Homing Instincts

by Sarah Menkedick

  I knew that Dad had written a novel in his midtwenties, about the night shift at a Cincinnati grocery store and working-class midwestern culture; that he’d received encouraging letters from publishers in New York; that after the divorce he’d thrown out the only copy. But I had never pictured him in the day-to-day absorption of the writer, living the writing life, and I had never pictured him racked by sobs: the only time I’d seen him cry was the day he dropped me off at college in Madison. He insulated me from his dreams, disappointments, and reconciliations; he never implicated me or suggested that his life could have been otherwise.

  But taking charge of me, I finally come to understand when I have my own daughter, might have marked the end of the possibility of his being a full-time writer. He moved into that frenetic, insomniac country of infanthood with his whole heart and soul. He took me backpacking all over Ohio, through the Red River Gorge and the Blue Ridge Mountains in Kentucky, into the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. I was two, three, four years old, with a pudgy belly and a stuffed unicorn creatively dubbed “Uni.” He hiked through his grief, shedding it in the dappled shade of midwestern forests, showing me the surprise dart of a salamander from under a lifted stone. He instilled in me a love for the woods. The woods, that distinctly Ohioan place: not forest, not regal pines or shimmering birches, but sturdy ash and smooth-barked maple, black walnut, and American elm. For my tenth birthday, I asked for a backpacking trip, and Dad obliged. We hiked to a lake and took pictures of ourselves leaping from an overhanging rock into the water; we fished for bluegill at dusk.

  Dad married my stepmom, Meg, when I was five, and the following year Jackson was born. Dad settled into a career as a scientist at a research institute and bought a house in Columbus. The dream of writing, nurtured first at Northwestern and then later in working-class fatherhood in Cincinnati, was once again set aside for the practicalities of supporting a family in a nice neighborhood, putting three children through college, taking everyone on vacations to Michigan, and stopping for breakfast at Frisch’s, where, growing up, he’d eaten out once a year with his mother.

  I, meanwhile, began to develop my own interest in writing, first with my brilliantly titled second-grade literary debut, Animals, which featured, as one might intimate, a host of creatures in their native environments. In the best example to date of my budding egoism, I dedicated Animals to myself. (On the second page was printed “This book is dedicated to _____­_____­__,” and in the blank I penciled Me.) I swept the summer reading challenge at our local library, racing through nearly the entire Baby-Sitters Club oeuvre in two months. In high school, I won the local Rotary 4-Way Speech Test Contest with a missive that railed against homophobia and compared it to the Holocaust, opening with the subtle, allusive line “Six million Jews.” I made it to the state finals the following year with a speech about Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, this one more finely tuned, with invectives against consumerism blended with wispy, softly voiced odes to the moon.

  Dad came with me to that second Rotary competition, just as he had come to the first, sitting through twenty-some speeches moralizing against the evils of marijuana and teen pregnancy. We drove to Finley, Ohio, where finals were held in a small, fluorescent-lit room in a redbrick building. I went first. About a minute into my speech, I blanked out. Just blanked out completely, falling into total silence like tumbling over a cliff. It lasted maybe thirty seconds; it seemed eternal. Then I picked up where I’d left off. I delivered the rest of the speech exactly as rehearsed, thanked the Rotary Club, and sat down wearing a rictus of forced composure. My dad’s compassion was written all over his face. In the parking lot I broke down, taking sobbing sips from my complimentary water bottle. All that work and I had screwed it up. I came in fifth out of five. A future business major—a business major! I wept—had taken the gold.

  “I’m so proud of you,” he said. “You finished with dignity.” I think he was prouder of me for having failed and persevered with grace than he would have been had I won. On the ride home, he tried to cheer me up. “I’ll letcha get whatever you want from Walmart!” he offered.

  “Wow, Dad,” I said.

  “Okay, for under twenty dollars,” he added.

