To our credit, Jorge and I last through dinner and several glasses of wine before I say, after assuring him that it is superinteresting and unusual, that actually, um, it sort of reminds us of a TV show we’ve been watching. What show? True Detective. The Satan worshipper totems favored by its backwoods serial killer bear an unfortunate, striking resemblance to the Pagan Sculpture. Dad has never heard of True Detective but sports a rueful smile and offers that maybe we should bury the placenta—still sitting in a white tub in his freezer—out there. This leads to a summerlong succession of sacrifice jokes, while the Pagan Sculpture slowly gathers the farm around itself. Dad channeled some sort of energy into it, his mysterious Dad force, for every day I walk the baby out to it and stroke its sides, and when he has her, he does the same. Morning glories, my and Dad’s favorite flowers, spiral up the sculpture’s triangular sides. The mini-Victrola of each glory is lined with silken fur, a luminescent yellow shining from the center. They twist open every morning with a bright clanging—in Spanish, they are called rompa platos, or “plate breakers”—and by afternoon have folded themselves up like parasols. Dad has planted gourds, too, and they dangle in the summery mess of vines, the baby giving a sudden burble of delight when I tease one out.
This, now, is the center of my days, this bewitching, backcountry Ohioan Louvre of uprooted stumps and felled oak; I circumnavigate it with the baby and suspicious Little Dude and regal Leroy, who sprawls himself on its sun-warmed sides as if it were a throne constructed explicitly for his glory. What would I have said three, five, ten years ago had someone told me the touchstone of my life would be an improvised Buddhist heathen sculpture on my dad’s Ohio farm?
“Eliminating purpose, awareness increases,” writes Suzuki. “Therefore my purpose is to remove purpose.”
Boredom is a way of eliminating purpose, and thus can become paradoxically compelling. Robert Gottlieb writes of the paradigm-shifting choreography of Merce Cunningham and John Cage, “It was very boring. Boring was tremendously exciting in the revolution.” Cage used boredom to heighten the unheard sounds of the everyday; in his famous composition 4' 33", there is no conventional “music” to listen to, no artistic composition of the type we’re familiar with, only what seems to be silence. Four minutes and thirty-three seconds of very boring silence that requires an altered type of attention—there is a cough, a sparrow, a siren—in order to be heard. Had Cage been a woman, perhaps he would have been dismissed entirely, seen as pathetically attempting to elevate the domestic, for it is composed of precisely this type of music. It is the music no one thinks of as such, boring, to be shushed or ignored in the greatness of the true, composed music of the mind.
In Speak, Memory, Nabokov writes, “There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of deliberate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic.” Nabokov would surely roll in his grave at the suggestion that this deliberate meeting place is motherhood, and a whole succession of old white literary patriarchs, not to mention much of the current literary elite, would find the assertion that literature could be anything but anathema to motherhood hopelessly sentimental and provincial, quintessential female dottiness. And yet I find literature for the first time here: in the milk cave, in boredom, in the clouds I watch from the porch on days that have no beginning or end. The clouds volcanoes frozen in mideruption. The clouds white foam churned up by revelers. The clouds impressionistic smudges of white and navy paint hurriedly roiled with fingertips. The clouds the ragged coat of a snow-white dog on the hunt. The clouds kneaded dough stippled with fingerprints. I find literature in the silence after the baby stops crying, which is unlike any other silence. It is as if the world returns after annihilation and astounds anew with its robins and spaghetti and cut grass. In that moment of abrupt calm there is no good or bad or should or shouldn’t, just gratefulness to recognize once again the distant drone of a lawn mower, the tittering gossip of the chickens as they take a wide berth around the dog.
Child-rearing is notoriously boring, monotonous, and repetitive and yet somehow perpetually changing and intermittent; it can be simultaneously frenetic and eternal. Doris Lessing once claimed there is “nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children,” and surely many intelligent women would agree. I might have before I had children. I’ve spent my life in flight from boredom, seeking to make the most banal experience of brushing my teeth ecstatic by doing it drunk on rice wine in a Chinese train, but moving now between rocking chair and couch and milk cave, switching nipples, whole days passing in a tangle of wet clothes and hair and sheets, I am bored and yet more aware of my life, amazed by it, in awe of my enthrallment to boredom.
