narrative but the silky filaments of milkweed, scattered hither-dither around the pastures: the self a thousand drifting seeds, some of which grow and some of which lie dormant and some of which float on and on.