  After I’d selected my random consolation prize, surely a Boyz II Men CD or hideous sweatshirt, and we were approaching the highway on one of those nowhere Ohio exits, all cornfields and country roads, he said, “You and I have something special. We grew up together.” It was the only time he has referenced our bond, and it came on the heels of my first disappointment as a writer.

  I took it for granted that my dad was using the royal we of parents. “We don’t smash eggs on the dog, do we?” “We love spinach, don’t we?”: that instinctive, knee-jerk we that blurs the parent’s identity with the child’s to teach social mores or maintain a veneer of politeness over seething frustration or express family solidarity. But I see now that this we was genuine, implying him as much as me. I grew up, and he grew up, too; he molted as I am molting now, letting go of past givens, rewriting himself, immersed in the natural world.

  My dad was raised without a father, and became an exemplary one. He gave his life to filling the gap in his own childhood, where a man never sat in the audience and applauded for him in spite of his humiliating failure, never listened to him for hours on afternoon drives through endless midwestern cornfields. I want to give mine now to filling the space where his novel may have been published, where he may have achieved the glory of recognition for a poem. Maybe we all long for some part of our past that was never fulfilled; we carry a lack in our bones. We seek it in smell or touch or landscape, stories or mementos or photographs, or subconsciously in amorphous cravings. For my dad this was the experience of having a father, of being fathered, and for me this is the novel of his twenties, all the novels that went unwritten as he played Frisbee on the lawn and fixed my bike and drove me night after night to play practice.

  But whereas my dad’s devotion to fatherhood was almost entirely selfless, born of sacrifice, my dedication to writing is born of the independence, strength, and drive he nurtured in me. The only sacrifice I have made for the freedom to write is that of furniture and a decent haircut. Instead I have asked others to make sacrifices for me: asked my husband to move to the United States so that I could attend graduate school, asked my parents to let me camp out on their beloved land. Now that I have a baby, the stakes of these sacrifices are rising: Can I claim that my writing is so important, so central, that it might mean I lack money for decent health care? Can I ask my husband to watch the baby for several hours each day in lieu of taking paying work, or much-needed time off, so that I can write highfalutin essays about the culture of Spanglish? Is staking out my impractical artistic mission amid financial insecurity and the all-consuming years of early parenthood empowering, a defiance of the centuries-old pressure on women not to demand too much, or simply selfish hedonism?

  The house looks as though someone has flipped it upside down and shaken it, we’re surviving off cans of refried beans, the poor dog is curled beneath the walnut tree in a state of shocked despair, and I am looking up shades of orange (Mahogany! Vermilion! Atomic tangerine!). I might as well be stopping for a cupcake in a hurricane.

  And so for the first time I understand the lure of giving up, of declaring it officially impossible and not worth it and taking a job as a park ranger. I have failed enough now to understand how unrealistic it is to expect the kind of success that would actually support a family, the kind of success that would provide tangible and objective proof of the worthwhileness of continuing. I am worn down and exasperated with all the rejection and the uncertainty and the starting-from-scratch ambiguity of each day, and family is the best and simplest excuse to say, Enough.

  —

  On one of the drives back up to Madison, eighteen-hour round-trip journeys my dad undertook to drop me off, we stopped in Evanston. “I’ll show you my old haunting grounds,” Dad offered. It was summer, and the lake was a gli
nting cobalt blue, foamy at the edges, framed by tawny statuesque buildings. “I used to take walks here,” he told me. “I read poetry.” The narrow beaches were still emptied of students, the piers lonely and meager before the vast lake.

  Growing up, I had taken it as a point of pride that Dad spurned Northwestern, that he was accepted into and then rejected that rich kids’ school and still made so much of his life, that he never nursed bitterness or a greater-than-thou attitude and went on to become the most intelligent, gentle, and respected person I knew. I had endowed his story with a Menkedick pedigree: not needing—and in fact triumphing in spite of—the Man. I had taken what he had given up so much for granted that I’d forgotten he’d given it up, and like anything given up, it lived on as the not-done, the not-realized, even if only in the very back of his mind on Sundays, or during tedious drives to Cincinnati, or walking the dog on certain spring evenings.

