Homing Instincts Quotes

“Pregnancy has lowered me from this state of uniqueness I’ve long sought and shown me you, too, are part of the most basic human experience.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm

“I resist the exhaustion, the sensitivity, my rounded belly and breasts. I resist, above all, the softness of pregnancy. Pregnancy is all curves and couches and naps, all tenderness and susceptibility.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm

“I’d spent my twenties constructing a hard, certain self on the foundations of boldness, ambition, an ardent sense of justice, a lean and muscled body, and now pregnancy is a confusing tumble into uncertainty, interiority, quietness.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm

“Child-rearing is notoriously boring, monotonous, and repetitive and yet somehow perpetually changing and intermittent; it can be simultaneously frenetic and eternal.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm

“I find literature in the silence after the baby stops crying, which is unlike any other silence. It is as if the world returns after annihilation and astounds anew with its robins and spaghetti and cut grass. In that moment of abrupt calm there is no good or bad or should or shouldn’t, just gratefulness to recognize once again the distant drone of a lawn mower, the tittering gossip of the chickens as they take a wide berth around the dog.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm

“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 the seemingly tiny, insignificant tasks women have performed throughout thousands of years in relationship with the world around them, in the sustenance of life.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm

“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.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm

“Motherhood, I grow to realize in these first months and years, is the experience of everywhere-and-nowhere-ness. It is to be the only answer to a very specific set of physical needs and it is also to be a psyche, a cosmos, an aura through which another being sees, passes, exists.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm

“We seek substance, but fear its heft; seek direction, but fear its constriction; seek the comfort of knowing what we are meant to do and where we belong and also fear the inevitable predictability, the dull familiarity of cycles and days, that this knowledge could engender.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm

“I have begun to sense that living always in search of a new triumph or adventure, spending each morning run fantasizing about the moment when I'll accept the award or board the flight to Singapore or say Well, Terry, thanks so much for having me, means living in perpetual, haphazard evasion of the ordinary.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm

“My baby is taking in the world, taking in me in front of her. I look into her eyes and feel myself absorbed by her like one liquid poured into another. Her eyes search mine under the frail porous muslin, which turns the harsh mountain sunlight to soft heat. Mother and daughter. Madre y hija.”
― Sarah Menkedick, Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm

“Nights I awake at two, at four, at six, and in the grainy coffee black I hold the warm parcel of her, feel the eager pressure of those small gums, our animal bodies pressed together, the darkness undulating a bit in my delirium”
― Sarah Menkedick, Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm