Homing Instincts

by Sarah Menkedick

  —

  The summer slants toward fall.

  One evening like any other, in late August, there is a rainbow. It is rainbow weather, with the trees spinning silver and schools of yellowing leaves twirling downstream into the thick grasses. All of my pregnancy, and this whole summer of new motherhood, have been rainbow weather: gray and butter yellow, Technicolor blue and electric green, slate and cotton white, rainy and sunny and stormy and calm. The trees tilt with the wind. As I watch, a flock of birds goes wheeling through the eastern sky. When they shift southward, all spinning in formation, they catch the light spilling from behind a cloud, and they all turn silver, a dozen silver coins tossed into the changing sky. Like that they stay an instant, glinting light, incredible, and then again they are birds twirling up and away. A rainbow appears, and then a double. We go out to play cornhole while the day’s final clouds ham it up on a blue horizon.

  It takes years to really notice this, understand it: the rhythms of a place, the way the sun moves across valley and farm. One afternoon I think of that plan I had in early pregnancy to become a better person: Have I? It is getting close to that reckoning time, nearly three months after the birth. Rocking the baby to sleep on the front porch, I come to see that in pursuit of that question I’ve stumbled onto something so much bigger, almost so big as to render the earlier question moot. I’ve stumbled upon, as Suzuki puts it, “the question that is the ground or basis of all answers.” Perhaps in some small ways I have become “better”—better at openness, better at quieting the blather and the urge to smear myself across the world in words, personality, opinions. The change is not complete; it jogs back and forth, and I can only be more aware. But the bigger point isn’t better personhood, like a task to be accomplished. It isn’t a remodeling so I come out on the other side with everyone remarking on my transformation: You’re you, but better! It’s more as if the world has begun to move from the stillness of my limited perspective and become once again a mystery, and the me within it is no longer definable by characteristics, words, or images, no longer the essential core around which the world pivots. At times I have the courage not to need that core, and at times, still, I cling to it.

  —

  On our trip to Mexico, we travel the bumpy hour and a half over mountain roads from Oaxaca City to Guelatao to introduce the baby to Jorge’s mother. Elena Rosa, we say, meet Rosa, and Jorge’s mother laughs her characteristic raspy, deep, humble laugh that embraces all absurdity, especially this small, bundled, black-haired being who shares her name. She exclaims over Elena, strokes her hair, coos at her, wraps her in a shawl with one simple motion I am unable to replicate no matter how patiently I am taught. Rosa sits beside me on her wooden bench overlooking the village and the piney mountains of Oaxaca. She watches me hold the baby and says, “Una mujer completa.” A whole woman. I know she means that motherhood has filled some gap in me, and I know this is a traditional notion and one women have rightfully fought hard to debunk. But I think of the writer Courtney Martin’s definition of the whole self as a radical challenge to the singular, mimetic selves we so often limit ourselves to, both online and in the everyday, the selves who rely on one word or expectation or pattern of behavior. The whole self is irreducible, incongruous, and perpetually unfinished; it is the struggle between contradictions. We try for equilibrium like the tongue of a scale flicking back and forth until it settles, quivering, in a revelatory moment of poise. In this moment we accept all those contradictions and what they say about our becoming, and we possess a rare grace.

  —

  At the farm in early September I wake from a nap in the hammock, my mind still coated with that thin furze of disorientation following sleep. Jorge and the baby are in the yard, and the afternoon is bright with clouds like fluffed pillows. Jorge has bought a new mountain bike and urges me to try it. He walks the baby while I curve around the gravel drive. Once I am on the paved road I pump and pump and then sail, legs splayed, wind lifting my hair, the yellow center line undulating up and over the Ohio hills past goldenrod, past the pastures out of which explode bright yellow finches. I think, I’ve made it. The last time I was on this road alone, I stopped, capped knees with sweaty palms, and sobbed, and now here I am—I made it. And here on the other side I see it’s still life, still the day to day, the thrill and novelty buffered once again by the slowness of the quotidian.

  Nonetheless, when I head back in the cooling afternoon, I want to believe I am a different woman, renewed, changed…at least until I pull back into the gravel drive to my husband holding the baby, and I take her in my arms and remember it doesn’t much matter. The trembling aspens clatter in a breeze above the driveway. There is no mail. The next morning, the baby wakes herself up, applauding her discovery of applause.

  She begins to pay careful attention to our mouths and the words they form, and I practice with her: “Boo,” I say, again and again. “Boo,” in front of the mirror while she watches, enraptured. The eerie memory of looking at photos of my mother in her thirties comes to me. As a child I remember marveling at how young my mother looked, there on a bridge in Paris, there on a hillside of daffodils. In those pictures she was a person I could never know and who would only ever exist for me as a potent mystery. I think of Elena looking back and seeing me as a young mother, looking in awe at the mystery of who I was, with my braided hair and my checked shirt on the farm in those in-between years of early motherhood. I see my life already gone by. Between one “Boo” and another in the bathroom mirror, my whole life passes.

  THE MILK CAVE

  “YOU ARE AN ANIMAL,” Jorge tells me. We are in bed. The context is not what you might expect. A baby is latched on to my right breast while the left leaks an opalescent waterfall of milk.

  “I’m a mammal,” I say. This is about as deep as our conversations get in this first month of parenthood. We are upstairs in what we’ve dubbed “the milk cave”—the cabin’s dim bedroom. I spend the better part of my days here, watching as my baby’s eager sucking mouth goes rooting and then latches on with the force of a heavy lid sealed shut on an overflowing container. There is nothing soft or gentle about my baby’s latch. It is the precise enactment of its definition: a clamping on, a fastening of two bodies. I feel a sudden tug of suction, a rasp of thirst, then sleepiness. I listen for the ker, ker, ker of her swallowing.

  Before I gave birth, I knew breastfed babies need to eat every two hours. But knowing this did not prepare me for the sheer amount of time breastfeeding demands. Even if someone had told me, “Twenty minutes per breast per feeding,” it would still have taken sitting down every two hours for forty minutes for me to understand, because just like every other aspect of pregnancy and motherhood—morning sickness, contractions—the imagined experience turns out to be laughably unlike the experience itself.

  I am hunkered down in the milk cave in a mess of sheets, sticky with an overabundance of milk, balancing the baby in the football hold and watching her eyes blink slowly open and closed with the rhythm of sucking. I finally finish, set her in her Björn bouncer, and start digging into emails, and then, again, she shoves her fist in her mouth and starts smacking her gums with comic eagerness.

  Whole yellow and green summer days slip by between the milk cave and the breezy porch, gazing at baby on the breast, at the whirring fan and the sheets with their pattern of roses, at the pastures of wavering grasses incandescent in afternoon light. Nights I awake at two, at four, at six, and in the grainy coffee black I hold the warm parcel of her, feel the eager pressure of those small gums, our animal bodies pressed together, the darkness undulating a bit in my delirium. I try not to fall asleep, have half thoughts, then enter a space of no thoughts at all.

  At first the novelty of the experience is enough to consume me entirely. But after a few weeks, I grow restless. I have to do something else. Or rather, I have to do something, since breastfeeding somehow doesn’t count. It seems to exist in that nowhere realm of feminine activity: in the back stairways, the dark
kitchens, those places where women do the invisible work that drives and maintains life. The essential ground-level work: the feeding, the nurturing, the staving off of chaos, work not measured in hours, miles, words, or dollars. Work that doesn’t count as such. I sit and stare and enter an oxytocin-fueled dream state, a new kind of boredom.

