Homing Instincts Read online

  For many people, there is no transformation that rewrites their story more dramatically than parenthood, nor a single experience that begs more for narrative than their child’s birth. I am no different. But for me sometime late in pregnancy, an awareness of the limitation of story, of its ultimate inability to capture the perpetually changing self, becomes as vivid as the need to shape and tell my own story. Now these two desires—to acknowledge all that stories reduce, hem in, and minimize, and also to honor my story as the meaning at the core of my own life—vie constantly for control. What I’ve come to wonder is at what point our stories are mirages that mask the ephemeral, immediate realities of our lives, reducing their complexities to a single dimension, and at what point stories have the capacity to anchor us, encourage us to pay closer attention to our changing selves, and to become more compassionate, open, and whole versions of those selves.

  I spend the first half of my pregnancy flailing in a new and frightening uncertainty, grieving the imagined loss of my self as defined by a list of countries and experiences. The story I’ve been telling over and over again for the past decade reveals itself as just that: a story. One that, once I stop telling it, will no longer define me. Then who will I be?

  So I build a narrative of transformation: the liminal period of gestation will remake me and I will emerge a mother above all. I will become a better person, my harder, selfish edges tamed by a year of walking in snowy woods with a growing and enlivening belly, a mind slowed and deepened. This is the story I still tell myself and still believe, the clearly marked channel I shovel all of my uncertainties and imaginings into, but in the second half of pregnancy I come to understand it as a story. That is, even after the breakthroughs, the moments standing in the half-frozen creek praying to a gray sky, the afternoons of weeping, the hours of writing in journals with a cup of lemon tea to fend off nausea, even after the rewriting of my story, I am repossessed by doubt or longing or simple fear. I come to see that I can never eliminate them, that perhaps never again will my story seem so straightforward or my identity so clear as a rung bell.

  Sometime in late winter, on one of many long gray drives back to the farm from Columbus, my husband and I get in a fight about a girl he loved when he was growing up. She was not a girlfriend, but one of those first loves that imprint on us forever, on our very understanding of love. I want reassurance that he does not love this girl any longer. In the ambiguity of the afternoon and twenty weeks of pregnancy, with my future foggier than ever, I want this certainty. “You have no more feelings for her,” I say. Normally, he would agree. Yes, no feelings. But perhaps the destabilizing rawness of pregnancy has robbed him of the ability to tell such a simple and conclusive story. He shrugs. He says, “Well, of course there are still feelings, but not love,” and I flip out. “What kind of feelings? What do you mean ‘not love’?” As any member of any long-term relationship will recognize, it is the beginning of a rapid and dramatic descent into hairsplitting arguments about the terminology of affection. He fights back asking if my similarly charged relationship with an ex-boyfriend is over, if I no longer have any feelings for him. And so we spend the afternoon inflaming old sensitivities to pointless soreness, struggling for a clarity neither of us will achieve and yet also, in this tentative space of gestation, fighting toward a nascent understanding of ambiguity.

  When we return it is evening, and that dramatic mazarine curtain of winter dusk in the Midwest has fallen. We are walking up a snowy abandoned road. The night is silken with cold and blue. The shadows of branches crisscross us, our interlinked arms. I feel a new adult understanding of messiness, an acceptance of the constant overlapping of past with present, love with love, self with self. I understand that they will forever blur into one another, circle back around one another, retain disordered contradictions like tidal pools arranged and rearranged with each wave. For a moment, I make peace with this understanding. We traipse across the furrowed snow of the yard, stand for a minute beneath the full moon, crawl together under the quilts in the bedroom. On that evening I grasp that perhaps this is all we can do: recognize the ways we struggle to sand our rough lives into tangible and comprehensible stories, and acknowledge the desires and fears that drive that refining process.

  Still, I continue rewriting my own story. My dedication to literature grows in direct proportion to my awareness of its limitations, its inventions. In the same way that the straightforward march of the pregnancy timeline makes time less acute, less real, the awareness that stories cannot and will not adhere to lived life makes me more determined to write.

