The material weight of the baby, her movements, the subtleties of her acquiescence or resistance, are a knowledge I’ve cultivated without ever realizing it. Or rather, I’ve realized it without respecting it as knowledge. I don’t begin to do so until I notice the way other mothers, whose kids are grown, retain the corporeal memory of the myriad physical details of taking care of children. They possess this in a rote way, without nostalgic or purposeful aim, but from time to time they recognize it with a sense of wonder and self-respect. My stepmom, for example, changing a diaper. Describing it, she flings her hands around in a series of crisscrossed, mind-boggling Xs. “Wham wham wham!” she says. “Done!” It is a spot-on reenactment of a wriggling newborn’s diaper change. It comes right back, she explains with the satisfaction of recalling mastery.
Mothers rely intensely on their bodies to interpret and respond to the signals of their yet-speechless infants. In doing so, they are forced to get in touch with a physical realm that is animal in its intuition. In the way great trainers can affect a horse’s canter with the slightest shift of their hips, mothers curve their palms to cup fragile heads, taper their rocking to imperceptible levels to coax peace. They must read signs most people do not recognize as signs, or even movements. They learn this language because it allows them to have a fucking break from it all to watch Parenthood and eat Cheez-Its with their significant others, please. But also because their bodies take over their nagging minds, their impulses, the selves they thought were so solid and unbendable.
In the very beginning I am incredibly awkward at breastfeeding. My baby is great, a natural, and for this I am so thankful. But I need about fifteen precisely arranged pillows and a support system for my elbow and my husband standing by with a glass of water to tilt to my mouth, since I cannot possibly devote a finger to anything other than the exact affixation of baby to boob. Little by little I gain proficiency, I recognize the tingly avalanche of letdown, I stop fearing I am going to suffocate my baby with my own tremendously inflated bosom.
Two months in, I can breastfeed while vacuuming and reading a novel. I twist my baby around with the fearless know-how of a master swordsman, and voilà, there she is, latched, while I chat on Skype and fold socks. I can tell from the slightest turn of her lip if she wants to nurse, or to switch sides, or if she is desperate for sleep and can’t get it without the help of my chest. She is a physical language I have learned to speak.
Then after I’ve put the baby to sleep and marveled at her head nuzzled just so in the crux of my arm, the mastery of my calming her into the cool ease of rest, I emerge from our bedroom and promptly drop a bag full of eggs. “Fucking shithead piece of crapola!” I shout. I’ve somehow managed to smear one down the wall, despite dropping the bag pretty much directly to the ground. The house has a vague eggy smell for days.
I seem to have gained a new corporeal sense only in areas pertaining to the soft, sweet, sticky body of my baby. And as has been the case with many other unanticipated changes of motherhood, I’ve developed a new respect for women’s knowledge, for all of the seemingly tiny, insignificant tasks women have performed throughout thousands of years in relationship with the world around them, in the sustenance of life. We can appreciate these tasks when they are codified as work or expertise and performed by men: chefs, say, or surgeons or architects. But there is also an architecture and a surgery and an artistry to everyday life, and while I respect that there is not the same training or the same weight in the latter, it is another type of learning, unrecognized, largely unvalued, carried in the bodies of women.
But my point is not a political one. The skills developed in the body by taking care of a baby are a gift, a way of being in the world, and a way of connecting with all the women—and some men—who have learned these skills before. They are a chance, as is all of motherhood in certain instances, to dig down below all the self-conscious assertion of everyday life to a more intimate, instinctual, animal level, of poop and vomit, sure, of milk and little necks creased with prune puree, but also of a physical elegance like that of an alligator slipping into a stream.
Sometimes I anticipate a future when this knowledge will be recognized, reactivated: ten years from now when I’ll hold a friend’s baby, or my brother’s baby, and think with pride and maybe nostalgia and maybe relief of these years and their total immersion. It is not unlike the anticipation I used to feel while living and working in foreign countries, dreaming of the day when I’d look back and remember the blue-lit morning beach, the sharp scent of anise in the air. It is infanthood as a country, mapped by a mother’s body.
