“Look at all that hair!”
And a cry, and there is a head with full black hair. One more push, and she is out, incarnadine and screaming. The midwife raises her quickly to my chest and I am in shock, half laughing, saying, “My baby, my baby,” as she looks up at me with dark eyes. I am surprised at their darkness, their differentness from my own. They are little shimmering opals. She is wet and ruddy and completely herself, and I am ecstatic, startled, touching her tiny hands and feet. It is 2:51 p.m. Outside, it is raining.
It is not until a few weeks after the birth, when I am fully immersed in milk and sun and poo, summer and new motherhood, that I see this is what I’ve been trying to do all along: open, open, open. The shedding of self is painful. The urge is to seize up against it, hold tighter and tighter to the old givens, but eventually it will only get harder and harder, the passageway narrower and narrower. Instead I have to let go: open. Open above all to not knowing who I am, where I’m going.
—
On the top of a mountain in New York I lie under a muslin swaddle and look into my baby’s eyes. It is the longest she and I have stared at each other, and the first time I sense real seeing and intent from her. Her eyes are big and dark, fringed with her father’s lush lashes. Beyond the blanket is a navy sky, an overcast day. My baby is taking in the world, taking in me in front of her. I look into her eyes and feel myself absorbed by her like one liquid poured into another. Her eyes search mine under that frail porous muslin, which turns the harsh mountain sunlight to soft heat. Mother and daughter. Madre y hija. A self feels a terribly flimsy and frivolous thing, a ridiculous concept to entertain or mourn. I am a being in the world, an animal. I merge with this small, plump brown body, its wide imploring eyes in which the act of living is direct, urgent, like a river. In which there is nothing to do but live.
Motherhood for me washes away my imagined significance and reveals a clear and terrifying stillness beneath. “When you have this kind of genuine connection with yourself and your world,” Suzuki writes, “you may begin to encounter wakefulness. You suddenly feel as if you’re in a vast, wide-open space with unlimited breathing room. It’s as if you’ve stepped out of a small, dark, stuffy tent and found yourself standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon. This is the place of just being. It’s not an otherworldly, ethereal place. You haven’t transcended the ordinary details of your life. Quite the opposite. You’ve finally contacted them 100 percent.”
—
I am in the kitchen cooking spaghetti Bolognese in syrupy August light. From everywhere comes the sizzle and pulse of crickets, their insistency in this final luxe of heat. The pastures are colored in the early autumn palate of Queen Anne’s lace, coneflowers, Day-Glo butterfly weed. The sauce is puckering on the stove, the baby is in her Björn bouncer, and I think, I should put on music, I should listen to a podcast, that old urge to make this time useful, to justify it. But in this period after the birth, for months, I don’t want to listen to music. I don’t want to listen to podcasts. I don’t want any layers on top of what is right now. I have descended from the world of abstractions, from life lived in a gaseous ring above the everyday, to the yogurty ripeness of baby shit, the grappling of pudgy fingers, the slow sand-dune slide into afternoon sleep. I’ve found a way of being that isn’t looking for explanation or stimulation or a way out. After these years of nonstop stressing about being smart and successful, padding and feeding and listening to the self, I am in a realm where all that matters is this creaking wooden rocker putting her to sleep. All I want to do is be good to this small, new human being. It is a meditation, a prayer, a daily practice.
—
For the first six weeks of the baby’s life, I tend to her in this timeless, absorbing fever. Occasionally I glance at the clock and register the time as if it were a passing cloud: 2:15, 7:32, 1:15, 6:45. The days lap, one over the other, and like the baby I note changing textures and temperatures, inside and outside, light and dark, but I do not inhabit or control but rather am passing time. This unthinking immersion is satisfying: a feeling of wholeness, rightness, I’ve sought my entire life. I can and want to do only this one thing; it is what I was made for. In this sense of absorption and completeness, I exist in a separate space from the rest of the world, or am not clamoring for position in the world in the way I was before. It’s the closest I’ve come to having a calling. In my career I’ve never been able to claim a divine selection: Oh, I’ve known since I was three years old that I was going to be a writer! But for a brief instant motherhood consumes me and I relish this singularity of purpose.