  I embrace the wholesale reappropriation of self that comes with pregnancy, and at the same time I circle back to question it, I juggle both its ultimate uncertainty and the need for it as an anchor. I rewrite myself in clouds and mornings, luna moths and rain, in repetition more than plot, and I rewrite myself in habits, in the regular phone calls to my mom, the slow walks, the new books and ways I read, the generosity and intimacy placed on the pedestal once reserved for intrepidness. There are times when I merge with motherhood—to borrow an image of Annie Dillard’s I’ve always loved—like a body diving into its reflection in a pool. Walking up the driveway one chilly spring afternoon I feel my belly beneath an old gray sweater, feel my gentle walk, my husband’s gaze, and I am a mother. It is a brief alignment, one of those tidy few we’re given in which we can see ourselves clearly in new roles, in which the murkiness, the back and forth, the uncertainty of our lives, cohere to match the stories we tell.

  —

  Daily life can rarely compete with story; we tell ourselves over and over that one day we will arrive at a certain point, we will have become a certain type of person living in a certain type of place with a certain type of lifestyle, but once we’re there we’re still scratching the dog behind the ears and examining our split ends in the mirror, waking up every day to shuffle around the kitchen while the espresso rumbles up its fount. Daily life overwhelms the gleaming vision of story with all of its familiarity, ordinariness, detail. We dwell perpetually in the story of our expectations and only rarely notice how they’ve merged with the quotidian, how they actually manifest themselves, before we have constructed and are chasing another set.

  At the end of Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood, Patricia Arquette sits amid boxes of her son’s belongings in his college dorm room, where, after eighteen years of child-rearing, she will finally leave him to fend for himself. In the course of the film she’s gone from a stressed-out, broke single mother, shuttling her kids around in a cramped car with the windows down, running from ruinous marriage to ruinous marriage, to a self-possessed professor with two kids in college and a comfortable middle-class house. She begins to cry, and her son asks what’s wrong. “I just thought there’d be more,” she says. In her comment is the whole of parenthood, the whole sweep of a life, and it is not sad or bitter: it just is, an inevitable part of our nature.

  On a hike in late May, when the woods are beginning to exude that tropical breath of midwestern summer, it occurs to me that I’m actually doing what I’ve always said to Jorge that we should do: live without worrying about productivity, take advantage of our impoverished artisthood by being present in the everyday: cooking and hiking and thinking and reading and not subscribing to formulas. And it’s enlightening, it’s great, I recognize the incredible luck of being able to appreciate it, but it remains everyday life—there isn’t the perpetual wash of amazement or satisfaction one imagines, or it comes in unexpected moments. We are still all wrapped up in the tumble of days, the basic gestures of maintaining our lives.

  I begin to have frequent Braxton-Hicks contractions, during which my belly is a fist clenching tighter and tighter around the baby and my organs. I have the sensation at each contraction’s peak that all of my bodily energy is coursing into the rock of my middle and hardening there. Gradually, my belly loosens until again it blends seamlessly—as seamlessly as it can when it sits like a soccer ball on my hips—with the rest of me.


  We have the first bonfire of the season, that primal smear of flame licking toward the huge obsidian sky. The lightening bugs are out now, a million zigzagging shimmers over the pastures, in the woods like glitter tangled in dark hair. The sky is so thick with stars the constellations seem to jumble together. Dad, Meg, visiting family, Jorge, and I sit in chairs drawn close to the pit. Jorge steps back to take a photo, and it occurs to me that this is the first bonfire we’ve had since the one just before I found out I was pregnant. I could not imagine what it would be like to be pregnant, then what it would be like to be four, seven, nine months pregnant. I cannot imagine now what it will be like to give birth, to have a newborn, and then a child. These are the first experiences of my life I have been unable to imagine at all. Of course I have visions drawn from friends and media, but they go no further than me, say, nursing in a rocking chair or hiking with the baby through the woods. I have no sense of what the day-to-day substance of the experience will consist of, and this highlights for me the absurdity of expectation. By the time I am pregnant, queasily taking teensy bites of blueberry bagel and reading Erdrich, by the time I am at the twenty-week scan saying “Una niña!,” by the time the Braxton-Hicks confirm that labor is real and imminent, each of these states has become—while exciting, while emotional—normal and assimilated. They’ve descended from the realm of story to the everyday. Even this bonfire, which I use as a marker to signify the near closing of this period of gestation, is one of many bonfires. They are significant because I assign to them this human, symbolic weight, this vision and description, but now I can also say, Here I am again at the bonfire, my huge belly reaching toward the heat, my hand resting atop it to feel the occasional explorations of a small foot; here I am with no beer, not even a desire for one, and this is now. The farm accentuates this: here again the fireflies, tricking out maple lane in gold dazzle; here again the first high chime of the crickets; here again the fire, the faces, older and lined, hair thinned, glasses or not, staring with the same primitive daze into the flame, and here the stories, the children, the years.

