Download Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm AudioBook Free
Sarah Menkedick spent her 20s trekking by themselves across SOUTH USA, teaching British to recalcitrant young adults on Réunion Island, picking grapes in France, and camping on the Mongolian grasslands; for her, meaning and goal were to be found on the road, in airfare from the normal. The biggest and most transformative excursion of her life might be one she never predicted: At 31, she moves into a tiny 19th-century cabin on her behalf family's Ohio farm and commences the trip into motherhood. In eight brilliant and boldly questioning essays, Menkedick explores the luminous, disorienting time just before and after becoming a mother. As she reacquaints herself with the refined scenery of the Midwest and adjusts to the often amazing physicality of motherhood, she ruminates on what this new stage of life opportinity for her long-held ideas of do it yourself, settling, and creative fulfillment. In "Millie, Mildred, Grandma Menkedick", she considers the nature of story through the life of her rough German grandmother, who brought up two boys as a single mother in the 1950s and then spent her 70s traveling the globe with her closest friend, Marge; in "Motherland", on a journey back to Oaxaca, Mexico, to go to her husband's family, she finally embraces her Midwestern origins; in "The Milk Cave", she discovers in breastfeeding a new gratitude for the spiritual and artistic potential of boredom; and in "The Lake", she revisits her youth with her father, whose relentless optimism and mystical streak she perceives anew once she's a child of her own. A story of a traveller come home to the farm, to become a mother in spite of reservations and question, and of understanding how to appreciate the power and beauty of the quotidian, Homing Intuition talks to the deepest concerns and expectations of a era.