Yet the initial timeless fever of tending to her tames, and I begin to discern blocks of time—a half hour while she naps, fifteen minutes while she gazes at trees and birds—when I can ostensibly “get things done.” I answer an email here; I sneak in a few pages in my journal; I spend an entire afternoon in the dark of the upstairs bedroom reading Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano while Jorge and the baby sleep. The more moments like these I am given or manage to seize the more I sense a fracturing: the tidiness of a clear self, even one wholly defined by and in service to another self, being eroded by the drag of conflicting desires and goals. I try to finish reading a poem before I respond to her whimpers and feel a guilt frighteningly disproportionate to her brief fidgeting. I put down Under the Volcano to walk her around for twenty minutes while she falls back to sleep, then put it down again ten minutes later when she wakes, then again ten minutes later when she wakes again, and I am appalled to find resentment where before there was a beatific sense of duty.
I try to tamp down the growing lust for these moments apart from her and the conflicting emotions they stir; I have found clarity and am reluctant to forfeit it. I want to feel a singing purity while baking oatmeal cookies and building block castles. In spite of all the thinking I have done about the fiction of self, I can’t help but fall for its illusion once again: this self a Mother, who consumes the traveler of the previous decades as neatly as a big fish swallowing a smaller one.
Damn it. The baby is crying. I am midsentence in Under the Volcano, the prose is rapturous, I am in writerly bliss but yes. Yes, here I come. Yes! I am a writer, I am a mother, I am carrying her through the plush August afternoon.
These selves, the traveler and the writer and the mother, do not fold together into one, are not mirrored on and on identically in a harmonic chord. Often they are in direct contradiction. I discover this on our first visit to Mexico with the baby. We’ve invited friends to our apartment for drinks. The baby grows fussy, and I take her into the bedroom to put her to sleep, but she won’t go down for the night. She steadies, her breathing calms, and then just as I begin to creep away, she startles and cries. After a half hour or so of this I grow frustrated, listening to the muted party sounds outside. Why tonight, of all nights? I think. She fidgets and whimpers and I become increasingly impatient. And then out of my familiar impatience, that characteristic itch I’ve carried with me through many situations on many continents, emerges another self, a ghost slipping out of my body: the mother. She has been in me all along and only in this moment can I feel her, watch her. The old me is still there, but she is watching in awe as another self holds and gently rocks the baby. I have cleaved in two, and all the while a third self—perhaps that essential core self of which Buddhism speaks, who simply observes fleeting emotions and desires as they flash around her like heat lightning—looks on. The mother whispers soothing words, rocks, loves, laughs at the other impatient foot-stomping self, and forgives her as one forgives a recalcitrant child, while the other self thinks, Fucking a, fucking a, how I miss that life of mezcal with abandon, while the third watches the whole process unfold. And then the baby falls asleep, and all those selves evaporate as quickly as they’d appeared. I rejoin my friends drinking beer at the kitchen table; the lights of distant colonias bristle on the far hill.
“Without losing yourself by sticking to a particular rule or understanding, keep finding yourself, moment, after momen
t,” Suzuki writes. I am on the porch rocking, the fully leaved maples on the driveway a swishing chorus, the baby’s slow-fluttering lids speaking of sleep. My eyes meet Little Dude’s sad mutt mug, she gives an exaggerated groan of neglect and chomps at a fly, and I am a task, a role, more than a person, a mother rocking, Sarah, yes, but Sarah sounds absurd, like calling myself Queen Fantasia the Fifteenth. I rock, rock, rock in time and space, Little Dude’s absurdly long purple tongue stuck out in a big yawn, the grass a glowing aura of green, a solitary finch perched on the highest branch of the apple tree.
