Homing Instincts Read online

  Time slows, each day creeping along in infinite afternoons. At some point, in the clear light of midmorning, my hair still wet, I rush down to my parents’ house, find my stepmom in the kitchen, and burst into tears. She guides me to the couch while I sob and explain that I don’t know if I can or want to do this. Then she gives me what every woman deserves and needs: the respect and trust to make her own choices. She says, “We will support you no matter what you do.” She says, Yes, this will change you. Yes, it will change your life. No, you might not be able to up and move to an island in the south Indian sea. But motherhood is one of the most elemental experiences in life, a transformation of consciousness. She says this plainly and honestly, as a lived observation and not an argument or a sentimental notion. She says it like setting a leaf on the table to be examined, its thin papery veins traced and studied. And she recommends Louise Erdrich’s The Blue Jay’s Dance.

  I walk back to the cabin, breathe, order the book. I read it in the course of several days in front of the fire and in it find the initial nebulous answer to this period of grasping and struggling. It is the first book I’ve read in a long time that arouses a renewed vigor for living; that brings out the zigzaggy depth of the woods and the afternoon gleam on the creek; that has me, after a month of coercing myself to eat for sustenance, rolling a raspberry around on my tongue to taste the soft, sour dissolution of each segment. I’ve read dozens of books over the summer and early fall, spending whole Saturdays at a Pittsburgh park devouring The Age of Innocence, sitting on the cabin porch plowing through the eight-hundred fine-print pages of Anna Karenina after everyone else in my dorky classics book club bailed. But the pleasure most of these books gave was an intellectual one: I felt I should study the classics, and I thrilled at piecing out the components of sentences, scenes, plots. I didn’t, however, connect with emotional resonance. I had forgotten that this resonance, the echoing of the book’s bell long after reading, the quaver in the air of heightened perception, ultimately drives my faith in writing. Louise Erdrich reminds me of it without going much farther than a mile from her house. In The Blue Jay’s Dance, she does not ride a camel across North Africa or wind up stranded in a remote Congolese village: she observes wild turkeys from her back porch and makes nests of her daughters’ hair. She thinks. And the contours of her mind, as she eats nacho cheese, roams her backyard, and interprets the meanings of pregnancy, are enough. They grip, entrance, compel, as much as any adventure narrative.

  One night not long after I finish the Erdrich, I go on a walk through the woods and emerge in the back pasture. I hear a hoot, and stop, wait. Another low hoot echoes through the newly bare trees. Before, I would have kept on walking. I had things to do, places to be. But I keep waiting, watching the champagne-colored grasses bend with the wind. And moments later a different hoot, higher in pitch and crooked up at the end, rings from a tree or ridgetop to the west. Silence. Then a low hoot in response from the east. For maybe ten minutes, I listen to the owls calling to one another across the forest dusk. Steady, soft, haunted sounds.

  I stand in the exact spot where, months earlier, I had sat in the damp grasses, smoked a cigarette, and thought, What if I take a year just to become a better person? It was summer, and the air was sweet and watery, the woods swimming in a twilight best described as midwestern marine. I’d just yelled at my dog in frustration and then, feeling guilty, marched off with what was left of the pack of cigarettes my little brother and I had split on our road trip. I was in the throes of a molting I couldn’t quite name. I snuck my one cigarette at the pasture’s edge, and in its clarity, all of my writing concerns, all my visions of success, faded. I thought of how few people get to dedicate a year of their lives to becoming better human beings. Is that not enough? Is it not hard enough? What if that was all I aimed at for a whole year at the farm? I lingered for a bit in the novelty of that thought, in the layered blues of a wet Ohio night. And then, when dark began pressing in from the woods, I brushed the smoke off my clothes. I hurried back through the pastures, the faintest whiff of dried leaf an undertone in the September night. I thought little of that moment in the happy bustle of the rest of the month, writing and drinking beer on the porch and hosting big dinners in the old red barn. And then I found out I was pregnant.

  That same spot, where pasture meets woods, is where I listen to the owls. A few minutes after each hoot, I think to keep walking, but I wait. I wait until just beyond the point of satisfaction of curiosity and momentary interest. I wait until the moment has sunk in deeper, until it has pulled me out of the trajectory of my evening, until I have settled into it. I wait a little longer, and then, I walk on. And the next morning, I wake up, crack open a notebook, and start writing.