  At twenty, during our impromptu detour, I finally felt what it meant to give something up. This trip was my first adult intimation of loss, of the fact that certain decisions are irrevocable even if they come round to the I’ll-tell-you-what. I saw the ivy on the patrician stone houses and the stoic grandeur of the lake and understood that here my dad had felt longing, had once held the promise of becoming an English professor or a poet or an organizer of city youth or all of these, but had ultimately not become any. In this moment my dad became for me human, fallible, and my relationship with him lost some of its childlike one-sidedness and gained a more adult inflection of empathy and nuance.

  Then we drove on, and surely I soliloquized with great pomposity about an obscure development in environmental history, and he had a double gin and tonic at Genna’s on the Square, and we walked around Madison’s tamer, gentler lake before we called it a night, well-sweetie-time-to-hit-the-hay.

  —

  It is too easy to extrapolate from my dad’s experience of loss the permission to live my life unfettered in the noble pursuit of literature, quality dinnerware and savings be damned. Still, in the way Dad trusts me even in the most uncertain circumstances, the way he urges me on and persuades me to have faith even with rejection after rejection, I sometimes sense that moment by the lake. In some ways, the more impractical writing begins to seem—another failed book, a baby, a plan to move to California—the more I sense that my dad wants me to keep at it. I don’t feel this as pressure or an obligation, and I know he wouldn’t judge me if I were to say, “You know what, I’m taking this nine-to-five job at a nice middlebrow magazine and we’re buying a house.” He’d likely be ecstatic for me to host Thanksgiving and stop calling him about the dead mouse in the kitchen. His quiet influence is more about extending permission, believing in the indefinable and experiential and existential stakes of art, and hoping that belief—and the part of oneself that believes—can be validated. My dad understands what it means to struggle for a creative, unconventional life, and he respects that struggle. No one ever modeled it for him or listened to him in his moments of doubt and urged him on; he had to tackle the massive and intimidating prospect of failure far earlier than I did, and without family who understood either the risk or the decision not to take it. He understands both.

  On a walk through the winter woods in the middle of my pregnancy, when I am kvetching about the impending rejection of my latest work, feeling despondent with yet another failure and the purposelessness of this whole endeavor, my dad says, gently, “You know, big deal. That’s what the Buddhists say. I mean, maybe you publish one great poem your whole life. And big deal!” He’s wearing his old down coat and his scruffy hat and his muck boots, shrugging in a foot of snow. He’s not being derisive or flippant or dismissive. He’s letting me off the hook, reminding me what matters. We are out for a walk in the fresh afternoon cold, and soon I will have a baby, for whom he will build a padded wooden rocking chair like the one he rocked me to sleep in so many nights. In the end this whole endeavor is worth so much more and less than that.

  As I move into early motherhood, I find myself less and less able to nurture the gallant fantasy of fulfilling his dream of being a writer. It becomes less and less clear what that fulfilled dream—my own or his—looks like and consists of. His dream was likely part the letter of acceptance from the major publisher and part the successful depiction of the guy on third shift named Frank who named his two sons Frank and Frank, the satisfaction of paying close attention to the relationships and sensations and emotions that compose everyday life. He went on to do this in other ways: memorizing birdsongs, turkey hunting by himself at 5:00 a.m., watching his children discover the world.

  My own dream, meanwhile, is less and less the proverbial carrot and more the immediate desire to note that this morning I fed the baby a wild black raspberry, felt her muggy, gummy little mouth on my fingers, and turned to see her round face, smiling its guileless baby grin, tilted askew to meet mine. At dinner the other night I told Jorge that for the first time I understand writing as a struggle toward clarity; in the past, I’ve mostly known what I wanted to say, had an idea how to say it. Now I don’t. I gather up the everyday and stir it around on the page, working it and working it until the water runs clear.

