Homing Instincts Read online

  And yet all of these markers come to seem a flimsy linear story grafted onto a truth that defies narrative. I read through all nine months in What to Expect When You’re Expecting, first all at once and then individually as I near each one, and each week I go to BabyCenter.com to see what the baby is up to—growing fingernails, opening its eyes for the first time—but still I do not feel time passing in the same way I did before. The weeks and months do not feel like a progression, an arrow or a line, as much as they do a space I have entered and am inhabiting. Time as a bowl, with me nestled at the concave bottom, the days and weeks orbiting around me, no clear forward, no back.

  —

  Sometime after Thanksgiving my niece and nephew visit. We go on a hike: through the maple woods to the east of the cabin, down near the pastures, then back into the far woods along the creek, returning via the old township road. This is the route I will follow nearly every day for nine months. Inspired by Louise Erdrich’s The Blue Jay’s Dance and hungry for symbolism, I hunt for bird’s nests. I find three, their thin bark fibers wound tight around the wishbones of young branches. Some are tidy as a ballerina’s bun, and others are messy with dried mud walls and haphazard leaves overlapping. My niece and nephew walk atop fallen logs with the careful steps of gymnasts, their arms outstretched. They clamber through a small tongue-shaped ravine, stirring up torrents of leaves and lunging themselves forward on vines. I feel almost ghostly beside their vivid presence, my body a slow-moving woodland creature, the nests featherlight in my hands. These raggedy-haired kids consume time wholly and enthusiastically without thinking, the way they gulp lemonade. I feel unhinged by it, uneasy.

  In the smoky fall evenings, I walk the pastures, slowly; in the past I have been that person on the sidewalk rushing around the dawdlers, the one who soars past all the other airline passengers and is through customs by the time they’re beginning to bunch up in line. Now the dogs race to the end of the pastures and come pounding back before I’ve crested the hill. They stir up flocks of wild turkeys, who hurry through the grasses in their balls-out scramble, then lift into improbable flight over the woods.

  On longer walks the dogs and I wind our way through beech forest to the top of the ridge, where the winter sun breaks through clouds and illumes a grand oak with a mockingbird in its top branches. The ridge is a palette of Ohio winter colors: storm and wheat, navy and honey, ice and yolk. An old road, long overgrown, runs along the ridgetop. Breezes, not yet bracing, stir the dried sumac and the grandfatherly pines.

  —

  At night, I hear the faint booms of my heart when I lay my head on the pillow. By now, twenty and then twenty-four and then twenty-eight weeks into the pregnancy, my blood volume has increased by almost 50 percent. My organs are squished, my ligaments stretch and ache. My mind is rooted deep in my body, and both are rooted deep in the here and now. The past and future fall away, and I am steeped in a fog that is the present and also beneath it, beyond it: the time of birth and death. My body has become a different kind of space, at once turbulent and surreally calm.

  On one level, an upper level, there is distraction and detachment, like what I’ve often felt on my period: biological fervor preventing a clarity of thought and focus. I have completely lost my ability to make small talk. I can’t dredge up witty anecdotes from my day or recall all the peppy questions that keep conversation alight. As an extrovert, I find this frustrating and distressing. But beneath the surface distraction is the quiet of a river or plain. An interior wilderness of waiting, and when I allow myself to descend there and inhabit it, to wander timeless without path or purpose, I discover an unfamiliar way of being: connected neither to past nor future nor the sensory now of moments but to the huge, quiet, endless flow of time.

  Jorge and I sit on the porch one evening trying to make conversation. I think we should talk about writing and photography, about the meaning of art or the portrayal of marriage in The Americans, but I don’t really feel like talking about any of these things. Jorge’s responses are halfhearted, and the conversation sputters, stalls. I am still disarmed by my lack of desire to talk, to think, to spin the world into intellectual cotton candy. There is a lull. In it Jorge stands and lunges at our mutt hound Little Dude, who makes a comic leap some five feet back and bolts around the yard in a cartoonish streak. He chases her in circles. “Leeeeetle Duuuuuude!” he shouts like a Disney villain. He returns, sits, panting, and I scratch the now-wary Little Dude under the chin. Jorge takes two glass bottles from a box of twenty we bought for two dollars at an Amish auction, holds them in the wind so they whistle and sing. Their pitch rises, pierces, and I tell him to stop. He looks at me petulantly.

