A friend of mine who miscarried at six weeks wrote me that she knew something had happened when she woke up feeling like herself again. She wasn’t able to explain how she hadn’t been herself, who or what she had become, only the return to the old self with its clear parameters and bearing on the world. I got the sense that her return was wrenching not only because of the loss of her baby, but also because of the loss of a brief experience of the expansiveness of pregnancy, a glimpse of annihilation both terrifying and liberating. Afterward, the self’s confines seem limiting, like returning to the same dull linoleum kitchen after an afternoon in the blasting sun of a wilderness.
And yet I’d lived in that kitchen for thirty-one years and grown accustomed to its peeling countertops, its magnets and coffee stains. I miss it desperately, feverishly, angrily during the first trimester, and with a numb distance throughout the second. My previous life takes on a nostalgic dreaminess, shrouded in pearly ethereal light, like Nabokov’s imperial Russia viewed from the wastes of Connecticut. It pulses from the opposite shore of pregnancy with the glow of irrevocable separation. By the third trimester, when the old me shows up for Monopoly, she has become a curiosity. The no-longer-me of pregnancy—a being who exists almost exclusively as a heavy-moving body, graced occasionally by a faint whiff of mind—has begun to guess at what so many mothers before me must have already discerned: that Sarah was a fiction, which has collapsed and left only the rubble of titles and habits.
I remember an activity in the third grade in which we were told to fill in an outline of a puppy with words that defined us. I wrote Tacos. Babysitters Club. Fiery. Purple. Then we laminated our newly defined selves in their dog shells. I still have that puppy in a box somewhere; it’s a cute artifact of childhood, and yet my adult conceptions and presentations of self aren’t much more sophisticated. I think back to all the times I’ve said “I am” with such vigor and certainty: I am a traveler, a writer, passionate, angry, loyal. Now more than ever, when people are summarized by profiles, we metonymize ourselves in pithy phrases: beer drinker, lover of marshmallows. These come to stand in for the mercurial energies that drive, confuse, frustrate, and refuse crystallization. They are the Greek ruins around which our lives swirl, ever contradictory and indefinite.
Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert alludes to this perpetual changeability in his discussion of the psychology of the future self. He writes: “We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy….[But] our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they’d like that.”
We disappoint our future selves because we assume they’ll adhere to the same patterns, nurse the same desires, rely on the same cluster of definitions and loyalties. Implicit in this assumption is the notion of a self that is a definitive part, if not the definitive part, of existence. This self wants Twinkies, and that one wants a non-GMO vegan nut bar, but each is clearly a self in relationship to the world. There is no room for a not-self in the way we think, or even in the way Gilbert writes, but in pregnancy the self is vaporized, and there is nothing to replace it.
I am blurred with the sound of crickets, blurred with my body, made part of what Suzuki calls the “great self”: all mothers, all children, the natural world, the trucks that rise in a distant grind over the hill and zoom along the straightaway, the slow blue curl of evening into morning.
—
I find I need more time to pull away from the everyday, from email and productivity and the drive for success. I need moments in the woods, in my journal, of a deeper consciousness, or else I start to feel a rust of stress build up; I start to clang for the first time in my life against the tin walls of my ego. I take the dogs and climb the hill into the snowy woods. I take the dogs and roam the blooming pastures. I take the dogs and descend through the smell of dogwoods sweet and thick as honey.
The more of this time I take, the more of myself I scrub off of the world around me until I start to see. I go nowhere, and yet in going nowhere I am in a way I cannot be when I impose myself on the world. As the winter tips into spring and spring brightens into early summer, the world comes into relief: immediate, overwhelming, and unmediated. Instead of me there is the morning porch, the coreopsis making their slow revolution with the sun, the driveway under a starry cosmos of maples, a dog with a fly on her nose, June’s orange-cream evenings fizzling into night. The bare bones of life, unadorned with expectation or seeking, only ever right now.