  I write for hours. The farm is now gray and thick with winter. At nine weeks, I am in the full maelstrom of the first trimester. Occasionally I step outside to grab a rough log from the pile beside the door and throw it into the woodstove. The air is bracing, with the sandpaper roughness of winter. Inside, the cabin is dark. Two armchairs face the glow of the woodstove, and the two windows on either side of the living room let in a feeble winter light. My writing desk sits before the southern window, empty.

  In the summer, I kept to a rigid writing schedule: a minimum of four hours a day, no interruptions. Four hours of total concentration and intensity, and then I’d be free. When it was over I would draw in a deep breath of relief and let it out. I’d droop over my desk, then stand and stretch in gratefulness.

  But writing in my journal for the first time in years, the hours fly by without my noticing. I flex my wrist, check the time, and discover I’ve been writing nonstop for three hours. By hand. I fill pages and pages but never count them. A small connection sprouts between me and my baby, me and my pregnancy. I hadn’t anticipated the intense loneliness of motherhood, the recurring sensation of living in quarantine from the rest of the world. It is akin only to the loneliness of grief, the way the colossal impact of loss grays the larger world into irrelevance. All the central dramas of life just months ago—will I get this book published, what kind of writer am I, should we live in the United States or Mexico—have disappeared, inconjurable, like love for a teenage ex-boyfriend. They have been replaced by the most mundane, immediate matters of the body—can I bear to chop this tofu? Is it okay to go running now or will I come back with the awful shakes?—and a need, baffling and enigmatic, for the big mysteries: God and family and death and love and self.

  No one else can understand or fully enter this sphere: I inhabit it alone. Even my husband, with whom I share everything, cannot in the beginning cohabit the space of pregnancy. In this loneliness I thrash and resist and sink and then, writing through each cold gray morning, I rise. I buoy myself and discover another soul in this space with me. A nebulous, mysterious one, but an undeniable presence. This is not the cooing, precious, cuddly infant, the ubiquitous Baby idolized by mainstream pregnancy culture, but a human being, who in some ways takes care of me more than I take care of her.

  One morning, Jorge and I wake to blue sky and a vista of gleaming white. The first snow of the season has blanketed the farm. We bundle up and traipse out with morning coffee in thermoses. The pastures and woods are held in that peculiar silence of snow, both heavy and light, hushed and expressive. In the woods the thorny tangles of multiflora rose have been bestowed an exquisite grace, shining in intricate patterns. The branches of the tall trees are burdened with a featherlight icing, crystalline against the blue. We crunch along, recognizing anew everything we’ve long taken as familiar: the dependable ash, their trunks tilting in gentle inclination with the hills; the tumbling ravine through which the dogs pound after deer; the creek. Around the abandoned house, on a hill to the northeast of the farm, Jorge saunters ahead to take photos and I stop. Gazing into the eastern trees, I see that their glazed branches have framed a perfect square of blue sky, a theater through which float silent clouds. For an unfelt stretch of time, I watch the snowy-white tufts drift across that r
inging silence of blue.

  I give up Burma, Africa, the desert Southwest, at least for the time being. For the first time, I recognize this delving into my own heart, mind, and body as a journey. A voyage ranging sometimes no farther than the rounded softness of swollen breasts and growing belly, than a small cabin in winter warmed by a woodstove and smelling of wet dog, grass, and mud. And I acknowledge then what I’ve been battling and fearing all along: proof of my own ordinariness.

  For so long, no one in my extended family had known how to treat me; my life and my choices refused recognizable frameworks. Now these people breathe a collective sigh of relief: I’ve fallen into step with a familiar pattern. They approach me, and over talk of nausea and contractions we connect for the first time. I’ve descended from some imagined terrain of the exceptional into which I’ve always placed myself, always sought to be placed, and become ordinary. And then I see that I have been ordinary all along.

