Homing Instincts Read online

  Jorge has booked two weddings in Oaxaca. These are paying for a monthlong trip to visit family and show them my still-tiny belly as proof that finally, finally, at the outlandishly old age of thirty-one, we are having a child. When Jorge called his mother to give her the news, her relieved delight boomed through his iPhone: “Gracias a Dios!”

  Landing in Mexico reinforces the dramatic change of pregnancy. More than any other place I have lived or worked or traveled, Mexico is the country of my youth. In Mexico I fell in love, formed a close-knit crew of friends, witnessed a revolution, grew and changed and grappled with the dramas and decisions of my twenties. I am accountable to Mexico in ways I have never been to Peru or China or France or Japan. I have family there now, and community, and a history.

  In Mexico I began to assert myself as a writer, and when I get really angry, when I yell about how fucked up the corruption or the machismo is, Jorge yells back, “Mexico made you!” As with all marital arguments, he is right in a piercing, painful way, and he is also exaggerating. My first big essays were all about Mexico; the piece about the goat slaughter in Huajuapan got me into graduate school and then into Harper’s. Life in Mexico provided ethical, personal, romantic, and existential grist for my writing for years; Oaxaca was to me what New York City so often is to the aspiring American bohemian. And as such it is also the place I associate with singing in the street at four in the morning; with riding in the backs of pickup trucks through the cloud forest; with impassioned half-coherent conversations in scruffy cantinas about the nature of life. Mexico was the setting for the ambition and adventure of my late twenties, the place where carefree drifting began to channel into career.

  Thus landing here with a baby in my belly heightens the sense of remove I feel from myself and my life. I see Mexico anew as both foreigner and—by dint of the tiny Mexican within—as something more. In Mexico City I am taken by the sensation that my baby has more claim to these dusky-rose skies and stone streets than I do; that within our small family I am the sole American, and thus my Americanness becomes more exceptional and definitive. At the same time, the baby’s blood, swirling with the history of Zapotec and comal smoke and masa slapped between palms, makes Mexico mine in ways that transcend my life and self. I feel this already, at twelve weeks.

  Jorge and I board the ADO for Oaxaca, as we have done time and again over the years. Usually I am giddy for the bus ride’s vacillations between eager attention and withdrawn contemplation. I embrace the Ultimate Travel Writer Cliché and prop my Moleskine against the window, ready to note ads for freelance clowns and construct the perfect phallic metaphor for barrel cacti. But this time as the bus pulls out of the TAPO station, I feel detached, as if I am back in Ohio, rooted in the cabin and woods, and this shadow person is watching Mexico City jostle by outside her window. Or more precisely, as if some essential part of myself was left in Ohio long ago, has always been there, and I am just now becoming aware of her.

  The volcanoes hulk in rare clarity in the distance, their snowcapped massifs regal above the confetti colors of this plain, and I am not myself-the-American noting the difference, or myself-the-American-married-to-the-Mexican, so much as a person entirely removed from it all, seeing the world via a gentle, fragile distance. I jot down images in my notebook, but not with the same fervor for accumulation and meaning making as in the past. I allow myself the wild abandon of a half package of Nescafé in a Styrofoam cup of hot water and just sit, absorbing details with the unfamiliar stillness of pregnancy. There a donkey hunched amid felled stalks of corn, there men with ragged shirttails working the fields, there uniformed schoolgirls disappearing down a dirt road, there people clumped under a sheet of corrugated tin, waiting for the bus. I know it so well at this point, and yet now that I have been shoved off the stage of my life, that I can’t quite see or place myself any longer, I find I don’t know it as well: there is so much I assumed I knew, I could describe with confidence contextually or historically or with firsthand evidence, but in this visit I sense the profound limitations of that knowing. More important becomes the process of putting aside what I think I know or can know to accept what I will never be able to understand.