In week thirty-six, my colostrum comes in. I am standing at the bathroom mirror and see droplets around my left breast through my threadbare gray tee. I gawk at myself in the mirror, lean closer to inspect the liquid. It is sweet and the yellow of buttermilk. I shout for Jorge, and he stares at it with mild fear. Later that afternoon I am sitting on the porch and it starts to rain. Jorge comes running barefoot into the yard, pulls off his shirt, dances around jokingly, hopping from foot to foot, so I too strip down to my underwear and run out, raising my hands to the sky of jigsaw blue and gray, the rain a cool prickling on my skin. I look down anew at my breasts, like acquaintances long ignored, now full of intrigue and power. I squeeze them to see the new, silky droplets pour over the nipple and mix with rain.
We take the dogs for a walk when the afternoon is thick with moisture and anticipation. The light and heat change quickly: balmy blue now, shifting to slate gray and chill, and then, quick as a flicked switch, white pummeling sheets of rain. We walk through them in the pastures, laughing, drenched, squinting through the streams rolling down our faces. As we enter the woods, the storm picks up. The creek gushes and slaloms up its banks and the trees are whipped into a white froth. The ground has disappeared in a brown churn, and even the dogs have slunk down, cowering, so Jorge shouts, “Let’s go back!” We turn, hurrying along the path in half thrall, half fear, and by the time we reach the pastures it’s over. There is sun, friendly blue. We’re soaked and dripping, our shoes squishy. We wring ourselves out and start back through the steaming thigh-high grasses. I open my dress, let my belly out, walk with my big taut body through the damp. We come over the hill of the front pasture to the view of farm and valley, my body before me, leading me slow down into the fields.
“You look like a flasher,” Jorge says. “The milk molester.” We put the dogs in the run, check the garden for strawberries, look down the throats of the irises at their striped tongues.
“Enlightenment,” Suzuki writes, “is like hearing a bugle or smelling tobacco for the first time.”
We strip off our dripping clothes, shower, tumble into bed. The afternoon softens and I lay before the fan, Jorge curled behind me, smelling of soap.
—
Every day in the barn, my brother plays the same notes on the saxophone. Jack is using the farm as a way station between New York City—where he worked as a barista at a Swedish coffee shop and rented an apartment so loud from the passing subway that he could practice his sax all day long without disrupting anyone—and Sweden, where he’s moving to be with his Swedish girlfriend and hopefully make a living as a musician. Jack and I have long been engaged in a competition to see who can pursue the least lucrative creative career in the most far-flung place, and he is now winning. We have reached a pinnacle of impoverished-artist seekerhood at this moment, Jack holed up in the barn with his sax and me in the cabin with my gestating baby, my parents surely damning our hippie arts education.
We refer to Jack’s repetitious sequence of scales on the baritone sax as his fart noises. “Makin’ my fart noises on the bari,” he says, and then goes through a range I label from popcorn to cauliflower to maple-’n’-onion baked beans. He cracks the screen door, opens a little valve on the bari, and dumps his spit. I sit on the front porch and write the small details of passing time
, for lack of anything else to write, for lack of a self or story to layer on it all. Dad in the garden planting tomatoes. A ruby-throated hummingbird coming to taste the snapdragons. Dad and Jorge struggling with the drunken careening of the wheelbarrow. A blacksnake in the grass. The mowers going again in our neighbor Dotty’s pastures, marking the start of long summer evenings. A luna moth, with its ornate, ersatz, unseeing eyes. Jorge imitating a giant squid, lurching toward me with arm-tentacles. Rain that starts across the valley, the sound of a whisper heard from another room, and moves closer in a white veil until it is thrashing the cabin. It gushes from the rutted roof and is gone, off tittering in the woods. I realize I have never before watched it move.
I remember the night I spent with my grandma when she was in hospice, dying; how after I’d calmed my crying and laid down my book, I came into a fragile awareness that lasted from that moment through her death and for a few days afterward. It was of the naked world, the empty world, beneath the banal everyday, beneath all the assumptions and plans we take for granted, all the fictions we assiduously maintain. Nothing mattered and yet everything was vivid, equalized. Part of the task of the self is to organize the world into hierarchies, tiers of relationships and preferences and desired outcomes and shoulds. But death levels all that, and we are left with a cup of coffee, boxes of trinkets, the green lichens on bare branches, pizza. There is an ache and a rawness in each conversation, each landscape. Sifting through a shoebox of Jesus key chains, summiting a wild peak, welcoming an adoring audience of literary hipsters: all take on the same sheen of meaninglessness that begs a search for deeper meaning.