  In the past, I’ve felt boredom as a restrained and tedious anticipation: how many more minutes in the waiting room, or until the bus arrives, or until this lecturer stops droning on. Boredom as a toe-tapping impatience for the next event. But in breastfeeding boredom is a kind of presence, an altered way of being. It doesn’t involve any anticipation. The act of giving milk itself is pleasant and soothing; it’s not that I am eager for it to end. And it’s not that it is uninteresting, between the strange palpable effects of the oxytocin and the mesmerizing face of the latched baby. It just doesn’t fit into the matrix of productivity or purpose or attention I’m accustomed to. It is simply being, a mammal animal being, layered with a human consciousness as thin and light as linen. It is not directed, not overtly constructive, and while it may spark curiosity or desire, it may also leave the mind unperturbed by either. There could be a revelation, an insight to be used in an essay or a dinner conversation, or there could be nothing more than the vaguest drifting of consciousness among the wind in the trees, a faint awareness of the sound the poet Pattiann Rogers describes as a “cavalry of paper horses.” It is this lack of drive and intentionality, lack of an actively interpreting self, that I find so unfamiliar and disconcerting. That I call boredom.

  So I do what we do when we become bored: I buy an iPhone. The iPhone is incomparably handy for traveling and for taking six thousand photos of baby in hooded bath towels, baby in socks, baby in sweatpants, baby with flowers, baby with dogs, but breastfeeding is the final justification: I need a task to perform. And so at 2:00 a.m. I start writing one-handed emails, checking Twitter, Googling “Muriel Rukeyser.” I get things done. I rejoin the ranks of multitaskers, not only living my life but cataloging and documenting it, too, making sure it adheres to measurable standards of productivity.

  It only takes a week or so to recognize the loss behind this gain. The self I’ve returned to—busy, hyperaware of a particular situation and its particular worth and where she is heading and why—feels more boring than the one present in milk and darkness. I can’t fall asleep again at 3:00 a.m. after the constant churning of Twitter. And each time I turn from the screen to my baby’s face I feel guilty, as if I’ve just missed a whole era for the forgettable pseudo-events taking place over and over on the spinning hamster wheel of cyberspace.

  One night, as I’m breastfeeding, checking email on my phone, and thinking about this tension between presence and achievement, I come across a recent post highlighting the work of the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, who emphasizes the importance of boredom in learning to pay attention to the world. Phillips writes: “In boredom…there are two assumptions, two impossible options: there is something I desire, and there is nothing I desire. But which of the two assumptions, or beliefs, is disavowed is always ambiguous, and this ambiguity accounts, I think, for the curious paralysis of boredom….In boredom there is the lure of a possible object of desire, and the lure of the escape from desire, of its meaninglessness.”

  It is this in-between that makes boredom so disconcerting. I’m staring out at the pastures, hypnotic in summer heat, their hazy grasses swaying, lulled by this escape from desire, its meaninglessness, and then a thought comes, and I want equally to follow it and to let it go.

  —

  Dad is carrying in his oven-mitted hands a blueberry cobbler Meg has made for us. He sets it on the porch table next to me and the baby. Doughy, sweet steam wafts up. He walks off through the rococo greens of trees and grass and pastures while I nurse the baby and smell the cobbler. It is days after the birth, and I am oozing blood. Down there I am swollen, throbbing. I take a strange pleasure in it, in its reminder of the intensity of birth, of the capabilities of my body. The baby latches, sending a shivery jolt of pain through me. Thin milk spills from her rosebud mouth over her body, which is a deep burgundy. For weeks after her birth she looks like a kidney bean and is covered in a black down, incredibly fine, which I stroke along her tiny arms and back. Her small body is as charged with scent as potpourri; the house is filled with it, sunny hay, and with the redolence of milk, blood, yellow seedy baby poop, the messiness of two humans making it through the first weeks of life. Outside the sky is the faded motley white of sea salt caked on skin.

  “For artists or writers to express their direct experience,” Suzuki writes, “they may paint or write. But if their experience is very strong and pure, they may give up trying to describe it: ‘Oh my.’ That is all.”

  —

  In July, we slaughter the roosters. Meg had ordered eight chicks in the spring, and we’d discovered shortly after their arrival that two were in fact roosters, who soon began to fight with each other and abuse the poor hens. Meg and Dad decide they’ll have to be culled, and the day comes when Elena is just over a month old. Dad makes his long strides up to the cabin in muck boots, stopping to check on the irises, and calls a hello into our cavern of strewn diapers and books and glasses of water.