  “The one thing I don’t like about you is that you don’t let me make my noises,” he says, and it is so ridiculous and precious that I laugh. “Go on then,” I say. “Make your noises.” He cups his hands together to make a rising birdlike call he says he learned in his village. The Jorge whoop, echoing over the porch, the pastures. The moon is a deep-violet circle, one small sliver of which is illumed bone white. It inches northward through the bare branches of the walnuts, a little higher each time I look.

  One late afternoon in January, I sit on a rock above the creek, watching my dogs sniff around the dried leaves for rabbits. I try to sculpt the afternoon into part of a story, a scene, but I can’t think of anything at all, not even of being where I am—the glassy water falling over slate, the rustling of dog paws, the absorbing silence of moss. All I can do is feel the vessel of my body, my consciousness drifting in and out of it like mist.

  This is pregnancy as, alternately, Zen state or acid trip. Zen state when I allow myself to see this strange wilderness as calm, spiritual, comforting, and acid trip when a restless frightening energy pulses behind it. In the latter case, I feel trapped by hormones, irritation and boredom threatening to overrun the precarious witnessing of what Suzuki calls “things as they are.” I want to come down off this hormonal high, to be released back into time and straightforward thinking. I want plans and progress. I chafe at this stillness, this inability to be anywhere but a small cabin in middle-of-nowhere Ohio.

  But then I am boiling eggs in the kitchen, in my socks, and I am laughing a belly laugh that is new since I got pregnant. It is a laugh with no inclinations other than happiness, both full and empty. It is a laugh surprised at itself. In the close light of the kitchen at night, I am watching the water bubble around the jiggling eggs, feeling my husband nearby on the couch. All of my life flies by in a glimpse of irrelevant time and returns to this.

  —

  One morning Dad comes traipsing up to the cabin in his camo muck boots. He knocks, the dogs bark, I put the shepherd in her kennel. In his hands is a dead bird, brown with white streaks along the sides. “It’s a rufous-sided towhee,” he says. “You hear them when you go turkey hunting. Isn’t it beautiful?” We stand for a few minutes to admire the frozen form of the bird, its curled feet, its closed eyes and smoothed feathers.

  Another evening I pace the cabin, bored, and then Jorge puts on Mexican Institute of Sound to listen to while doing the dishes, and I am dancing in front of the woodstove with the baby, cradling my taut belly with one hand, and with the other doing that horrible pointing-at-the-ceiling gringa dance that prompts Jorge to ask, “Where does that come from? Why do you people do that?” but I don’t care because I am making jerky little circles on one foot singing “Katia, Tania, Paulina y la Kim.” I convince Jorge to join me on the rug, and we are both sticking out our hips, putting on satirical versions of those sexy disco faces, the logs popping in the fire and the baby a nebulous presence, rocked in my belly under the warmth of my palm.

  One night in the thick gray plod of February, I stand at the sink doing the dishes with Jorge, feeling glum and jealous. He has booked a wedding in Brisbane and will spend nearly two weeks in Australia in April. I will be at thirty-one weeks when he leaves, and although the midwife said that it’d be fine for me to go with him, I decide to stay. I wash wi
th a sad little set to my mouth, and Jorge dries and puts pots away, and I warn him not to get attacked by a kangaroo because they can be vicious.

  “What do I do?” he says. “How do I avoid an attack?”

  “Let’s role-play it,” I say. “You be the Mexican and I’ll be the kangaroo.”

  So Jorge shuffles along with the look of a clueless güey, pretending to be carrying a boom box that is playing tinny rancheritas about unrequited love.

  “Dónde puedo comprar mis frijoles?” he asks, hamming it up, and then I lunge at him and rake my razor-sharp kangaroo claws across his face. He shouts and drops the boom box.

  “No mames!” he pants when he finally fends me off. “Eres un bruto!”