In pregnancy, an experience whose shifts parallel those of grief, I find myself once again shaken by this awareness. Nothing matters, and I have long been a person for whom things matter.
I do not know how not to want, as wanting seems an essential precursor to the societal mandate of getting: book contracts, jobs, fame, from point A to point B.
What does your character want? goes the refrain in a fiction workshop. This wanting, and the various barriers to its fulfillment, are what drive a story. Without wanting the character is lifeless, the plot rudderless. The reader has no motivation to keep reading. Without want I cannot plan, practice, prepare, measure. Without wanting and obtaining, wanting and losing and wanting more feverishly, moving always closer to and farther from an ideal vanishing point, there is nothing to save me from sinking into insignificance, banality, and smallness, from being consumed by the dogged tedium of the everyday.
So there is nothing left to do but recognize that insignificance, banality, smallness, are all there is; they come sprouting up through the loam of pregnancy, bare as the first green shoots in the hot boxes. Jorge holds out a shoe to show me a tiny frog huddled inside. “Poor stinky rana,” he says. Jorge plays corn hole by himself, the bags hitting the board in a steady thud, thud, thud. A heron flies over the pastures holding a fish in its mouth. For the first time in my life I notice the creeping return of shade under the trees. Jack emerges from the barn with a cup of coffee in hand, his eyes crinkled against the sun. I hold up Suzuki’s Not Always So in greeting. “ ’Sup, Shunryu?” he asks. “Whatcha realizin’ today?”
“We don’t seek for anything,” Suzuki writes, “because when we seek for something, an idea of self is involved. Then we try to achieve something to further the idea of self.” To seek, to expect, to want, are to enter into a cycle of perpetually seeking, expecting, and wanting, digging further and further into the narrow burrow of the self. What is achieved is small, fleeting, insignificant, and never enough. It flakes away the instant we are confronted with birth or death. All of my attempts at design pale in comparison to just letting go, but letting go is terrifying, and I must do it again and again. Without the self, maintained and defined by wanting, there is nothing to separate me from the world.
Jorge and I go for a walk in the pastures after sunset. The sky is a darkening blue. Over the woods and grasses lingers a pale mist, into which the huge moon fizzes off-white. All the acute desire that has defined my adult life—of jobs and accolades and adventures—is absorbed by prayer. “What is holy—that’s all I want to know,” writes the poet Carrie Fountain. In the front pasture Jorge makes me stop for a picture. He perches the tripod uphill, where it takes in pregnant me and the apple orchard and the grasses that slope toward the valley’s center. Far behind us in my parents’ house, the TV lights up, bright images against the impending dark. Jorge presses the trigger and then sprints downhill through the wet grasses to place the flash. There is silence, stillness, a flare of light. He does this again and again, and I close my eyes and pray, slowly, carefully, as I’ve learned to do this year. The year I learned to pray.
We spend maybe twenty minutes on photos before Jorge is happy with one, on his screen a little blue moonlit representation of our blue moonlit scene. We continue into the back pasture, where we can see the moon in full glory above the ridge. It has the sandy color and regal fatigue of an old lion. I roam to the edge of the farthest pasture to where I can hear the creek running: a different sound in darkness, furtive and self-possessed. The inversion of night makes a new landscape of the familiar. I turn left and rise past the persimmon tree into the open field, the trees aproned by the soft gray shade of moonlight, their leaves shimmering in night breeze. I pray for myself to become a mother, this role I want to inhabit in the coming year. I pray to come into a different self: fuller, calmer, more compassionate. I pray. And then I look to a star, the only one visible in the back pasture, and pray for Elena, for my baby, her above all else, and nothing else matters. We return through the quiet slippery pools of mud between pastures, and I feel myself only as prayer, my whole body keeling toward the birth of this new being. I am erased, I am singing. John Cage writes, “Everybody has a song which is no song at all—it is a process of singing, and when you sing, you are where you are.”
—
During the most annihilating, intense pain of my life, I am expected to breathe deeply and open myself, like a tulip. In birthing classes the nurse warns us that she’s seen many women who wanted to do natural childbirth clamp up with anxiety at the pain and end up needing analgesics or an epidural.
