Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (2 page)

I AM FRANTICALLY SEARCHING FOR MY
NEWBORN SON, ARCHER.
I’M ON
my knees. My hands are slipping across cold hardwood floors. I grope my mattress’s metal frame, the legs of his crib. I’ve already thrown all the covers off my own bed, convinced he was suffocating in down.

When my panic reaches an apex, I wake up.

Sleepwalking. Night terrors. I have no idea what to call these episodes, but they have become a regular part of my life. More than once, at sunset, I have wept knowing I was assured another sleepless night to come. Sometimes, I cry into the night, watching my son nurse in his sleep as my husband, Matt—a bookish woodworker with a collection of self-designed tattoos—snores nearby.

Matt does not parent at night. That was established early on. Though I’m already back at my day job—teaching writing classes between nursing sessions—he is working with power tools. Sleeplessness and power tools are not a good mix, and anyway, Archer wants milk. I am the supply. He is the demand. We are sharing my body. I am his ecosystem. He is mine. And it feels like we’re clinging to each other for dear life. Matt is in our orbit, but he has become a distant planet.

When I am fully awake, I see Archer safely sleeping in his crib. I glance at the notebook where I record each of his nursing sessions so that I’ll remember to rotate sides, lest my raw breasts began to bleed, again. He is nursing nine times every twenty-four hours, a system that means he is attached to my person, suckling, almost constantly.

I hear his every movement, each breath. I read too much about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. I cannot relax. I have not slept more than three straight hours since he was born, but I am especially shaken by the night’s episode, which has actually brought me to my knees.

My mouth is dry. My hands press against hickory floors.

I rise to get a glass of water that my body will, in time, turn to milk like holy wine.

Dawn won’t offer assurances. Days feel like hour-upon-hour of living underwater: the outside world muffled, every movement slowed to a languid speed. My friends tell me I seem to be handling things well. Things being the fact that my colicky son does none of the quiet, cooing lap sitting that seems so common in other people’s babies.

I wonder if it’s because I am afraid to tell the whole truth—what happens beyond the hours I spend staring at my son in wonderment, amazed at the miracle of his life. I love and marvel over him as if he were my own heart pushed into the world and, still beating, set on top of my chest. Yet I cannot help but mourn the loss of something I can’t quite place. I have an inner emptiness—literal and figurative—that I’ve never felt before. It’s as though nourishing his life has built a new chamber in my body that is now cavernous and empty, waiting to be filled.

I make my way into the living room without turning on any lights and walk toward a window, half expecting to catch sight of a bobcat. I see only the river below, a distant forest, and the hill leading to our garden plot. I feel like I am the only being awake in the world and—despite the fact that I have just doubled the number of people I share a house with—I have never felt more alone.

 • • • 

To his credit, Matt perpetually tries to bring friends back into our lives with more regularity, but his attempts—often grand, as in “Oh, did I mention I invited ten people over for dinner tomorrow”—don’t always go over well. In fact, they often lead to arguments and, to my chagrin, me throwing fits and—in my worst moments—food. Are these out-of-control reactions the result of hormones, exhaustion, or are they proof I am becoming someone unrecognizable?

I hold Archer, literally, all day long. He will not lie in a crib without crying and I—struggling with feelings of confusion, spousal resentment, and guilt over things I can’t quite pinpoint—cannot leave my baby when his face is wrenched. So, he sleeps on me. He plays on me. Constantly. Sometimes, especially around dinner, even this does not quell his crying episodes. I sing. I dance. I cry.

I have no hope of ever sleeping again. I have no hope.

I develop tendonitis in my arm. It hurts when I twist it to put him down, punishment I accept for thinking I might be able to go to the bathroom without a companion. I forget to brush my teeth. I don’t shower. I can’t figure out how to balance these simple things against my need to feel I’m doing a good job—the right things, what I’m
supposed
to do.

When a friend tells me that her baby takes three-hour afternoon naps, about how she’s concerned her child might be sleeping too much, I have a lurching physical reaction. I do Internet searches that lead me to terms like “wakeful baby” to explain why my experience is so very opposite. I find articles about wakeful babies being of higher intelligence, having a keen sense of curiosity. I want to believe them, but I suspect these articles were penned by parents like me as a form of solace in an excruciating time.

