Sarah Menkedick’s debut memoir, Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm, offers a meditation on the way we live our lives through the stories we tell, and the way that youthful itinerancy ultimately yields to the desire for rootedness, family and home. For Menkedick, this impulse to home “is to cultivate a different kind of attention. To notice more acutely with an interior radar.”
In the first of eight essays, Menkedick writes of the travel and experience that defined her twenties: trekking across South America, teaching English to recalcitrant teenagers on Réunion Island, picking grapes in France and witnessing a revolution in Mexico. In later essays, she explores how this period of willful rootlessness gives way to a longing for a more internal mapping of self, family and the drive to create. This transition, and consequent personal transformation where her life “flops outside in,” is catalyzed by a return to a 19th century cabin on her family’s farm in Ohio, and her pregnancy with her first child. Surprised by her own longing for the comfort of the familiar, Menkedick makes sense of her experience by referring to the homing instincts of other living beings: loggerhead turtles, spiny lobsters, cats and even dung beetles. This quest for home is conveyed as inevitable and innate; the result of an indefinable but irresistible wholeness that home offers.
The moment of transition between youth and adulthood can be challenging ground to tread without descending into tropes or essentialisms. Menkedick accomplishes this with a keen awareness and a sincere voice that captures the internal dilemmas of a generation of women carving out family, professional and artistic roles in a “post-feminist” world. This means shaking off the baggage of fixed gender roles and maternal martyrdom, and coming to understand motherhood as a radically intentional identity rather than a compulsory one. In Menkedick’s words, it is an act of “transcendence rather than capitulation,” where family and home mean an expression of, rather than the sacrifice of, one’s “entire life and self.”
This attention to the quotidian, and where it fits in the larger universe of humanity’s desires and questions is a front on which Menkedick exercises a strong feminist voice that does not shy away from its own critique. Her reflections are suffused with the writing of other authors and spiritual philosophers such as Louise Erdich, Annie Dillard, and D.T. Suzuki, whose words offer a cadence to her own learning of self and wholeness.
It is possible to feel this contemplative space emerge on the page, just as one feels the changing of Ohio seasons, and the prayer-like comfort of daily walks through the woods. Menkedick’s attention to the nuances of landscape mirrors the internal terrain she traverses in her work. In the early essays she writes of the way that ideas about self and purpose are reshaped through the experience of pregnancy – at once transformative and completely ordinary. In returning to her husband’s home in Oaxaca, Mexico she comes to recognize Ohio as her own Motherland, made in “ritual, attention and affection.” In other essays she reflects on the experience of pregnancy as a “wilderness of waiting” in a state of altered attention, and her relationship with her grandmother, whose life speaks to the nature and meaning of the stories we tell.
In the early pages Menkedick does make some assumptions about the universality of her experience of home, going as a means of coming of age. Certainly not everyone is able to circle the globe before an inevitable return to the nest, nor does everyone have a nest to return to, nor does everyone “couple up, go to graduate school, launch careers.” But despite these problematic generalizations, Menkedick engages with the most enduring and mysterious of questions (life, purpose, art) in beautifully wrought, deeply embodied prose. Among the revelations of motherhood is 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… a knowledge carried in the bodies of women.” Within her essays, home for Menkedick emerges in these experiences of motherhood, the unrelenting physicality and present-ness of which strips away much of the internally imposed pressure to continually assert herself as untethered; belonging everywhere and nowhere.
She accomplishes this though without fetishizing the domestic, and with an honesty about the contradictions she finds herself constantly negotiating: home versus the road, the daily work of mothering versus single-minded devotion to her craft. Rather than professing a bleary-eyed and blissful transformation and transcendence, she is attentive to the ways that the daily rituals of motherhood imprint themselves on the body, and accompany the steady emergence of a knowledge that is at once spiritual and profoundly material. Motherhood is a means by which she is able to situate herself and her experience within the broader world.
The final essays are the most compelling, with the birth of her daughter, her early experiences of mothering and the way that the total immersion of parenthood makes her see her father, who raised her, in a new and tender light. These essays are haunting and evocative. Here, as in the rest of the book, she wrestles with essential questions without providing myopic answers.
The text as a whole resonates with the sense of “heady, dreamy immersion” Menkedick says she’s come to seek in her work over a more rigidly defined purpose. Indeed, she herself offers the best synopsis of Homing Instincts when she writes in her final essay, “I want to feel the world called up, depicted in its contradictions and coincidences and complex schemas. I want to merge with it, with its mystery.”