  We arrive in Oaxaca at night and climb the highway up the Cerro del Fortín until the whole valley is visible, a gleaming river of lights bordered by low black mountains. The memory of showing up this way when I was twenty-four years old, electrified by every strange scent and vision, hits me hard with that particular nostalgia of early pregnancy. Not only will Oaxaca never be foreign in this way again, but I have the intimation that it will be a long time before any place will feel so exotic, so new, so wide open to enthralled perception. The baby acts as a screen between me and the world; she is the ultimate newness, the ultimate exoticism, the ultimate discovery, and everything else pales behind her, everything else I experience predominately through her. The tightly spun cocoon of motherhood renders the world distant as stars, and yet at the same time its details become more intimate, more personal, part of a shared humanity that transcends context and borders. This is a paradox that Mexico highlights.

  In Oaxaca we stay in a tiny studio in an old hacienda-style home that has been converted into a series of furnished apartments. Our place consists of a two-burner stove, a mini-fridge, a dinky shower, and a bed that eats up the majority of the room. On the roof is a tiled terrace with a view of the surrounding streets and jacaranda trees; doves brood on the scrambled telephone wires, and from the neighboring roof, inevitably, come the frantic yelps of a puppy chained in the sun all day long. It is the archetypal Oaxacan blend of suffering and tenderness, the beautiful and the crude.

  It is also populated mostly by elderly Canadians and Americans who shuffle up the stairs shouting loudly, “Joe, there’s a very nice show in the Zócalo tonight! Did you hear Mary came down with something? Maybe it was the ice!” They make us feel terribly young, like a couple in a short story who show up at an ancient farmhouse, all fresh faced and innocent and preggers, only to confront a suspicious decrepitude. One man, somewhere in the haze of his fifties, alternately sits at a table on the patio or a table on the terrace drinking hard alcohol out of innocuous-looking cups. He reeks and talks too long and seems disconcerted when I reference my pregnancy, then opts to ignore it and offers us a drink. Supposedly he has a Mexican girlfriend, and in the day he disappears for hours to walk the colonias. Late at night I see his silhouette on the roof with a six-pack of Negra Modelo, pacing. Most of the other guests are corpulent, flowing-white-linen types, vocal and opinionated, accumulating various florid handicrafts. They are friendly enough but not terribly interested in us, which adds to my sense of invisibility and the feeling that I am carrying a secret. Their community vibe—“Bill! Bill! Are you going to do the Zapotec weaving? The bus leaves at two-thirty!”—makes us feel like outsiders despite the fact that Jorge is from here, that I have lived and traveled here for nearly a decade. They lend to the overall aura of liminality and unreality, the sense that we have left behind our previous lives but not yet arrived at the new.

  In the afternoons we have the best sex of our relationship. I am stunned that pregnancy has filled me with desire and set a million sensitive filaments I didn’t know I had on high alert. Pregnancy sex feels both illicit and innocent, sex at its purest and also its most superfluous. This blend seems fitting in our situation, as we muffle our moans while heavy-sandaled elders patrol the hallways. We are at the core of layer after layer of secrets, hovering in this yellow-curtained room, in this small queen bed, in the heat of our intertwined bodies between what we were, what we seem, and what we will be. When it is over we lie side by side, listening to the whir of the fan, and then Jorge pounces up as he does and makes coffee and goes to work on his computer. I am slow, still, everything I do during this time in Mexico deliberate as if I might break a delicate understanding between me and this place, as if I need to move with the nearly invisible precision of an opening flower.

  I sit on the rooftop terrace eating
persimmons. They have the taut flesh of plums but the strangest most decadent interior of any fruit I’ve ever tasted. They seem as though they were crafted in an elaborate hipster San Francisco kitchen: a touch of Madagascar vanilla, a dash of Saigon cinnamon, and the plushness of a rum-drenched cake. We’ve never seen them in Oaxaca before, and we buy them in twos and threes at the market in spite of their exorbitant price. They appear only in my pregnancy; when we return over a year later we cannot find them anywhere.