The pain starts at 1:00 a.m. on June 4, and at first, it’s a curiosity. I actually think, Oh, so this is what a painful contraction feels like. The pain is unlike the low swampy throb of period cramps, unlike a bellyache. It radiates, starting at a center point and then undulating outward like the rays on a sketched sun, before those rays turn back and clench down on my whole torso for an excruciating five to ten seconds. It is still an exciting novelty while I stuff granola bars in a duffel bag, while we climb into the Honda in the thick of night and start with a crunch down the gravel drive, giddy nervousness giving me goose bumps. Heavy fog shawls the pastures, and the fireflies shine through it like bioluminescence. From here onward, every time I see fireflies I will think of this night, will remember the wing of the car door open in the driveway, the pulse of gold through the mist, the pain and the brink. Stepping off the cabin porch, easing my animate belly into the front seat, I have a vertiginous sense of the threshold: when I return, I will have a baby, the wormhole to this life of pregnancy and preparenthood will have finally closed completely.
On the two-hour drive into the hospital, in the triage room, and even making my way down the hall to the delivery room, I can separate myself from the pain, see it at a distance. Its intensity is observed and noted. In fact, I note that my sharp, ragged breaths and long shuddering exhales sound exactly like my grandmother’s when she was dying.
I suck on a purple Popsicle and then have to go to the bathroom immediately to expel it; Meg shows up, touches my belly, and hugs me; Mom shows up and hands me a black-and-white cloth box with a stuffed bunny and a monkey rattle and onesies; my sister takes blurry pictures of my face raw with emotion; and Jorge, as he does, weathers it all grinning and letting me squeeze the life out of his hand from time to time. There is laughter, b
anter, little waxy cups of water.
But shortly after we enter the delivery room, Mom and my sister and Meg and Jorge and bent, shuffling me arriving in a happy pack with the midwife and the nurse, there is a shift. The last thing I remember thinking is How in the world did my sister compare this to running a marathon? I half laugh, and then am swept under. The pain takes me like a riptide and leaves only the barest shred of conscious experience. I double over, clutch at myself. I clench my teeth and my muscles. I bark “Ow-ow-ow-ow-ow!” involuntarily, as if the words are being yanked from me like flopping fish from water. The midwife says, “Say ‘open.’ Not ‘ow.’ ‘Open.’ ” Desperate, I say it, “Open, open, open.” Each time it comes out a little calmer than the last, the o sound releasing breath. I breathe audibly, slowly, through the contractions.
They measure me, and my dilation is four centimeters: the same as when I arrived. At this moment I understand that I must make my peace with labor, or I’ll never make it. I strip down to a bikini, shuffle doubled over to the bathroom with the birthing ball, and keel over said ball in the shower for the next three hours, rocking and moaning. In these hours I am nothing but pain and a vessel. I close my eyes and envision riding the contractions like waves, rising in increasing pain to the searing crest, holding there with forced breathing for the ten or fifteen seconds of peak intensity, then breathing my way down as they recede. Jorge’s jeans are rolled up at the ankles, and his bare, brown feet are the only thing I see. They are tender and beautiful even in this agony; I notice and remember this. I open.
I move into transition and the contractions become unbearable; I stumble to the bed, lie on my side, and kick, screaming, “Ow-ow-ow!” like machine-gun fire. I am at this moment seeing only snippets of faces, hearing my sister say, “You’re doing so good,” and Jorge saying, “You’re doing amazing.” The midwife asks if I want to start pushing. I say yes, not really hearing my own voice, and then I am pushing my feet against my sister and Jorge’s palms with all my strength. I begin to shout, guttural primeval sounds, over and over, which feels good. The midwife interrupts: “Sarah,” she says, “you can roar your baby out. But right now you’re not doing any work. You have to bear down.” I’ve been evading the pain with all my noise. I am silent, internalizing all that energy, and then I bear down. For the first time I feel an enormous wall of pressure, a discomfort unlike anything I’ve experienced, as I try to free this other body from my own through a very small space. I bear down until it seems I am near exploding. When each contraction ends, some meager sliver of self-awareness returns, and I pant, cry a little, then feel the building of another contraction and bear down again. At some point I wail, “I can’t do this anymore!” and Meg leans in and says, “You are doing it.” I bear down again. And again.
Homing Instincts Page 13