I find that I can’t operate under the Anglo-Protestant hierarchy that places endeavor, work, intelligence, far above the categories of contemplation, communion, mindfulness. The ultimate shallowness of artistic fervor became terrifyingly clear in pregnancy, and although there are moments when I get my fierce ambition back, its centrality has been forever tested. There is something more, something else, and how it manifests in hours of stroking the smooth arc of a flushed forehead, in making endless slow circles around the pigeons, in saying “treeee” and “dawwwwwg” and “cowwwwww” remains to be told, but I feel obliged to seek it there. The type of meaning making, attention, and purpose necessary for mothering seem far more difficult to master than the concentration and thought I conjure in writing.
One of psychologist Adam Phillips’s child subjects explained to him, “When I’m bored, I don’t know myself.” When I’m not writing, when I’m not multitasking, when I’m not consciously constructing new material, I don’t know myself, but I have found that not knowing myself brings its own satisfaction. My sure knowledge now is physical, held within the muscles and tendons that stretched to make room for another body inside mine, that opened to loose it, that strengthen sustaining it.
One night not long after the birth, in my first experience of an out-of-body fatigue that feels like what I imagine an astronaut might suffer if untethered from his spaceship, I crawl upstairs to sleep while Jorge watches The Good Wife and cradles the baby. I am passed out in otherworldly bliss for some fifteen minutes when I wake up shaking. I shake violently and sweat out what feels like every last ounce of fluid I have in my body. This goes on for an undetermined surreal stretch of time before it finally calms, and, disarmed, I stand and undress. My clothes are drenched. I can wring the sweat from them. Other than standing naked, exhausted, and baffled beside the bed at 8:00 p.m., I feel fine. Not wanting to waste a second of potential sleep on pondering what has just happened, I promptly curl up again and don’t wake until the baby is proffered to me some hours later, hungry. Later I find out that my body was ridding itself of all the excess fluid of pregnancy; that in one swift gesture, it released everything it had held so dearly for nine months.
—
At times in this fragile boredom, I feel like I do when I am backpacking, when the scope of my life has been reduced to what can be carried and enacted in a small patch of woods: light the stove, eat the slop, wash the dishes, start the fire. The basic chores become absorbing, my hands take over from my mind. I am grateful to have gone through the motions of the day, dipped the tin pot in the stream and set it out to dry, laid my aching body down. There is no recourse to the trappings and attractions of the higher mind; a clean face, a nap, a full belly are enough, in the same way that having nursed and rocked and soothed into the comfort of sleep become enough, as satisfying as the most well-wrought paragraph.
In these first few months, the grandeur of the long vista and great expectation are reduced to twenty-minute intervals of panting, fumbling survival. Jorge and I are in a perpetual frenzy of alertness and exhaustion, like animals preparing for winter, if winter came and went every twenty minutes. Our lives are a series of cycles on repeat, with no room for th
e luxury of anticipation or reflection. We are where we are and we are attempting to extract a poop-soaked onesie with the precision of surgeons so as to not have to give the baby another bath. In ten minutes we’ll be in another place entirely: maybe eating cherries and rocking on the front porch to the blue expanse of the pastures at twilight; maybe singing Bossa Cubana, Bossa Cubana and bouncing the baby with one foot while simultaneously trying to chop and boil and wash; maybe, blissfully, asleep. The everyday is physical and sensual and immediate and boring, and story is irrelevant before it. We live, to steal Geoff Dyer’s description of jazz greats, “as if improvising was a form of clairvoyance.”