  I look out over the rooftops, bake my vulnerable body in the sun, close my eyes. With them closed I can see Oaxaca as it has always been and always will be: the mountains like the raggedy coats of old horses, houses the color of soft dinner mints. In this city, in the past, I delighted in the blue hour, the time when the sky is drenched in a thick watery indigo and the hamburger stands turn on their solitary bulbs. As a traveler, so much of what I lived for was sensation, stimulation, the rare awareness that makes the most minute details salient. I craved the startling anecdote from the taxi driver; the dreamlike experience of wandering amid hundreds of goats herded by a taciturn twelve-year-old; the afternoon rainstorm narrowly dodged in a nook with fathers and schoolkids and aproned señoras. These experiences, and my capacity to notice and shape them, were the way I measured the meaning and vivacity of my life.

  Now being in Oaxaca illuminates the fact that this type of noticing as a concerted act and sensory thrill has become superfluous, insufficient; I feel dulled to it, as if the old sensation tries to prick my skin and I register only the pressure. I am fully honed in on my baby and on my own interior landscape of change. My traveler’s eye passes over the old man clutching a chicken piñata in the back of a pickup to focus on the subtlest shifts in my belly, the workings of memory and time, the new and tremendous solitude that sometimes steals my breath. It is not that I’ve ceased to care about the shifting kaleidoscope of the world outside or stopped engaging with it, but rather that for this stretch of pregnancy—and well into early motherhood—I give up on the passionate quest to understand and document it. I need to be inside my own body, my own heart and mind, sitting and waiting, sitting without expecting. “In my early years of sitting,” wrote Buddhist priest and teacher Joan Halifax, “I tasted that stillness and knew that it was medicine.”

  Each time I try to conjure the active meaning making of my former outspoken adventurer self, my writer self on a quest to assemble the world into thematic overtures, I sense that I am missing an obscure, essential presence. There is work to be done and it must be done in this quiet space, with closed eyes that sense the mountains and sense the ironwork in the crumbling haciendas and sense the señora shuffling down the midday street with chiles rellenos nestled like puppies in the basket on her head, but with a concentration that stays in the interior. That waits out the urge to notice, the noticing itself, the gleam and shock of the world.

  Sarah Manguso writes, “Writers must labor from a vague feeling, usually some large, old emotion, and in so laboring, come to understand the qualities of that feeling, and the source of it, and the reason they still feel it.” I have long written with my eyes and my brain, twin tools of noticing, and in pregnancy these are no longer enough. I’m not able to explain what takes over from them, from what depths I am drawing my need and desire, until Manguso’s definition illumes them like a lit match. I am living and struggling in these large old emotions of love and fear; they are literally in my gut, a way of being in the world that begins and circles back to the belly.

  Little by little, I find that I can no longer be angry, or, rather, I can no longer trust my anger. I do not sense it as an integral part of me but watch it with distaste from the outside as if it were a disagreeable rash blooming and fading. On the terrace, bougainvillea and geraniums rain pink petals onto the tiles, the effervescent laughter of schoolkids rises from a nearby playground, the gas truck barks “Gas de Oaxaca! Kilos exactos!” Up here in the morning glare, I remember a bumper sticker from the nineties: IF YOU’RE NOT ANGRY, YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION. I can see it clearly on beat-up little Hondas making the trek from Cincy to Columbus. It might have had something to do with Ani DiFranco, or perhaps I just associate the two via the person of my best friend’s older sister, a pale, outspoken vegan who introduced me to concepts like cruelty-free mascara. People like her, who knew what was done to bunnies in research labs around the nation and weren’t afraid to show you in graphic brochures, made anger hip. They made it necessary, and young.

  This notion of anger as a function of superior intelligence resonated immediately with me. I’d always had a razor-sharp sense of injustice that surely drove my parents to late-night, nerve-soothing gin. I was one of those kids for whom everything had to be equal, for whom the refrain It’s not fair was the ultimate rebuke. This is, of course, essentially American: a naïve, frequently hypocritical obsession with fairness that is blind to history and context and the myriad complexities of a particular situation and instead bound to the rules of the preschool classroom. Righteous, precocious, and verbal, I was predisposed to inherit it in the worst kind of way. “Did you know,” I’d say to my parents, my tone implying that of course they didn’t know because I was about to dramatically inform them, “that the most educated people in the world don’t have kids?” I let this fact resonate in the 1990 Toyota Tercel until it presumably rocked their worlds. I don’t even want to imagine what I must have put them through when I read A People’s History of the United States in AP History.