  How, I ask myself, can the most common of all human experiences be so overwhelming? How can it be so transformative and yet banal, so widespread and so unique? I’ve always associated the transformative, the unique, with being jarred out of commonness, out of familiarity. With being out: exterior. But now, in that worn blue armchair claimed by the mutt hound Little Dude, its velveteen fabric smothered in dog fur and smelling of forest musk, I range no farther than the centimeter thickness of the notebook and find transformation.

  Maybe I’ve never trusted myself enough to sit still, to wait. Meaning lay in movement. Restlessness was energy, life. But pregnancy is nothing if not waiting. It is mulling for nine months in the dark, smoky hut of your body. The baby grows and incubates within you, and you grow and incubate within yourself. In this confined space—odorous, full of enigmatic throbbings and anxieties, adamant with the assertion of new life—you learn to slow down, to seek inward, to not do. To not apply, to not search, to not cast yourself into the future, to not strain for validation in exotic elsewheres and nexts and shoulds. To neither strive nor react. To wait.

  In my dark cabin, moored by my mysterious body, I read. Isolated, completely and newly ignorant, I experience literature for the first time as vital in addition to pleasurable. I have always been skeptical of the claim that literature is imperative, redemptive, even lifesaving. Coming from a writer, I know this is potentially blasphemous. I grew up a voracious reader, my definition of hedonism a Saturday afternoon sprawled on the grass reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. But literature has always existed for me one or two levels above the raw core where we grieve, suffer, struggle to survive.

  In pregnancy, however, I develop a craving for books not too distant in urgency from that for Haribo gummi raspberries. I read with a hunger and need I’ve never experienced, revisiting the birth scene in Anna Karenina; poring over Pattiann Rogers for hours on the porch for her scrupulous, unflinching wonder at gestation; consuming Anne Enright’s Making Babies over the course of several evenings with the famished devotion of a disciple. I read viscerally, as if these books are in fact the retelling of my own experience. I discover, in other words, the universality of literature.

  Whereas before I sought to differentiate myself, I now seek commonality; I am astounded by the fact that I can discuss, intimately, with real empathy, a shared bodily experience with Mexican market women and my aunts in Cincinnati and CEO friends in San Francisco. I start to see everyone as a baby. The man with a gray Santa Clausian beard and a T-shirt that reads BOOBIES MAKE ME SMILE at the Amish auction. The teenagers in their stiff turquoise prom dresses, sweating through zits and makeup. The immigrants mowing the measly strips of lawn on either side of the interstate. My parents. My editors.

  Pregnancy has lowered me from this state of uniqueness I’ve long sought and shown me you, too, are part of the most basic human experience. But more important, it begins to show me that this ordinary experience, on a small patch of earth in Ohio, with aching breasts, feeling for tiny flutters in the belly, attuned to the slow passage of rain across the valley, is just as vital, insightful, essential, as the remote Chinese temple in mountain fog.

  What if I take a year just to become a better person? But perhaps the quest isn’t so much to become better as to allow myself to grow into the unknown. To let go of seeking and achieving. To let go of the notion that I am exceptional, and then to rediscover the exceptional in my own ordinariness.

  This will be an inward year, a year of not doing, of waiting. And in many ways, it will be a year of failure. Failing and failing again and maybe, gradually, getting a little bit better at change, at growth. Each time I fail I learn more about the impossibility of living by any mantra or credo, of making a definitive pivot from one state of being to another. Each time I fail I sense the mille-feuille of past selves, givens, lives, wants, piled up beneath me, and I both resume and start anew.

  On a brief trip to Cincinnati to visit my mom, she and I swing by Half Price Books. Mom, who has always liked dense philosophical and religious tracts, is browsing the religion section. Having scoured both nonfiction and parenting unsuccessfully for anything striking, I wander over to her. In one of those eerie, seemingly prophetic used-bookstore finds, I glance at the shelf on Buddhism and see Shunryu Suzuki’s Not Always So: Practicing the True Spirit of Zen sticking out. The cover is a photo of his round ascetic face, small and polished as a nut, smiling that kind Zen smile that seems to dissolve all of my life’s contortions into butter.

  Mom buys it for me, then goes digging in her basement and gifts me her copy of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, heavily underlined and scrawled with marginalia like all of her old books. In this way Suzuki, a Zen monk and the founder of the first Buddhist monastery outside of Asia, becomes the accidental and divinely ordained guru of my pregnancy.