Life is an endless sequence of tasks, connected only by the huge sky of fish-gill clouds. Running, when I am finally able to do it again; writing, in the few moments I eke out in my journal while she sleeps her newborn sleep of terrifying stillness; reading; driving the two hours into Columbus for towering hot-fudge sundaes with my mom and sister: all possess roughly the same texture and quality as changing the umpteenth diaper of the day, as shh-shh-shhing around the pastures, as squinting at the oracle of that tiny scrunched, maybe smiling, maybe squeezing-out-a-fart face. The ability to fantasize about dream lives and to see the day as part of a sweep toward future glory is temporarily lost, and all that is left is the immediate and obvious duty of the moment, with each moment opening out into an entirely new one—peace! frenzy! enchiladas!—and yet all of them ultimately the same. This is boredom, but it is also revelation, it is also a kind of release. Suzuki writes, “When you do something, have a strong air of determination to do it. Woosh! Without any idea of skillful or not, dangerous or not, you just do it. When you do something with this kind of conviction, that is true practice. That is true enlightenment.”
There will be no other choice in these first months. I boil peas. I rock until she grows heavy and my eyelids begin to droop. I coo. I press the baby to the breast and pick her up in the dark, I walk her around the wet grass at dawn. I scrub the filthy folds of her chunky little neck. Sometimes I am exhausted and miserable and even angry, and other times I am full of a swooning intensity of love that makes me want to devour her, and others I am laughing a helpless, giddy laugh at the fourth poo in four minutes, but regardless, I fill the tub. I wake up. I hold the small warm body close. All of my previous emotions, taken so seriously, stories in and of themselves, flit across the bedrock of biological determination. I recall Pema Chödrön noting that the average emotion lasts ninety seconds. I recall the old Montana maxim “If you don’t like the weather, wait ten minutes.” One minute I am swaying her very gently in my outstretched arms, and the next I am reading Under the Volcano, and the next I am rubbing Desitin on a teensy bottom. For some women this signifies oppressive, stultifying obligation, and perhaps had someone laid out the mandates of motherhood for me several years ago, I would have agreed. But my expectations haven’t aligned with the everyday in which I find myself. For me, this conviction of duty, this bare-bones necessity of presence, are freeing.
One night she wakes at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., in that thick gray-black I never really knew until I had a baby, and she rocks on all fours, saying “Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma.” She has been learning this in the way babies quietly learn without giving anything away, and now she reveals it with urgency. She must practice. Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma. It comes from her as a necessity, from that pure conviction of which Suzuki speaks. It wakes her up. I am ecstatic—Ma-ma!—laughing and clapping quietly in the dark, but she is still half asleep, unaware of the thrill her feat has occasioned. She repeats it several more times, exploring the syllables, and then she tumbles over and falls back into a deep sleep.
—
In motherhood, I discover a surprising physical grace. I have never been good with my hands. By this I don’t mean Oh, I can’t hand sew little cat ornaments to gift at birthday parties or I could never make my baby a homemade dinosaur costume for Halloween. I mean, I can barely open a bag of cereal. Somehow, there are Cheerios everywhere and the kitchen looks like the scene of a bizarre tragedy and my husband is saying, again, “What is wrong with you?”
In the sixth grade, my classmate Sarah Weese used to come over on snow days. By unspoken and unexamined fiat, she and I only hung out when school had been canceled. On these days, we would play Trivial Pursuit and drink the Swiss Miss with the teensy bobby marshmallows and get giddy together in the strange middle-of-the-day quiet of my kitchen. Then we’d go back to school and politely say hello to each other, like travelers who’ve bonded throughout an epic flight delay but have little in common at their destination.
Even in the sixth grade, Sarah Weese could cut a flawless slice of cheese. At this I marveled. I’d cut irregular gobs like slabs of rock severed in an avalanche. Or the cheese would crumble beneath my knife as if humiliated by my ineptitude. Sarah Weese, however, slid the knife clean through in a single motion. The cheese was felled like a tree. And although Sarah Weese and I drifted apart, my snow days in high school spent with other friends in coffee shops or at the movies or sulking around the aisles of Kroger’s buying stale candy, I always remembered this prowess of hers. She could open a bag of microwave popcorn and give flight to a perfect plume of steam. I’d scald myself, drop the bag, scatter its contents, curse.
