Homing Instincts Read online

  In retrospect, this insight about my mom and dad, which lifted unbidden out of that creek of piebald boulders, is much more prescient. When they were thirty-one, my parents divorced. My dad took me and moved to inner-city Cincinnati. He sought refuge in the natural world, rebuilding himself with backpacking trips around Ohio and Kentucky, where he taught me about hemlock tea, sassafras, maple, and oak. He led the Cincinnati chapter of the Sierra Club’s Inner City Outings, guiding rowdy groups of kids on expeditions into the midwestern woods. He meditated, read, raised me, and worked his way through devastating loneliness in our dark basement apartment on Ravine Street. By the time he met Meg, my future stepmom, he was no longer the working-class Ohio dad who’d given up a full scholarship to Northwestern to marry my mom, have a baby, and work nights at a Cincinnati grocery store. He was no longer poker-playing, Bud-drinking, handlebar-mustache-and-running-shorts Dad. He and Meg adopted a Buddhism-influenced Eastern religion that inspired them to move to the countryside in Indiana, become vegetarian, hand stencil old furniture with psychedelic suns, and—briefly—take up O’Douls. They had my little brother and built a life of meditation, weekend hikes, hippie casseroles, beat-up vans, and Dwight Yoakam.

  Eventually, they distanced themselves from the religion, but the change stuck. The dad I know and remember is this dad, who finds solace and nourishment in the woods; who listens to tapes of turkey calls and answers them with his own turkey call, which hangs from a cord around his neck; who is deeply influenced by Buddhist thought. My sister, ten years older than me, has known two dads. They share certain characteristics—unflagging optimism; a profound and gentle intelligence; the tendency to make enormous piles of “slop,” a conglomeration of lima beans heaped on corn heaped on rice that seems suited to a trough—but they are in many ways different people.

  My mom, meanwhile, left behind Pleasant Ridge and her roots as part of a stern, conventional, working-class German family to explore Europe and become a willowy, bohemian beauty I idolized throughout my childhood. She went to the symphony, wore vintage dresses with scalloped collars and tiny waists, and took me to downtown coffee shops thick with smoke and chatter. She lived in an old brick house on the cusp of Cincinnati’s downtown and let me write on its peach walls. In her kitchen, with its view of an old sycamore and Cincinnati’s steep hills, I discovered Gouda cheese and grainy Dijon mustard with seeds. She’d yanked herself out of the trajectory of young, taciturn motherhood and work for work’s sake but still sought a clear sense of purpose. Sometimes amid the elegance of her house, or in the backyard, looking at the distant railroad tracks tinged blue in winter, I sensed her loneliness.

  Thirty-one was the year that rewrote both their lives.

  My thirty-first year begins with the physical onslaught of pregnancy. Susan Sontag famously wrote, “Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” Pregnancy is not illness, but the way it plunges women into the realm of the physical, placing the body at the forefront of experience, mimics illness’s disorienting and drastic perspective shift. Like many young people, I had taken my body for granted, dwelling almost wholly in my mind and its warren of obsessions, hopes, and worries. I focused on my body during a long run or while pulling a skirt over my hips, but this awareness was considered and temporary. Pregnancy, however, shoves my body and its complex machinations onto center stage, making it impossible to ignore the fact that I am a fallible, physical creature, and bending my mind from its wandering to the confines of my heart, gut, bowels, breasts.

  So I spend October groaning in an armchair by the fire, begging my husband in mousy tones to do the dishes. My stomach seizes up each time I open the fridge or cabinet: pregnancy heightens the sense of smell, and each whiff of old celery or leftover spaghetti is enough to summon a tide of disgust. Even the woodsy scent of the cabin’s shelves and the gentle aloe vera in bodywash trigger an inner churning, as disorienting as trying to stand level on a pitching ship.

  Unlike vomiting, headaches, or soreness, nausea is diffuse, more a malaise than a specific pain. It’s not visible, it’s not concentrated in one particular spot: it coils bitter and green through the body. It is one of the most difficult sensations to describe and imagine, and it is my initiation into a time in which words seem both terribly paltry, fake, and also as essential and sustaining as touch.