  Dad and Jorge catch the roosters, and then Dad, Jorge, Jack, and me—baby snugged to my chest—proceed in drenching heat to the boat shed near the horse barn, where Dad has set out a little weather-beaten table with blue legs. Atop it lies a hatchet. While Dad gets ready, Jack holds the first rooster, and Jorge walks the second a short distance away so it won’t witness the slaughter of its compadre. The smaller rooster in Jack’s arms is already scraggly and raw from being attacked by the larger one.

  “Are you okay, dude?” Dad asks Jack, who looks uneasy. Jack nods. Above us the sky is a hot deep blue fleeced with cottontail clouds. It is the peak of afternoon, and the light is direct, poured yellow from above as if from a pitcher. Jack brings the rooster to the table and presses its neck to the worn wood. I am carrying sleeping Elena in a cotton sling. Her face is soft and round, sweat pearling on her precious nose, her tiny strawberry tongue white with milk. The heat settles around us all, watery, undulating.

  With the front pasture rising ripe green behind him, Dad raises the hatchet and brings it down with a rubbery crack, severing the head in one clean blow. Blood geysers from the neck and sprays all over Jack, who half mutters and half cries, “Oh, man, oh, man, oh, man.” Dad grabs a bucket and says, “Here, dude,” and Jack thrusts the gurgling body into it neck down. Rooster feet stick up, spindly and yellow, still twitching. On the table, in the head, one green eye blinks. “Oh, man, oh, man,” the dude says. He is polka-dotted with blood. His farm baptism, we joke later.

  Then it is Jorge’s turn. Having grown up in the mountains of Oaxaca and attended an agricultural high school, he is familiar with animals and their harvesting. He has made his own chorizo, hunted rabbit, watched his mom swiftly kill their chickens and boil them for mole amarillo. He emerges from beside the barn with the second rooster, carefully positions its neck at table’s edge, and smack comes the hatchet, the head now a writhing absurdity, the body a feathered cavity fountaining blood. Jorge ducks the body quickly in the bucket to drain, sparing himself any spray. Elena sleeps.

  “Whoo boy,” Dad says. He takes the first body out and begins cleaning it, pulling the feathers from the still-warm skin with a soft ripping sound. I see the black points at the feathers’ tips, the black dimples on the skin where each fit so precisely. Dad carves the meat from the bone and the bone from the body. The breasts are measly and muscled, and Dad lays them on a platter on which is depicted a bucolic farm scene. He whittles elegantly around the lurid jumble of organs, chops off the feet, and tosses them with the feathers into the bucket. I stand in the boathouse shade with Elena, who is deep in that beatific newborn sleep, her cheeks rouged, her eyelashes a fine-tooth comb, her breaths an almost imperceptible heat among the greater forceful heat of the day. Once Dad finishe
s we walk back up the hill toward the house with a platter of meat and a bucket of feathers. I stoop to pick a four-leaf clover. That night, we eat the tough grilled meat with barbecue sauce and suck at buttery corn on the cob while the chickens bumble around the grass, the sunflowers bowing above them like monks.

  —

  Dad is building what will soon come to be known as the Pagan Sculpture. He has harvested gnarled tree roots and old gray logs, a few stolid trunks, and a heap of classic John Menkedick miscellanea, and it all sits in the front pasture awaiting transformation. Every day he goes out to work on it, waving a gloved hand at me on the porch. Slowly it gains a base, then rises into pyramidal form, with the roots like Medusas tentacling out from the sides. We are called to consult from time to time about the positioning of a particular piece: does it flow or interrupt from this angle, will we trip over it if he leaves it down here? Finally, one evening when Jorge and the baby and I are sitting on Meg and Dad’s porch, watching blue take over from the wet yellow heat, he comes striding up and declares it done.