Finally, one day at around the six-month mark, I admit to myself that I am going to have a nervous breakdown if I don’t take a shower each morning. I turn on a white-noise machine and put Archer in his crib. His tiny features crinkle like tissue paper being balled. His complexion turns crimson. I turn the water on and try to relax, impossible in my near-psychotic state. I hurriedly rinse my hair—which has begun to fall out in clumps as my body attempts to readjust hormonally—and I run back to him.

My friends, mothers, tell me that I will slowly get my life back. I don’t believe them. My biggest fear—my secret fear—is the same one that plagued me years ago when I took a soul-killing receptionist job to quell my parents’ concerns about health care coverage: This is what my life is going to be from now on. Only, I no longer have the solace of a reception area full of
New Yorker
archives. It is impossible to read while nursing, because the rustling of pages wakes Archer from his tenuous bouts of postmilk slumber. So, I sit. I stare at walls.

The woman I once identified as myself seems to have ridden off into the sunset. I am having a complete breakdown of faith. Faith in what, exactly, I do not know.

 • • • 

Have you ever heard the saying about how a mother is someone who, upon seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, declares she never did like pie? Before I was a mother I thought this quote was sweet. My own mother, a retired elementary school teacher with a sweater for every holiday, is selfless in this way. But when a friend posted it on her Facebook page halfway through my son’s first year, it made me unreasonably upset. The mother probably baked the pie. Why not just cut the freaking thing into smaller pieces so everyone can have a taste?

When Archer turns eleven months old I begin ordering books about no-cry sleep solutions, but I am beginning to think it might not be such an awful thing to let him cry it out at night. I have cried myself to sleep for months. Something isn’t right.

One night, when Matt finds me wailing in unison with our son, he tells me I should take a break because my emotions aren’t good for Archer. Only then do I understand I’ve entered a phase of my life when people seldom consider what might be good for me. Even
I
somehow don’t feel it’s acceptable for me to think about my own needs—physical or otherwise.

Not long after Matt chastises me for crying, I tell him it’s time for Archer to go to his own room. I want him to feel safe and secure, but I have given so much of myself I feel hollow. An actual shell of my former being. And if I have no enthusiasm, no wonder, no want for life inside of me, how am I going to nourish my child?

Matt and I survey the home we designed and built together, putting in hard labor at night and on weekends. I suggest that we move Archer into the guest room, but Matt is convinced that he should go in a smaller space that once served as his office.

“It’s cozy, womb-like,” he says.

After a little hemming and hawing, I finally agree, and he builds a changing station using scrap wood from one of his job sites—strips of walnut, oak, and wormy maple. On the night Archer moves into that tree-lined, womb-like nursery, farther afield from his former residence—i.e., me—he starts sleeping. Not all night, but for several hours at a time. Finally, I understand what he’s been trying to tell me all along. He needs me, but he also needs some space.

I can totally relate.

 • • • 

Months pass. Each week, I get a little more sleep. Thirty minutes. An hour. Two hours. I am still breast-feeding, and I am still night walking—stumbling into Archer’s room, cradling my swollen breasts, convinced I am holding him after a feeding session only to find I’d already put him down—but my floor-level panic sessions have become sparse. I am upright. I am coming back into the world of the living. Sort of.

I’m an odd bird, you see—a mix of my mother, who rarely leaves the house, and my father, who cannot stay seated for more than ten minutes. Even before Archer’s birth, I hardly ever went out to socialize, but I often took trips farther afield. It’s unlikely I’ll meet you downtown for taco Tuesday, but I might very well join you for a trip to Tahiti.

Archer makes this tendency tricky.

I spend most of my evenings watching computer-streamed television shows that don’t require me to think. But as the months go by, my ability to stay awake increases. I start reading the news again. I begin to allow myself to dream improbable dreams. I pull up Web images of far-flung phenomena. Because my memory has been racing along the ridges of the Appalachian Mountains I call home, tracing the migration corridor of the monarch butterfly, seeking the promise of my own rebirth.