  But nausea is only the misty backdrop to a cast of more precise, colorful pains. My breasts swell and ache. Coming down the cabin stairs, I clutch them like tumbling puppies. I’ve always had small breasts, the firm functional ones of an athlete, but in pregnancy they grow fat and lusty and unwieldy, wagging under T-shirts and pouring over the tops of bras. “How long is this going to last?” Jorge asks, wide eyed. I give him a light smack and tell him they hurt like bruises, not to even think about squeezing them. In truth, he’s intimidated by them and their new command of me, their blind, bursting, no-nonsense commitment to this mission that is taking me over in spite of myself. They are unbridled femininity, the first sign of a new and discomfiting softness.

  My gut torques up, making room for the uterus. Most other organs follow suit, deferring to the growing womb, squeezing and contorting themselves to accommodate it. Even meager bowls of fruit inflict the horrible overstuffed feeling of late-night drunken bingeing. My belly balloons, not yet with baby but with gas and blockage. My blood sugar crashes an hour after I’ve eaten and, shaky, I devour handfuls of walnuts in an attempt to stabilize it. Headaches surge on the waves of increased blood flow and slam against the bones behind my eyes, over and over, all night. They recede slowly in the morning, leaving a hazy waste, a meek tiptoe into the next day, on the couch nursing coffee.

  But of all the first-trimester symptoms, fatigue, which seems largely benign, is the one I struggle with the most. I am used to being out in the world: running, walking, sticking my head out the window of a Latin American taxi, dragging a begrudging boyfriend up the side of a craggy peak. But my body is now a tent that caves at the slightest gust. I try running on the road to the lake but make it no farther than a quarter mile before stumbling to a stop. I brace my palms on my knees, put my head between my legs, and weep. The valley shines with the finite fall bursts of copper and vermilion and gold and reinforces the fact that I am doubled over, shattered. Who is this person, and what is this life? Why did I want this? Every category into which I place myself—traveler, runner, tomboy, adventurer—seems to have paled behind the newly salient and oppressive designations of mother and woman.

  Of course, I know these identities are not intrinsically opposed and should, in theory, overlap. The former, exterior me, the cocksure and outspoken one of certain opinions, knows that motherhood does not have to and should not overshadow one’s self, career, or lifestyle.

  But my first humbling discovery as a mother is just how constructed, precarious, and abstract my worldviews and beliefs are, how easily they may crumble in the heat of personal experience. In these earliest days of motherhood, before my baby has even grown fingers or toes, I sense that the labels I’ve long stuck to my life are only labels, that the hierarchies I’ve put in place—inside and outside, domestic and foreign, routine and adventure—are artificial and perhaps even cliché. Motherhood forces me to extricate myself from the sticky net of societal assumptions, from my own familiar ways of thinking and seeing, and, from the vantage point of a small homesteader’s cabin in southeastern Ohio, take in the world anew: myself, my story, the way we build ourselves and stories and lives within the confines of culture and our own expectations.

  What I cannot recognize at first, what I resist with that stubborn blindness we reserve for our deepest fears, is that perhaps I want the dramatic shift of motherhood; perhaps I don’t want my life and myself to go on unchanged, mot
herhood like moving to another country and learning another language. Acquaintances of mine complain that everyone only wants to talk about their pregnancies, that they want to shout I’m still me! I want to counter But I’m not still me and But I don’t want to talk about anything else. This feeling frustrates me; it seems to demonstrate new and surprising weakness. Me, of all people—so much her own person, such a champion of bold individualism—why can’t I assert still-me, still-me, the birdsong of independent womanhood, and if I can’t sing it now, will I ever again?