  “No one sees it coming,” I say. “Again.”

  We run through several scenarios, with the Mexican alternately eating his taco or downing a shot when a bloodthirsty marsupial charges from the ether to take him down.

  Pregestation, these are scenes I cannot imagine: Would we simply not have the time for them? Would we be drinking Bell’s Two Hearted and reading New Yorkers? Would we be too sophisticated and exposed to urban culture for live reenactments of animal attacks? Or would I simply not remember them: would they be absorbed into a larger sense of mission and purpose that clouded the everyday?

  These are strange gifts that months ago I never would have labeled as gifts. Lying in bed in the morning as I lie in bed now, sometimes for forty-five minutes, sometimes an hour, which would have been unimaginable six months ago, scratching the scruff of my husband’s beard and murmuring fat jokes in Spanish: “Tu mamá es tan gorda que…”

  Or in the afternoon, Jorge going to the mailbox: the spring birdsong of robins, cardinals, and red-winged blackbirds strung across the hills; the crunch of gravel; the rush of brown water; the world washed, chilly and thawed. I am present to it in a way that is both incorporeal and fully embodied. I’ve forfeited all the forward-looking ambition of my typical awareness, and there remains an unfamiliar, essential me: here on one afternoon that will become another and another and another, each day a diaphanous screen laid over the next, their sameness transparent and simple. The sun sinks toward the prickly ridge of purple-brown trees, the dogs sit shoulder to shoulder in expectation, tails curling in opposite directions. We are all waiting for Jorge to come back and we stand watching his slow approach, envelopes in hand, beneath the heavy spring sky. This afternoon takes on the quality of a dream, of life lived outside of time.

  —

  This second trimester is the slow recognition of the fact that pregnancy is altered attention. Attention is a form of possession, a taking control of the world and shaping it in one’s mind. Historically, attention has been described by philosophers and researchers as a spotlight, an isolating of certain information as relevant, interesting, and important within the overwhelming array of sensory input coming at us at all times. Attention is inseparable from expectation and meaning: our expectations, in the process of paying attention, exclude what they presume irrelevant and then fit the relevant into familiar patterns, from which we construct meaning. Then the cycle repeats itself. Attention, without expectation in particular, without knowing what to look for and why, falters; it flattens and broadens. Meaning vaporizes.

  In the United States, this is generally taken as negative. Not only in the context of school, in which paying attention means processing a specific set of information in a limited time, but also in work and life, in which attention is an increasingly valuable currency. The opposite of attention is distraction, the scourge of the Internet era. U.S. notions of attention and its value haven’t changed much since William James’s seminal description in The Principles of Psychology, volume 1: “Attention…is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction.”

  Maria Popova, founder of the curation site Brain Pickings, uses James in 2016 to illustrate the dangers of contemporary multitasking and to emphasize the value of attention in an era in which it is increasingly fractured. Yet in pregnancy I find that this war over attention has a very American flavor of dominance, reducing the world to what we can use to shape further expectation, confining it to the categories of relevant and irrelevant, of purposeful and useless, of the center and the fringe.

  James wrote, “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.”

  This is on one hand universal and on the other quintessentially American: notice the recurring I and my. My experience, my mind. Attention, ultimately, is the world filtered through my seeing, shaped by my expectation, my ego, my struggle for meaning. To some extent, there is no way to avoid this. There is a degree to which we must pay attention in order to function on a daily basis; without a filter for all the sensory information perpetually surging around us, we lose a sense of direction and reality, flounder in stunned passivity, sink even into mental illness. Yet there also might be value in loosing our attention from its tight leash, letting it drift without clinging to tasks, bearings, narratives. In contrast to the emphasis on attention as a spotlight beamed from the head of a discerning “I,” Zen and Buddhist traditions envision the highest form of attention as dissolving the barriers between the self and the world, as paying attention not only to this rock or that thought but the whole of life now and forever, the self within it and also the self as inseparable from it.