  I spent a lot of time being angry in Mexico. Not all of this anger was unpleasant; much of it grew out of solidarity, community, deepening awareness. To share the anger at an inept government, at its blatant white-elephant construction projects marring the cityscape, at the murder and disappearance of activists, was a way to be woven more intimately into the tapestry of daily life in Oaxaca, to feel more connected to people and place. It was to form a united front and share a type of belonging and seeing. It was also the only form of empowerment, however illusory, we had against total impunity.

  But much of the anger in these years was also miserable. There was the anger at the daily insult of harassment and the several times I was grabbed in the street; anger at bureaucrats who sucked up endless precious hours with their petty power; anger at the dysfunction and corruption palpable in pollution, strikes, protests. This type of anger bogged my life down in resentment, frustration, guilt: a suffocating moss of largely useless emotions. But not to feel anger seemed not only near impossible but also complacent, giving in to the inevitability of violent patriarchy and its everyday humiliations. To shrug, as many travelers I met throughout these years did, at “cultural differences” and adopt a paradoxically condescending distance from it all seemed a gross, smug privilege. And besides, I was not a traveler. I had a Mexican husband; I’d spent the better part of my postcollege life in Mexico. I framed the struggle with anger largely in these terms of cultural relativism. Either I saw Mexico as a colorful other whose problems were just part of an overall show of sometimes beautiful, sometimes dismaying difference I watched as an American, or I saw Mexico as my own and tackled the many indignities of life there.

  Only now, in pregnancy, do I begin to see beyond this dichotomy to the larger question of my anger and its function. From the very beginning, the biggest surprise of pregnancy has been the sense that my seething emotional core—which could run from exuberance to outrage to abstract intellectual giddiness in an instant—has hollowed out entirely. In its wake is this disarming emptiness. To be empty has negative connotations in U.S. culture, in which being full, having more, having something rather than nothing to say, are heavily privileged; it would seem that this emptiness is a loss. But instead I feel freer. Not light, not airy, not unburdened of cares and worries, but less battered by the whims of my righteousness. More capable of seeing the way that anger is not necessarily an essential indicator of vitality but often a smug, shallow parody of it.

  The opposite of anger is joy; the two emotions possess
a parallel intensity, and neither lasts. Each is ultimately egoistic, shining its light on the triumph and exceptionalism of the bearer. I see now to the end of their fuses, the explosion and the fizzle and the what-next; I can’t seem to get either to matter. It’s not that I am bathed in the alleged beatific glow attributed to pregnant women, that I am suddenly taken with New Agey abstractions like respecting everyone’s spirit and spreading loving-kindness (although I am increasingly skeptical of the hard shell of snark and irony that defines my generation). What compels me isn’t so much the substitution of a new formula—balmy saccharine acceptance in lieu of anger—but rather that old profound place where neither matters. This is the place of birth and death, the night in the hospice with my grandmother, the moment I found out I was pregnant, when all of the opinions and surety of the everyday dissipate before an acute sense of the essential.

  Pregnancy has the effect of setting me apart from myself, like pulling away a sheet of carbon paper to discover the outlines of my vulnerable and distinct personality vividly etched. There is my fear, my insecure rectitude, an inner equanimity I’ve sensed but never quite witnessed, a need for control coursing bright red through my veins. In demanding a total embodiment only experienced otherwise in extreme sport or meditation, pregnancy sets my tightly held self ashimmering as a constructed sheen.

  There is opportunity here. My righteousness no longer appears a virtue but rather cheap insulation from complexity and uncertainty, creating surety but also walling me off from the potential for a deeper understanding of the type that goes beyond realizations and mantras and shoulds.