  On that fall morning, while goldfinches flit in tidy arcs above purple thistles, I keel over on Kennonsburg Road and I fight. I wonder if a dogmatic biological clock has overrun my distinct life and personality, if I’ve been duped by hormones. I resist the exhaustion, the sensitivity, my rounded belly and breasts. I resist, above all, the softness of pregnancy. Pregnancy is all curves and couches and naps, all tenderness and susceptibility. I’d spent my twenties constructing a hard, certain self on the foundations of boldness, ambition, an ardent sense of justice, a lean and muscled body, and now pregnancy is a confusing tumble into uncertainty, interiority, quietness. I crumple on the road in the full fall sun and I sob, for my restless ego, for my decisions, for the sense of being terribly stuck, for the fear and hope of wrenching free from myself.

  I fall into an intense depression, the first of my life. It happens quickly, like the air being released from a tire until what once was buoyant and strong is a limp snakeskin. The days are glorious, shining blue: the best of the year in Ohio. The pastures glow with goldenrod, the red maples dazzle the woods, crisp leaves twirl from on high into the creek, the sky blooms a deep pink at dusk. Dad and I discover a wild persimmon tree at the edge of the woods: so much ripe orange fruit, the size of an infant’s fist, dangling in delicate ornamentation from each branch. In the afternoons I slump before the fire and weep. It is a scary, uncontrollable weeping, as if some force within is writhing itself out. I stop writing. I enter the liminal space of grief, where nothing that came before matters. The story I’ve been working on feels utterly irrelevant, its driving questions as flat and lacking in context as a practice conversation in a foreign-language textbook. My works in progress, these stolid pillars that had held up my life, that had seemed so essential and important, collapse and cease almost entirely to matter.

  Yet for as bad as I feel, I’m not mourning the work. The distance I sense from it doesn’t scare me; the fear comes from another, more obscure place, much deeper than concerns about success or productivity. In fact, the radical separation I experience from my body of work gives me an uncanny, unexpected hope: that when I begin writing again, it will flow from clarified, transformed seeing, from a frightening subterranean place I am being forced to acknowledge.

  I spent the summer trying to figure out what type of writer I should be, operating under the assumption that if I could pin this down I’d have a clear winning strategy, and a way to dodge the fundamental uncertainty about why writing matters and why I do it. Now, having surged into a change so much bigger than the one I was expecting, where lives hang in the balance, I see clearly that all of this doesn’t matter: whether I write fiction or nonfiction, novels or memoirs, whether I write at all. If I’m going to begin writing again on the other side of this, I will have to do so knowing none of it matters. This is one of a series of paradoxes I’ve wandered into in the confines of pregnancy, Ohio, this enigmatic homing: how to stop seeking meaning to find meaning, how to let go of myself to rediscover myself, how to not know in order to come into a different kind of knowing.

  Relatives visit and talk with enthusiasm about the pregnancy. I feel as if I’m peering at everyone through a peephole, responding to their eager and oversize faces with muffled gestures from behind a wall. I want only to be alone. I wander with my dogs through the woods, crying tears as unstoppable as blood. Sometimes, I’m childishly angry; months ago, Jorge and I had lobbed around life options like badminton birdies. We could take off for Burma, we could travel around Africa, we could buy a Westfalia and cruise the desert Southwest. Neither of us really wanted any of these things: “Or,” Jorge said, “we could just stay here at the cabin, through the winter, and read.” This sounded lovely, but also puzzled and made me guilty. I should be longing to explore the dusty back roads, should be searching for stories in the great beyond, I reproached myself.

  Now, I want nothing more than to go to Burma. Africa. The desert Southwest. Without the opportunity and desire to leap into the wider world at a moment’s notice, I don’t know who I am or want to be.

  How much of myself is a core self, and how much is a reflection of the circumstances in which I choose to place myself, over and over, until they become motifs and myths? How much of myself have I created from the outside, with pride and fear, trying to adhere to an abstract ideal? How much of me is flimsy construction, how much bedrock?

  Utterly unmoored, back in the land of the chirpy hi between the long o’s, I panic. Having confused travel with experience and experience with self-definition, I swing to a distraught conclusion: I am now doomed to stagnate in the domestic, the rooted, the body, the woman’s realm of hearth and family.