—
In July, the baby and I avidly follow the World Cup. Germany beats Argentina in the final, despite my frenetic cheering for the latter in the name of Latin American solidarity. Shortly after the game it grows dark and windy and then storms in that frothy, full-on way it does here in the Midwest, as if a smoky-browed stranger has just swept in through the door and held the whole scene in thrall. I am on the porch with the baby, and she is fussy. I nurse, press her to my chest, and when that doesn’t work hold her out in front of me, her head in my hands. Like this I rock her, watching her eyes blink slowly open and shut, watching her stare at me, the rain, the world on this stormy summer afternoon. I hold her toward the cabin, its cozy yellow interior, the rain pounding down white and silver behind me and sending up a fury of spray from the grass. As it lessens I turn her toward the storm, and I see that this is the whole of motherhood: that slow turn outward, facing the rain, the drops on the hostas, the broken fence beam, the coneflowers and the butterfly weed, the woods, the pastures, the thrashing sky.
—
Farm summer is blurred in infinite shades of green and yellow—chamomile and lime, emerald and daffodil—bound by the bathlike midwestern heat. Amid this green and yellow mugginess I dance one afternoon with the baby to Jack’s version of “Caribbean Fire Dance.” I am ecstatic to be getting a tune in lieu of fart noises, and Jack is letting loose with it, practicing for an upcoming solo show. I strut the baby around the yard through falling walnut leaves. I get all caught up in the dancing and the day, and when it is done, I applaud.
“Bravo, little man, bravo!” I hoist the baby as if she were a Grammy.
“Thanks, dude,” comes the winded call from the dark recesses of the barn.
Not long after, we all go to Columbus to see Jack play at a small bar selling artisanal mead. There are the requisite hipsters and tattooed bartenders and a few self-conscious girls who lurk near the edges of the stage, clutching drinks, while I give them the big-sister narrow-eye from the bar. Jack begins to play and goes through nearly three-fourths of his repertoire before he gets to what I immediately recognize as “Caribbean Fire Dance.” The baby is asleep in her sling on my chest and I am rocking back and forth like a small craft at sea, in the way new parents do for months on end without thinking. Jack’s face is wrought and red and immersed in the song, sweat streaming into his ginger Viking beard. I think of him in the barn, working his way up the fart scale and then busting out with an “Oh, fuck! Yeah, that’s it!” in adorable earnestness. I think of his spit dumpage, of his deep-in-thought face when he steps out of the barn with coffee mug in hand, catches me watching him, and asks with a grin, “How’re the goos goin’?”
Now he is onstage pouring himself into the vessel of his horn, his whole self given over to that wail and treble like I give myself to a story. I feel that heart-gut emptying, all of one’s brief human life channeled into this tenuous expression on a Thursday evening before a crowd of dudes in wry-sloganed tees shouting, “Yo Brian, hit me up with a Dos Equis!” I want to slap these oblivious people who flit in and out from the patio, pawing at each other in rompers and Vans without socks, I want to dash their ten-dollar habañero mead margaritas to the refinished concrete floor and say, Do you see that breathless wonder up there?! I feel for Jack, the red pinch of his face and the windedness of trying so hard, channeling himself into each note, pushing himself up and down the scales, and straining to swing between high and low, light and dark, on the boughs of the heart. Little red beard, I find myself thinking, it’s so hard, and so thankless, and so you have to try like you do, try with the dedication of ritual and the acceptance of tedium, try through all the everyday banality of the fart noises, and you also have to give up, recognize that everyone will walk back and forth in front of your stage thinking about the fat content of organic tofu burgers. You play on anyway, free from the need for validation, from the division between practice and performance, barn solo and bar solo.
I am obviously speaking to myself as much as my little brother, learning that the work does not mean much, might not matter at all, if it is not equally worthwhile for a two-month-old on a farm in rural Ohio or an auditorium of aficionados at Carnegie Hall. This may be utopic, but it is also essential to one’s sanity as an artist, to making anything of depth, to pushing beyond the everyday struggles of ego and success that only grow more elusive and crazy making.
“When we are trying to be active and special and to accomplish something,” Suzuki writes, “we cannot express ourselves. Small self will be expressed, but big self will not appear from the emptiness. From the emptiness only great self appears.”