  “It is a kind of mystery that for people who have no experience of enlightenment, enlightenment is something wonderful,” Suzuki writes. “But if they attain it, it is nothing. But yet it is not nothing. Do you understand? For a mother with children, having children is nothing special.”

  At a time when I am still figuring out how to keep a small, vulnerable human alive, I am less and less able to define why writing matters, and yet I begin to write like I mother: out of bedrock necessity. The baby’s diaper needs to be changed and I change it. I need to write and I write. I don’t write because I think I will lose a part of myself if I stop, because I think becoming a park ranger will cause my soul to wither with the spurning of art. In fact I think I might live a healthy, happy everyday life: bake more pies, write more letters, stop driving Jorge mad by leaving balled diapers on the rug. I write not because I have some new gleaming sense of purpose, or even because the literature of motherhood hoisted me out of my own moments of despair and made me want to give that gift to another stranded soul. I sure as hell don’t write to make money. I know less and less of why I write, and the less I know the more compelled I am to do it, the more I drive at it the way the hummingbird drives with a jet roar into the hostas, making me duck each time.

  In Zen in the Art of Archery, Eugen Herrigel, a professor of philosophy living in Japan, recounts his quest to learn archery and, through it, Zen. Herrigel is constantly trying to find some trick, a formula, for pulling off the perfect shot, but his teacher insists that he not shoot, that instead, when the bow is at its point of highest tension, he wait until the arrow shoots itself. Of course, this is maddening for the poor pupil, the kind of maxim that makes a frustrated writer want to say, Screw it, I’m starting a mommy blog. Herrigel tries again and again, unable to wait, succumbing to quivering muscles, always attempting to discern the right moment instead of letting go. And then one day he does it, unawares. He looses the arrow unconsciously, having disappeared into the postures and rhythms he’s learned so well. He writes, “It is necessary for the archer to become, in spite of himself, an unmoved center. Then comes the supreme and ultimate miracle: art becomes ‘artless,’ shooting becomes not-shooting, a shooting without bow and arrow; the teacher becomes a pupil again, the Master a beginner, the end a beginning, and the beginning perfection.”

  I am unsure whether the hours I manage to carve out at my desk with leftover peanut butter pie, mentally shredded from intermittent waking, could be qualified as perfection, but from time to time slogging away I feel myself become this center. It is a return to the emptiness I experienced for the first time when I was pregnant: a feeling of calm, clarified seeing without any grasping. The part of my brain that is perpetually waiting for the baby’s slightest whimper, the part that is aware I’m in a barn in a hot green Ohio summer strugg
ling to write to the tune of the whirring fan: all fade and I am nothing but the play of words. I am not going anywhere or aiming at anything; I am not myself so much as I am a hollowness. I am rung by the world like a bell; I am breathed, as Herrigel puts it, instead of breathing.

  Mostly, however, I write like a mule schleps its load up a mountain. There is no misty aura of glory or romance, and oftentimes it’s a slow and tedious hoofing for my hormone-boggled brain, and I stop every ten minutes for Cheez-Its. I defend my writing time, though, with teeth. Jorge and I get in the worst, longest-smoldering fights of our relationship about this time, whose practicality I cannot justify. He is the one earning the money. He is the one whose time is billable, who actually pays the bills with his wedding photography, although often he’d rather be shooting documentaries about rodeo riders in the Mexican Sierra. And he washes dishes, fries bacon, does laundry, walks with the baby around the yard saying, Yes, the birdie house, yes, the leaf, oh, yes, what a nice rock. It requires a terrible and terrific arrogance for me to claim three hours to hash out a half-coherent treatise on the gestation periods of walruses: an arrogance not only in the immediate domain of my family but in a larger, universal sense, to imagine that fitting life into language matters when I have now lived the reality of birth and the pressing need of a hot little mouth.