 • • • 

Nearly the entire monarch population of eastern Canada and the United States migrates to Mexico’s Transverse Neovolcanic Belt to wait out winter, traveling up to 3,000 miles from their respective homes. Their needs are so specific, almost all of the approximately 250 million monarchs that make the pilgrimage each year can be found in a small, mountainous swath of land in Michoacán and, to a lesser extent, the state of Mexico, where oyamel firs grow at high altitudes.

A monarch’s life span is only two to six weeks in the summer months, but those born in late fall live for an unbelievable seven to eight months. This generation is responsible for carrying on their species’ migratory legacy. The butterflies traveling to Mexico are four to five generations removed from the butterflies that left the mountains the previous spring. But they always return to the same vicinity, and often to the very same tree their ancestors left the year before.

Scientists believe the monarchs mark the trees in some way, but they do not know how.

In 2007, three years before Archer was born, I visited the El Capulín Monarch Sanctuary on a magazine assignment. The site was deep in the Sierra Madre Mountains, beyond the orbit of Mexico City field-trip buses and day-trippers. I was joined by a driver, Paco, and travelers including the Matthews family—Judy, Donald, and their son, Dan, a second-grade teacher with a penchant for Hawaiian shirts.

Judy and Donald, hobby naturalists from New York, had spent the last fifteen years of their lives working as volunteers for Monarch Watch, an educational outreach program of the University of Kansas. The Matthewses told me they had a garden they cultivated with plants other people might try to eradicate from their manicured lawns. They were especially careful to nurture milkweed, which the monarchs depend on for reproduction. This is where the butterflies lay their eggs, and the Matthewses were thrilled to think that the monarchs at El Capulín might have started their journey on the underside of a leaf in the family garden.

The Matthewses almost hadn’t made it to Michoacán that year. Dan explained that his father was coping with an early stage of Alzheimer’s disease and his mother’s walking cane was required because she had Parkinson’s disease. “It was looking like we couldn’t come on this tour . . . but it was important that we come now,” Dan said. “This might be their last chance.”

In preparation for the trip, Dan’s students had raised two butterflies to watch them go through their metamorphosis. One of the butterflies, Holey, formed its chrysalis on a book in a forgotten corner of the classroom. When he emerged, he had a hole in his wing. This deformity made the butterfly the kids’ favorite. Dan recalled, “I have a video of the kids on the day we released the monarchs. The butterflies were just out of reach, and they were chasing them and calling out, ‘Holey! Holey!’ It looked like a church service.”

The kids asked Dan to keep an eye out for Holey on his trip, but the odds of it made him roll his eyes. He said, “I mean, I didn’t even think Holey would be able to fly.”

 • • • 

The path to the monarchs’ roosting site at El Capulín was hidden between a white house and a wooden hut surrounded by banana trees and grazing sheep. It was not a place you would easily find on your own unless you were a butterfly, and maybe not even then. There, just outside the village of Macheros, monarchs lived at the top of Cerro Pelón, or Bald Mountain, a dormant volcano.

At the foot of the mountain,
vaqueros
, or cowboys, stood by their horses waiting for us to choose a companion. We’d been warned that the sanctuary’s roosting site was not accessible without one. I approached a tan horse with a black-and-gray-speckled mane. The animal, Flor, was short in stature, which helped calm my near-crippling fear of heights. But I was still nervous.

At dinner the previous evening, I’d explained my hesitation about riding horses and another woman on the tour said, “Sounds like you are having control issues.” She was right. I didn’t like being dependent, out of control of my own motion.

As Flor and I started our journey, I thought about how far monarchs travel. They move all the way to Mexico on air currents. They do not flap and flail; they soar. They would never make it across the continent before freezes if they used their own energy. It is because the butterfly leaves so much up to chance that it is able to reach its ancestral home in Mexico.

The relatively flat section of the lower trail leading to the monarchs’ hibernation site was flanked by trees with very little underbrush, likely due to grazing livestock. The evergreens’ trunks were impossibly straight. As Flor and I climbed, the brush got dense, and the path got steeper.