  —

  Stories have themes and characters. I wanted to make of my grandma a character, but I realized that I had not one but many characters: the Millie who gamely wore the same outfit for a week in Spain after the tour bus ran over her suitcase, and the Mildred who forced a medieval torture device of a hairbrush through my tomboy hair before dinner; the Millie who never spoke of her husband and never dated or remarried, and the woman who fell asleep listening to the truckers on shortwave radio. The grandma who asked my dad “When is she going to get a job?” after I’d been living hand to mouth overseas for years, and the grandma who, when I confessed in her living room at the Seasons that I didn’t know what to do with my life, responded, “Well, that’s okay,” and meant it. The one who said when I moved to China, “Well, at least it’s not Mexico,” and the one whose diminutive white-haired friend approached me in the Seasons dining room and said, “So you’re the granddaughter from Mexico! We’ve heard so much about you.”

  It could be argued that these are simply different sides of the same woman, manifestations of the multifacetedness of any character, but I believe they are also different women, selves that didn’t fit into other selves with the tidy alignment of matryoshka dolls. This I couldn’t understand until I became a mother. I so completely inhabited my own story that I failed to see its construction, its ultimate flimsiness—the way I had cut myself out of it like a chain of paper dolls, so many one-dimensional selves holding hands into infinity.

  —

  Story gets addictive. A little quickly snowballs into a lot, especially in times of uncertainty. In the final stretch of my pregnancy, after seven months of living in a cabin on a remote plot of land in southeastern Ohio with little for narrative other than the changing days and seasons, with the tremendous and indefinite event of birth on the horizon, I grasp at whatever story I can. A robin builds its nest in a nook between two beams on the back porch. We see it gathering dried grasses, sticks, bits of hay, twisting them into habitable form with a pragmatism that reminds me of the women selling fruit on the streets of Mexico, shearing papaya neatly of their skins. Sometime after the nest has been established, Jorge and I peek in to discover four pale blue eggs, and from then on I glance outside every so often to check for scrawny hatchling necks poking above the rim. One morning in doing so I see only absence in the nook where the nest has been: a view clear through to the woods. I look down. There, on a bed of rocks, is the overturned nest. Beside it are two baby birds, tiny, splayed, and wet looking.

  Hugely pregnant, my heart a lump in my throat, I rush outside to investigate and then kneel down beside the babies. The thin reptilian skin of their chests is transparent, exposing the red and blue tangles of their insides. Their bodies rise and fall infinitesimally, each breath a minuscule palpitation in a world that suddenly seems enormous and loud, full of crashing branches and prowling dogs.

  I pick up a stick, hold my breath, and poke each of them. Their beaks snap open instantly, like toys. One is more vigorous than the other. Looking closer I see that there are tiny gray spiders crawling all over the weaker one’s body. I reach down and pinch the spiders one by one, chucking them aside, strangely furious. Then I take control in the way we do in 2014: I hurry back into the cabin and Google “baby birds fell from nest.” The advice of the Google hive mind is to put the birds back in and leave them alone: no one can do the job of a mama bird like a mama bird.