  This seems a mystical platitude until five months of pregnancy have wiped my mind clean of purpose and function, and my attention is a mist resting lightly on leaves, snow-damp bark, the perked ears of dogs, the nascent trilliums, my dad struggling to explain something about rabbits in Spanish. I am a distinct presence in this rumbling changing body, with round ligament pain occasionally doubling me over as I run, leaving me panting and wincing, awed to feel my hips wresting themselves open as I place my heavy footfalls on the snow. At the same time, the barrier between myself and the woods, the world, my family, has become permeable; without my obsessed focus on tasks, productivity, and direction, my attention eases out like a river into a delta. I do not impose myself so much as flow and sink into it all like water into sand. I sit on the front porch eating my giant bowls of crunchy yogurt, a concoction I swear to Jorge that if we ever one day open a coffee shop we will sell for eight dollars a bowl, potent as it is with granola, Greek yogurt, chia seeds, walnuts, fruit, flax, and abundant raw honey. I give it to a friend when she comes to visit and it knocks her out for four hours. When I finish it, I sit back against one of the porch beams and rest my palm on my belly, feeling the crunchy granola arrive at the baby, her kicks and rolls. With the warmth of my new blood and insulation I can sit in the pale cold sun for a long stretch without getting a chill. I close my eyes and, without ever labeling or realizing it as such, meditate. My body takes me there more than my mind. Some days I feel like one of the posters of the human circulatory system in Mr. Wieland’s ninth-grade biology classroom, all of the veins and muscles transparent, the head a goulash of swirling wires, the hands splayed open as if to say, This is it.

  Like this, I notice woolly worms, I notice flickers on the walnut tree, I notice once the perfect carapace of a molted grasshopper. Perhaps notice is too active and directed a term. I see without beaming that spotlight of me, without making sense of, without organizing, without rushing what I see into language. Pregnancy for me becomes a way of unlearning, the words I know and use so confidently and thoroughly trailing behind me like the alphabet that floats through cartoons, As and Zs adrift over the budding oaks. I write in my journal, I write a few essays, but these feel less like meticulously crafted art than like natural specimens carefully pasted into a collector’s notebook. Mostly I wait, my attention both suspended and everywhere, here.

  Mean
while it seems everyone else is out in the world traveling and seeing, checking in with me on the phone or Skype to report their findings. My sister goes to Boston for a conference and calls to say she’s bought the baby children’s books, that she went for a transcendent run on the Charles River, that she saw African American kids steal from a Muslim shop owner and yell racist taunts at him as they ran away. I respond and offer my thoughts while padding around the cabin, touching my belly whenever she asks about the baby. Jorge comes crackling through a horrible Skype connection from Sydney and announces that he witnessed a car crash via his hostel window, and also that he is heading to a koala sanctuary.

  “Take a picture of a pregnant koala for me, okay?” I ask, and he promises. Ultimately I will have to settle for a pregnant kangaroo, which I accept. All of these updates, my sister seeing ponytailed Harvard grads jogging along the gray river, Jorge watching pelicans gobble up tossed fish on the Australian coast, seem to belong to another world, not only thousands of miles from me but also far away in a land where people actively notice and have experiences and accomplish tasks and stride purposefully from one day to the next. I, meanwhile, circle round and round like a hamster, from crunchy yogurt to crunchy yogurt, run to run, pasture to pasture, and yet in doing so I learn to let go of the Charles River and the Gold Coast and pregnant kangaroos and all the sorting and highlighting of the world and to be a human animal, to be smelling moss and hauling my unwieldy self up hills and reading on the porch and eating olives with my dad and not thinking about what else and why and whether or how any of it matters.

  In my desk I keep the photos of the twelve- and twenty-week ultrasounds and revisit them when I begin to drown in my waiting, using them as touchstones, as reminders that this is a temporary period and not an eternity of Ritz crackers and mysterious twangs from tendons I did not know existed. In the first the baby is still a peanut, a little rounded peanut with legs, and the legs are my favorite part. The ultrasound technician took a photo just of them, chunky and so babylike it is astonishing. I show the legs to everyone as proof that there is a real baby in there, a chubby one, with little feet and everything, as I myself am still astounded by this.