—
On a drive from Columbus to the farm one afternoon, my mom calls to check up on me and mentions cooking chicken tetrazzini just before my birth. For the remainder of the drive I think of chicken tetrazzini baking in the oven, myself in my mom’s belly, her anticipation of my arrival. Only with my own baby can I understand that physical connection, that craving, the elemental biological nature of it. To be pregnant and to mother are to live at the level of those basic elements that in antiquated biology textbooks were called “humours”: blood, bile, chicken casseroles topped with Ritz crackers. These become more essential than ideas, stories, conversations: the swelling scent, the growing baby, the teeming body. To live at that level is to find boredom superfluous: the beating heart, the churning arteries cannot be boring or not boring. It is to live in total absorption with another, the thoughtlessness and timelessness of whole afternoons lost in a tangle of sheets.
I often have the sensation of living a moment simultaneously from two bodily perspectives: my own and the baby’s. When I hold her to me and look down at her I have the uncanny feeling of also looking up at myself; I sense her tiny wriggling body as my own, and so too her heat-seeking mouth, smelling my chest, and I am a single-minded being groping for warmth and milk, lulled by the tremendous comfort of a mother’s proximity, while I also feel from a distance my own body relax with the knowledge of what she needs, with the power to take care of her and to feel as she feels. When she finally lets go and sleeps, the deep sleep where her whole body goes slack and her little limbs tumble around like a doll’s, I too slip for a moment into the delicious relief of temporary oblivion. Her sensations eclipse mine like the sun sliding over the moon, leaving only the tiniest sliver, tinier, tinier, until for an instant the two merge in a total blackness that eliminates the rest of the world.
The only other time I’ve had such a clairvoyant sense of another person’s experience is in sex, whose overpowering physical intimacies share more with maternal connection than we tend to acknowledge. The tie between mother and baby is not lusty or erotic, but it is carnal: in the pressing of skin to skin, the synchronizing of heartbeats, the shared sweat, is the same blurriness of bodies, the same desire to inhabit another body and lose oneself in it, as in the obliterating moment of orgasm. The baby slides around atop me in the bathtub, her skin slippery with soap and so new it seems to have just come out of some silken pod; the baby and I are snuggled up tight in the dark as she nurses to sleep, her legs twined around mine; the baby dozes in her back carrier, her drool-covered cheek pressed heavily to my neck, ululations coming in little puffs from her mouth as she soothes herself into further sleep.
“Everything,” Rilke extolled, “is gestation and then bringing forth.”
—
Breastfeeding on the front porch one clear afternoon, I taste a blackberry—that is, I don’t just eat a blackberry expecting blackberry taste. Looking out at the proscenium of summer sky over the humming stage of woods and pasture, I tend to think that maybe I’ve just never paid this type of attention. The blackberry has been another layer in a multilayered reality. But when I spend the majority of my day sitting with a baby at my breast, my world limited to a series of delicate one-handed reaches and careful crab walks, my brain soft and dreamy with oxytocin, I notice only one flavor at a time, or I don’t consciously notice at all. I settle into my boredom as the day settles into its changin
g airs and clouds, until the baby pulls abruptly off the breast as she tends to do, sending a little jolt of pain through my nipple and leaning her head back in pure satisfaction, a dribble of milk running down her chin.
THE LAKE
THE YEAR I TURNED TWENTY, my dad drove the nine hours from Columbus, Ohio, to Madison, Wisconsin, to pick me up from college for the summer. He came in a van freckled with duct tape and coaxed into continued operation by pure Dad scrappiness. On the way back, we talked about the young adult novel he was writing, about a boy on the cusp of adolescence whose father has just died in a tractor accident on a North Dakota farm. Outside, the Midwest streamed by in golds and periwinkle blues. Just before Chicago, the van thumped, groaned, and began to expire. It ground to a terrible slowness, amplified by the cars whizzing around us. Somehow, Dad steered it onto a tiny triangle of asphalt between I-90 and the off-ramp to I-94, where it finally fell silent and died. “Well,” Dad said, “I’ll tell you what. That couldn’t have worked out any better.”