  Feeling the enormous pressure of story, terrified of the symbolism of having baby birds die on my back porch two months before I give birth, I go outside again and wedge the nest firmly into its nook. Then I lift the birds inside one by one. Their bodies are cold and rubbery. There seems to be no elegant way of arranging them, and they wind up heaped atop one another, little beaks grasping. Finally I leave them and go back to work. But their frailty, the enormous symbolic import of their life or death, weighs on the edges of the morning and then collapses it into singular worry. I give up on work and kneel on the couch by the window, watching the nest, biting my nails, waiting for the robin mom to come back. She doesn’t. For hours, with that unique capacity for thoughtless waiting that pregnancy engenders, I keep my eyes on the nest. Still she does not return. I give up and collapse on the bed upstairs, a crying blubbery mess. Eventually I come back down, make myself coffee, shuffle back over to the window. There she is, hunkered down on the nest, her simple features plain and alert.

  “She came back!” I shout to Jorge.

  “Órale,” Jorge says, nonchalant, glancing out the window before popping a cookie in his mouth and starting his own coffee. He takes the birds in stride as one more element of the morning—rain or sun, chill or warm breeze—while I teeter on a narrative knife-edge.

  I spend the whole day, and the better part of the next two weeks, watching the robins. Their drama becomes my drama, their story a parallel of my own, an allegory for the perilousness and hope of birth. Eventually, I realize that the two straggly puppet strings of the babies’ necks have dwindled to one; that one neck grows stronger and steadier and more self-possessed.

  “What happened to the other one?” I ask Jorge, but we are too scared of frightening away the mama bird to approach the nest and look in. I watch as the mama plucks huge white poop sacs from the baby’s behind and flies off to deposit them in the woods. I watch as the baby wrestles open its threadbare wings and begins to flutter them in the nest in practice flight.

  On Mother’s Day, there is a spring storm. I take the dogs for a walk, and when I return, invigorated at the sight of spring beauties and the blooming trilliums on the creek banks, I glance from a safe distance to see, once more, a blank space where the nest has been.

  “Fucking robin mom!” I shout to Jorge. It is my first experience with that potent, primordial mix of possessiveness, blame, and guilt that characterize parenting. The nest is overturned; beneath it I find the remaining baby. It is much bigger, strong
er, healthier, opening and closing its clementine beak with vigor. The rubbery skin has sprouted the long pins that will become feathers. The pins are livid and gray-black, the colors of steel and railroad and charcoal around this tiny thundering heart. I am struck by the mixture of hard and soft, fragile and strong, witnessing the naked mechanical structures that will support the delicate grace of flight. I look at the pink clawed feet and remember the nurse at the eleven-week ultrasound: “Everything’s there,” she told me, showing me the legs, the feet, the tiny hand reaching up. “He or she just needs to grow.” When I put the chick back in the nest it pokes up its little head, which is scruffy like a stuffed animal worn bare from so much handling, and gives a silent cry for food.

  I spend the afternoon waiting for the robin to return. As the hours go by, the chick’s head surges straight up: a direct, vertical plea. I get angrier. Has she given up?

  Around four I go hunting for worms, scraping heavyhearted in the bright mud by the old township road. No worms, or none my untrained eye can see. I trudge back, come inside, and see the robin perched on the edge of the nest, her big gray eye taking in our window. I feel a swelling of both love and consternation for her, want to applaud at this dramatic turn in the baby’s narrative. Over the next week I watch him grow tufts on either side of his head so he looks like a little old man; see his wings fill out until their fluffiness obscures their mechanical origins entirely; catch his first endeavors to free himself from the mama robin as she clamps her haunches over him. Occasionally he succeeds in popping out from under her, and he glances around for a few seconds in dumb wonder before her warm flank wrestles him back down. She has the Hula-Hooper’s ability to separate her lower body from her upper, wiggling those paunchy hindquarters while keeping her head still and poised. She becomes for me a character, a mixture of hard practicality and tender concern, somewhat like those tough and weary old market women in Mexico, somewhat like my grandma.