Later, when I moved to Oaxaca, I watched women on the street carve mangoes into flowers. They’d peel the fruit in one slick rotation, the peel removed almost as if it’d never been there, as if it’d gotten away with a crime. Then they’d rotate the stick that sustained the mango, their hands barely moving, slitting crosswise into the gleaming yellow muscle until suddenly it became a flower. They did this over and over, dousing the mango flowers in chamoy and handing them to passersby like me, who so quickly devolved into a sticky pulpy mess that my husband was embarrassed to be walking with me.
Being in Mexico constantly reminds me of how useless my body is as a refined tool. I am a great runner; I can outpace and outlast many men. My body can tear up a 5K and strain itself to near vomiting to win a DVD player. And as a crude instrument for schlepping cheese sandwiches to the tops of mountains, my body thankfully works very well. But there is a brute, banal straightforwardness to running or hiking: lurch your body forward, keep it moving, faster, harder. The trembling elation after a backpacking trek or a run is testament to the fundamental clumsiness of these motions, the way they jolt and jar the body, straining muscles and releasing sweat and pushing all systems to the max.
In Oaxaca, people wield their bodies as instruments in the performance of distinct, elegant functions. The señoras, above all: they pound tortillas between their palms with a flat kissing sound and then, just as quickly and with just as much force, press them between metal plates and slide them onto the comal. No motion has more weight than any other, none appears to require strain or self-awareness. I am not romanticizing this, getting all heady with the copal smoke and rhapsodizing about the time when women used to spend twelve hours a day preparing meals. I once met a woman in a Oaxacan pueblo who got up at 4:00 a.m. to begin making a breakfast her husband would eat at 8:00, and while she seemed cheerful enough, I am wary of projecting a nostalgic wonder onto her.
Rather, I’m compelled by the physical knowledge apparent and contained within these daily tasks, a learning in the muscles that also indicates a certain type of relationship with the world, a sensual understanding of it: the mass of which it’s composed, the materials, their reliability and unique volatility. Historically, we associate cartography with men: explorers projecting themselves onto the landscape, hacking their way up rivers, graphing their exploits on crumpled paper. The topography of women is more intimate and largely uncharted, unheralded: it is an everyday geography of masa and children’s ropy bodies, nopales sheared of their needles, the rough newness of a towel from which the last drop of moisture has been wrung.
This is a way of reading the world, of both mapping and navigating it. It is a sure and unspoken learning of one’s surroundings that is perhaps more seamless
and intimate than that of great men. Its glories are often ignored as boring or shameful or dull, too quotidian and taken for granted to be noticed, and taking place not out in the open, on summits and plains, but in the milk caves of huddled intimacies.
Perhaps because I have always striven not for the accomplishment of perfectly baked bread but the soaring exceptionalism of a conquered peak, I suck at most tasks that demand dexterity. Maybe some innate resistance to perceived femininity slips the egg through my fingers, compels me to chomp at the mango like a medieval king working on a lamb leg. I have done nothing to try to improve this utter lack of manual ability. I have gotten along just fine without it for many years, walking down the street with beans on my face, making soups of lopsided vegetables. And for the most part I am no better at any of the quotidian tasks of physical labor—the buttering of bread, the mopping of floors—than I was ten years ago.
One summer night a few months into motherhood, however, I realize that a new physical prowess has emerged stealthy and jaguarlike from my clumsiness and overtaken me, in spite of myself. I do not know it is there until, in the diffuse glow of moonlight, with a poised, tensile delicacy and care, I lay my sleeping baby on the bed.
For an instant I hover above her, utterly still, my body a heat and a presence saying, It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. I have one hand on her back, the fingers lightly splayed, a touch like a leaf resting on grass. When she lifts her head a bit in protest I, without thinking, increase my touch by an infinitesimal fraction, directing into it every ion of my energy: Please let me drink this beer and check Twitter sleep baby sleep. It works. She settles, her body relaxes. I inch away as if in mendication, glide soundlessly off the bed, tiptoe to the door, and ease it shut in a slow, practiced, fluid motion.
My God, I think. Where did this grace come from?
I see then that my body has learned the geography of the baby the way that the aproned women on the corners know mangoes and the abuelas know tortillas and Sarah Weese knew cheese.
Homing Instincts Page 16