—
For my thirty-second birthday, just over a month after I give birth, my parents make me dinner. Meg makes beef curry, and Dad makes a cucumber-pepper salad and dal, and we have birthday cake, white with three candles. They sing “Happy Birthday” while I hold a sleeping Elena to my chest. When they say “Dear Sar-ah” I feel their tenderness as parents anew, seeing me as a daughter and a mother, a daughter who will always be such, even to their deaths, and now a mother who is beginning to understand why. Their gentleness is not only for me, but also for the experience of once having rocked a baby to sleep, having once begun and now watching that beginning again. I feel for the first time my own life in the ongoing pitch of lives. I can feel myself passing the torch in thirty years, making beef curry, blowing out the candles, and then being gone, and on and on.
I think of my dad hiking in the snow, calling “No bunnies!” to his dog Rosie when she runs off on a scent. He looks grizzled and sweet in the gray winter afternoon; he tells me, “There are only so many more times I can fall off a horse.” While I am on the porch feeding the baby, he walks past with his little camp chair and his man purse and waves; he is going to write in his journal by the creek. I find him one afternoon with the baby, sitting in a rocking chair on the edge of the pastures. She is fast asleep on his chest, a deep heavy sleep from which she is not easily roused. He’s wearing a leather hat and watching the day’s soft elision into dusk, the birds flitting from birdhouse to birdhouse. He is feeling again the weight of a baby’s trusting body, the tiny gusts of her breath.
Not long after, I am on the front porch of the house with Jack and his girlfriend, Sofia, holding the baby, watching another storm roll in. A huge triangular mass of gray cloud is advancing, the wind is picking up speed in the trees, and then the storm cracks open: thunder, thrashing of leaves, rain. Silver sheets pummel the grass and garden. Our voices are drowned out. The storm does its work in oceanic navy light, as if we were under the belly of a ship. Fifteen minutes later, it is over. The ship moves on, and in its place shines a landscape of sharp, sublime contrast. The sky is a patchwork of empires: battleship gray, gold, cerulean. Over the woods, a double rainbow appears. Beneath it, the pastures glow with heavy light thick as lacquer. The farm is quiet. Sofia and Jack are making gin and tonics in the kitchen, and Dad and I are in the yard with the baby. It is still raining, just enough to wet the baby’s face.
I see now the object of Dad’s life has been to create this safe space: the front porch in the midst of a storm, the comforting white noise of Jack and Sofia puttering about in the kitchen, and I understand the meaning of family. I see myself as only part of a cycle, which unfolds in this place he has built. The place is as much himself, the rock of himself upon which we engrave ourselves, as it is this patch of Ohio.
I remember in the previous fall, in the dark of my uncertainty about the pregnancy, going on a walk with Jorge and my dad in late afternoon, just before dusk. We climbed slowly through the lycopodiums to a rocky shelf that overlooks the woods and the valley beyond them. The light was that combination of ice blue and copper particular to clear days in early winter. It came slanting at a low angle through the beeches and warmed the green moss on boulders. Dad and Jorge were talking about trail building, and I had the sense of being in an eternal scene, like the specifics of conversation didn’t matter and there was just that moment spread over the whole of my lifetime. The Ohio landscape seemed as essential a part of me as an eye or an organ; its rainbow of greens, its winter skies, are all that remain below the myriad ongoing definitions and assumptions that snag and then drift away. If there is any self I can claim, it is only the fleeting feeling of recognition in these woods, of walking through them behind the tall redheaded comfort of my father. Elena will hold something else, a snatch of bawdy street fair in Mexico and perhaps California pine and always the stellar brilliance of fireflies in early Ohio summer; elements she will absorb beyond whomever she dreams and creates herself to be. I see the smallness of my own life in this place, this center, the aerie of family and the newly wet hills. I see myself as only the Ohio woods, the light, observed. As Annie Dillard writes, “When everything else has gone from my brain—the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family—when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.”
Homing Instincts Page 14