This is my dad’s timeless refrain, his summary of any not-entirely-catastrophic catastrophe. Robberies, rejections, breakdowns, breakups: each ultimately comes round to an I’ll-tell-you-what. He has perfected his timing, making his pronouncement at precisely the moment when calamity becomes comically absurd and transforms into family folklore. You’ve been thrown over the handlebars of a used mountain bike with hypersensitive brakes that Dad scored for fifty dollars? “Whoo boy,” Dad announces, “good thing we were out here on these campground roads and not in the city. Tell you what: couldn’t have worked out any better.”
The I’ll-tell-you-what is part of an enduring Dad faith, a philosophy embedded in his being like crystal in granite. To him, each potentially dire incident is a precedent for a new awareness. He is so skilled at giving a sense of meaningful inevitability to unexpected plot twists that, growing up, I never recognized his story as an I’ll-tell-you-what story. I didn’t feel the weight of his loss, his own dire moment; his life was not marked by regrets or wanting of redemption. He constructed for me such a sturdy sense of independence that I never saw his sacrifices as such, never thought of them as laying the groundwork for my own life until I became a writer, and a mother.
—
It was a mark of my dad’s yet-to-be-rewarded faith in me that, when I was thirty-one, recently bestowed a highly impractical graduate degree in creative writing, and subsequently jobless, he invited me and my husband to move into a cabin on his forty-acre farm. If my life has been an exercise in stretching my dad’s trust—cohabiting my final year of college with a former professor ten years my senior; backpacking alone across South America; getting engaged to a man he’d never met; relocating on a whim to China—this is perhaps the time I have most tested its elasticity. Red Hawk Farm has become Dad and my stepmom Meg’s lifeblood, embodying the vision and purpose and sense of mission they lacked in their professional lives, and the personal fulfillment they often postponed or set aside as parents.
This farm is where my dad wants to die, amid the Ohio woods, the swaying grasses of the pastures, the darting blue jays and chickadees, the goofy ululations of wild turkeys, the meandering creek bedded with deep-blue slate. Here, he has begun to write again, taking up poetry at age sixty-two. Here is where he circles back to the dream he had as a young man, and here is where I am beginning to recognize the enormity of what he has granted me: the freedom, independence, and courage to pursue a creative calling he sacrificed for family. Here is where I will start my own family and where I will confront the meaning of that calling: if and how and why I am committed to it, what it means when I have a baby to raise, what to make of its filial significance and heft.
—
My dad grew up without a father. He was two when Earl Menkedick died of meningitis, and my grandmother stared down the nuns who wanted to collect him and his brother, Bill. Grandma took a full-time job as a receptionist at an insurance company. The German midwestern stoicism that steeled her against what could have been the all-consuming pain of grief also prevented her from expressing overt affection for her boys; she never told them “I love you.” She placed her faith in hard work and education. My dad went on to become the valedictorian of his high school and won a full scholarship to Northwestern. He showed up wide eyed and idealistic in 1960s Chicago, the token working-class midwestern proof of meritocracy. He wanted to study English, to work in social justice.
Yet he quickly found himself alienated and lonely, unsure of how to be around so many kids who came from much-wealthier backgrounds and took in stride their roles as students at an elite university. He was out of place, vulnerable; he read T. S. Eliot by the wind-whipped lake. A year into college, he dropped out, returned to Cincinnati, married my mother, and had my sister. He gave up the sweeping ideals of literature and the sixties to become a father. Over the next decade he worked nights at a Cincinnati grocery store, putting first my mom and then himself through college, earning a master’s in English and a master’s in math from the University of Cincinnati.
I was born in 1982; one year later, my parents divorced. My dad moved out, and I went with him while my eleven-year-old sister stayed with my mom. This was, and is, highly unconventional, and now that I am a parent, I cannot imagine what my dad must have been thinking. He packed up his life and took a baby with him to a tiny basement apartment on the edge of Cincinnati’s crack-addled ghetto. He planted morning glories, built a wooden playground in a backyard the size of a horse’s stall, fed me and dressed me and performed the thousand daily rituals of parenting, alone and heartbroken.