  Suzuki writes, “After you have practiced for a while, you will realize that it is not possible to make rapid, extraordinary progress. Even though you try very hard, the progress you make is always little by little. It is not like going out in a shower in which you know when you get wet. In a fog, you do not know you are getting wet, but as you keep walking you get wet little by little. If your mind has ideas of progress, you may say, ‘Oh, this pace is terrible!’ But actually it is not. When you get wet in a fog it is very difficult to dry yourself. So there is no need to worry about progress.”

  This change, this wrenching of self from self, is muddy and hard and painful, fought for through the thickets of consciousness and habit. There is no goal to be achieved, no adventure to be had: there is only a way of living, interior and distinct each day.

  As the light wanes toward the New Year, the round swell of my belly in the bathwater grows bigger and more noticeable: softness firming into solidity. I begin to feel the baby move—first flutters and then rolls and, at times, the hard, unmistakable curve of bone against my skin. One night in December in the bath, I sense what it would be like to be in the womb, warm and quiet and cushioned. The line between inside and outside blurs, the baby in me and me in the water and both of us wet, warm, weightless. Lying on my back in that old claw-footed tub, looking up at the close wooden beams of the ceiling, my baby and I afloat in deep winter, I say my first prayer.

  In early January, just around the time that the New Year’s resolutions start to go stale and all the uncertainty of another cycle comes flooding back, there is a polar vortex in Ohio. “A polar vortex?” I snort, when Jorge reads the weather from his computer. I think it might be an awkward Spanish translation. But then I check weather.com and, indeed, there it is, the polar vortex. For days, temperatures drop below zero; our pipes freeze in the middle of the night, which I discover only because I am getting up to pee every half hour. In a scene that would have strained credulity when Jorge and I met eight years ago in Oaxaca, he lies on his stomach under the cabin running a blow-dryer to unfreeze them, and succeeds. The creek solidifies into a creamy stream of thick ice; swirls of snowy wind pound the cabin at night. And then, abruptly, the vortex moves on.

  Several days later, i
t is nearly fifty degrees, and the whole farm aches with thaw. I go running, and the ground is a sponge; my feet sink inches into dense, fragrant mud. Ferns and lycopodiums thrust their green from behind the thick padding of damp leaves, and the sky shifts abruptly between gray and a bright, fresh blue. Sun flashes in long swaths over the seeping and gushing woods like a diaphanous scarf trailed by clouds. The creek roars, the remainders of its hard ribbon of milky ice clinging to its banks, creating a slalom for the released waters. The world seems temporarily cracked free of a stillness, a containment, and it oozes and weeps and shines and shivers.

  I ask Jorge to come with me to take the first photo of my belly. I perch in the creek in my muck boots, imperfect, scared and tentative, excited and moved, looking up at the changing sky. I cradle the big white hill of my belly. I close my eyes. The day—muddy, wet, exuberant, frightening, uncertain, life forcing its way up through the ground and racing downstream over hard blue slate—is as good as any for conversion. I am on that precipice of transformation: I know this change is in me, I know I want it, and now I have to make it happen. And so I do what we humans do: I use the day as a marker, a new beginning. On this day, I say, a girl, a traveler, a writer, an adventurer, becomes a mother.

  “Ready?” Jorge asks. I close my eyes, open them, study the shifting puzzle pieces of the clouds.

  “Ready,” I say.

  MOTHERLAND

  ON OUR FIRST NIGHT in Mexico, at the thirty-dollar-per-night Hotel Canada just off the Zócalo in Mexico City, Jorge dreams he’s being chased by a giant gorilla.

  “Subtle,” I say. “Scared of something?”

  I am twelve weeks pregnant. As predicted by my mother and sister, who experienced the same pregnancy timeline, the fog of the first trimester lifts. It is dramatic as a curve in the road and around the corner, clarity, sun, the smell of meat finally enticing instead of repulsive. It comes at just the right moment, when we land in a city of a million taquerías. I am surprised to find that I’m able to walk the streets for hours, attend a massive protest against Enrique Peña Nieto, stomach black beans and meat and jalapeños. I am, just in time for Oaxaca, ravenous.