  In pregnancy I am forced to confront persistent cultural prejudices I’ve long held against the perceived feminine: against domesticity, motherhood, the imagined softness and weakness of introspection as compared with real, hard, muscular experience. I spent my twenties with men, challenging them to climb onto dubious watercraft and down another tequila shot. For years, I had only one or two female friends. I took this as a point of pride, as if the closer I hewed to the stereotypically male the more interesting and successful a person I’d be; an assumption borne out by many women writers, who receive the highest accolades and widest recognition when pandering, as the writer Claire Vaye Watkins puts it, to old white literary men. I have been devoted to the American religion of realizing my potential, my possibilities—and then creating more potential, more possibilities, in a perpetual froth of ambition.

  I have absorbed the cultural definition of settling as an unfortunate compromise, particularly one made by a woman. There is an implied for less at the end of the term, with home, family, and rootedness comprising the less: less than intrepidness, less than rugged individualism, less than risk. To settle, to not push as hard and as far and as much as one can, to not roam, accumulate, and discover, is a particularly American defeat. It is to reconcile oneself to the here and now, the imperfect, the triumph of the banal over the exceptional, the inward turn as opposed to the outward gain, and as such has always seemed to me like a type of giving up.

  But the primary definition of settle is to “resolve or reach an agreement about.” After years of looping around and around, seeking and finding and striking out again, I come to understand under an Ohio sky—trussed clouds, sweep of lavender, the vast horizon smudged with orange—the singular circularity of my search. To settle: to turn one’s attention to, apply oneself to. To tread the same stretch of grasses through autumn, then winter; to memorize the low flapping of the horse fence, the rivulets that feed the creek, the butte across the valley that hoists the first signs of spring. To become or make calmer or quieter.

  Only after moving back to the United States did I build up a strong cohort of women friends and colleagues and come to believe in the fundamental importance of a women’s realm of shared struggle, stories, and ambitions. It has little or nothing to do with vapid pop culture depictions of rom-com girlfriendhood and can include wine and clothing swaps and boyfriend woes alongside critical readings of Adrienne Rich, manifestos, road trips in beat-up cars with a box of Cheez-Its wedged between the seats, the unafraid defense of one’s writing before a skeptical crew of knowing men.

  In the course of a few months, I went from zero female influence to running with a pack of women. These women had spent the past decade summiting Indonesian volcanoes and tagging birds in the Wyoming brush, and through this familiar entry point of travel and adventure I discover
ed a terrain of much-vaster shared experience, full of echoes and resonances I had never found with men. In these months and coming years, I also recognized that for as much as I may follow a male formula for success, traipsing through jungles and writing with cool detached bravado, I would never be afforded the privilege of maleness. If before I had been able to nurture a vision of myself as the odd one out, the prodigy, the foreigner, the strong woman running with men, I now came to understand there were forces I could never outrun, and that in the very act of running I was limiting myself and my writing to a narrow realm of proficiency.

  Through the common experience these friends and I pored over, on Skype and in sad Brooklyn sublets and dank Pittsburgh bars, attempting to discern how we would shift from our twenties to our thirties, how our lives would change and narrow, how we would or would not hew to the traditional trajectories, I became passionate about the experiences of women and their representation in literature. I founded a magazine of writing by women and immersed myself in a growing literary movement that analyzed and denounced the way this writing is so often marginalized, trivialized, and ignored. I fought to reclaim what has long been defined as “female” as universal and challenged its depiction as frivolous or insipid compared to the “male” realm of war, exploits, and travels.

  Yet in my own life the dichotomy persists: intellectually, I celebrate the interior and the rooted, but personally, even with a persistent sense of staleness, I cling to the exterior and footloose. For as much as I’ve come to pay attention to what it means to struggle as a woman in an overwhelmingly patriarchal world, to respect the connections that only women can share, and to recognize that I might find solidarity with women that I never will with men, I am still wary of being shoved off into some irrelevant, imaginary land of diaper bags and coffee dates.