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"Exactly one week before my first book came out, my daughter weaned and potty trained. She did this in a day. After months, maybe even a year, of my hand-wringing about a possible eternity of diapers, about when and how to perfectly ease her off the boob, she woke up one morning and became a kid."
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"During the first weeks following our return to the U.S. after a year in Mexico, the playground was a space of near-euphoric refuge. Rounded edges, softened rubber, bouncing bridges at toddler height. The playground was the parental equivalent of a high-quality organic boxed brownie mix: just add a push on the swing and voila, instant stimulation."
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"I was driving a winding Ohio country road while my husband was at his mother’s funeral in Mexico. I was driving by myself, listening to a live recording of Natalia LaFourcade’s “Aventurera.” On either side of me, fields shone bright green under July sunshine. The sky was that big, earnest Midwestern canvas of blue and tufted cloud. I passed the Sugar Shack, the cows and the sheep, the tractors, the Amish boys pedaling their homemade bikes. I passed the sign that reads HAY FOR SALE, which still elicits dumb laughs from Jorge and me with its unwitting Spanglish interpretation: THERE IS FOR SALE, a fitting description of U.S. culture."
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"Maybe if we examined our derisive and supercilious attitudes towards the domestic and the realm of care-giving instead of assuming it pathetic, female, and sentimental, then it wouldn’t seem that art exists in such a rarefied realm. The assertion that it does, and that mothers may never be able to fully exist there or, if they do, will cease to be good mothers, impoverishes both art and motherhood."
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My baby was 18 months old when I joined Instagram. I figured the platform would be a way to connect with other mothers and writers, with the side benefit of bringing into sharper relief all the small everyday moments that define the life of a parent: the spilled Cheerios, the appalled reaction to a first hardboiled egg, the walks in endless circles around the patio with Perrito the pull toy.
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I have never been good with my hands. By this I don’t mean, “Oh, I can’t handsew little cat ornaments to gift at birthday parties,” or, “I could never make my toddler 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?”
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In the first few months after the baby is born, I experience a singing clarity: Milk! Diapers! Milk! Diapers! Lusty oxytocin! Sleep! Cheez-it binge! Sleep! I have cleared out a space–no, cleared out my whole brain–for this time, and I have no expectation of writing. It feels good to sink wholly into the physical, answering needs like playing whack-a-mole: hunger, got it; poo, got it; exhaustion, nailed it, and in between, losing myself in the baby’s depthless black eyes.
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I have always been skeptical of the writerly claim that literature is essential, even life-saving. I know that, coming from a writer, this is potentially blasphemous. Like most writers, I grew up a voracious reader, my definition of hedonism a Saturday afternoon sprawled on the grass reading The Age of Innocence. But literature has always existed for me one or two levels above that raw core where we grieve, suffer, struggle to survive.
Until I got pregnant.
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In the eighth month of my nine-month human pregnancy, I go on a binge-Googling of animal gestation periods. Frilled sharks, I discover, gestate for 42 months. Elephants take 22 months. Sperm whales: 16. Walruses: 15. Rhinos: 14. Horses: 11. I am seeking solidarity and comparative comfort in the realm of beasts, seeking to place my experience on a spectrum of waiting. I think of going on into month eleven, twelve, twenty, thirty-five: days into months into years of pregnancy. I find a kind of horror in it, and fascination, and reverence, and ultimately a question: what does it mean to exist in waiting, to wait so long that the line between life and waiting blurs?
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When I first met el Gordo – antes de que lo llamara el Gordo, cuando todavía era Jorge – we spoke puro español. He had a mop of pelo negro, casi chino, a lion’s mane embracing a sweet, round cara de inocencia. Pero en sus ojos había algo más: cunning, perhaps, the slyness that emerges when he crouches to snap photos quick and unrepenting at a distance that the gringos documenting el folklor would never attempt. El jura que sólo estaba haciendo su trabajo: siendo el manager, checking up on los clientes to be sure they were getting good service, they were satisfied. The fact that I was una rubia, más guapa en ese entonces, y sola, studying Spanish at a table for two – such classic and easy prey, which makes me almost want to believe him, since he was never a gringa-hunter and abhors cliche – no tenía nada que ver, insiste. Nada que ver.
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This past fall, I went with seven other third-year nonfiction MFA students from the University of Pittsburgh to New York to pitch editors and agents. Incidentally, we are all women. All young women. Not a single one of us was pitching a memoir or personal essay: one of us was writing a biography of Alexander Graham Bell, one a true crime story about a coal town murder, one immersion journalism about gay square dancing, one narrative nonfiction about a highway in Peru and its impacts, one a profile of a small-town filmmaker, and finally, in my case, literary journalism about Mexican migrants returning to Mexico after years in the U.S.
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There are five types of navigation, five ways to find your way home: topographic, celestial, magnetic, olfactory and true.
Topographic is used by the lowest forms of life, your mollusks and your limpets. Celestial is the rarest, used by some species of birds, some species of seals, humans, and the dung beetle. Many creatures use a combination: magnetic for broad navigation to general points, then olfactory for specifics.
True can only be used in familiar areas, where one can rely on landmarks: roads, rivers, mountains, buttes, fields, forests, the abandoned house, the one-room Airport Inn, Stauf’s Coffee, the baseball field, the water tower, the corner grocery, the place where this or that memory has imprinted like the fuchsia or the mournful blue on stained glass.
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Try this with The Best Magazine Articles Ever: Go down the list, and say out loud to yourself the gender of each writer as you go. You’ll say: man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, woman, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man.
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