My memories from that time are colored in the washed-out blues and striated yellows of old film photos: the playground at Fairview Park in winter, me in a woolly face mask that makes me look like a miniature serial killer, summiting a slide in tiny hiking boots; or me sprawled on the knobby rug—abhorrent in the way only seventies rugs can be—hugging the dog; or toddling up the street in an ill-fitting snowsuit and scraggly hair, this photo stuck to a piece of scrap paper with Dad’s cheeky caption beneath: Will you help this child? I remember the extraordinary gift of a green Care Bear, and the precise moment I looked up and met Dad’s eyes as he handed it to me; remember an illustration on the wall, a red smear with black eyes, which he called the Boogeyman; remember reading The Giving Tree and choosing our own giving tree in the park, a flowering cherry overlooking the Ohio River. But these memories must have all been from later, when I was four or five, and are layered atop the ones suggested by the photos to create the impression of that time.
Now I see those years through a parent’s eyes. Holy crap, I think, I was a toddler. I would have been digging through drawers, wobbling around on my hammy thighs searching for electrical cords and balls of dog hair, smearing beans on the walls and wailing with protest when my face was washed. I would have been waking up fussy at 2:00 a.m. and whacking my dad on the head at 5:00 sharp to start the day. “I rocked you to sleep listening to Raffi,” Dad told me years ago, and I found that sweet and quaint. I felt a tender affection for “Baby Beluga” and “Down by the Bay” and cheery bearded Raffi in his giant banana suit on the cover of Bananaphone. But now I know what this means. It means that drippy, sluggish exhaustion like a thousand marionette strings tugging you down, and suppressing frustration at being woken for the tenth time in two hours and feeling stabs of despair as you lift the baby from her crib, and the surprising, sweet heaviness of her head nestled into your shoulder, and singing and singing until you no longer exist, nothing exists but blackness and warmth, and finally you soften your song into sleep. The more my baby grows, and I play that role for her—waking with her; racing after her as she takes off with a measuring cup for the open door; walking, rocking, soothing for hours through teething and fevers and fears—the more stunned I am by the magnitude of what my dad did for me.
Taking care of an infant leaves lasting physical impressions: the way my sister instinctively starts to rock when handed the baby, even once the baby is a year o
ld, and the way a friend of mine’s boyfriend, who had two children by age twenty-four, jutted out his hip and said, “You’ll be like this, all the time, in a year or so.” He was right, and I think of this each time I thrust out that hip and set my baby astride it, feeling part hen, part mom. This is muscle memory, a rewiring of the body and mind. On a drive down Highway 1 in California with Jorge and the baby, I realize that infanthood is a place, a very small place, no bigger than ten square feet and sometimes only the size of a couch or a bathtub or two warm bodies clutched together, which parents occupy completely for several intense years in spite of how far-reaching they believe their gaze or range to be. Outside, the sea is undulating a sparkling crystalline blue and smashing white spray against the cliffs, the beaches are slivers of toasted almond, the bridges offer glimpses of Pacific between the flip books of stone rails, but try as I may to be swept away with awe I am too busy reading Dónde Está el Ombliguito? and proffering silicone broccoli. I am fanning Cheerios like pearls on my palm. I am making expressions of shock and fascination as I demonstrate two blocks coming together and pulling apart, I am bonking a water bottle on my head and saying, “Ag-ua, ag-ua.” The baby has been in the car for five hours already and is willing to play along with this road-trip plan provided the entertainment is steady and enthusiastic. Even in the downtimes when she is gnawing an apple slice and I can trace the brilliant static of waves all the way to the horizon, I am not lost in the landscape as I once would have been. I am instead in the country of motherhood, and it is no bigger than arm’s reach.
I have a new respect for anyone who has taken on the responsibility of infanthood, who has put in that time day in and day out, handing the plastic spoon back and forth for hours, guiding the unsteady feet up and down the step over and over, before eating an entire box of Cheez-Its and passing out. My dad did this for me, and he did it without ever revealing his own pain and loss. I did not realize until decades later that during this time Dad was also building himself back up. He had been broken, a vision of himself and an understanding of his life had crumbled, and with me in those Cincinnati years he was going through a wrenching change. Later, my sister would tell me about finding him sobbing in the kitchen of the Pleasant Ridge house in the year before the divorce. She would tell me, too, about seeing him hard at work before the typewriter.
Homing Instincts Page 17