A First-Time Mom Finds Life Remade in the Family Cabin
Living in a strange, new and confining space unexpectedly shapes a writer’s experience of becoming a mother
Sarah Menkedick
May 14, 2017
Guest Contributor. I'm a writer, mother, and traveler. My work has been featured in Harper's, Pacific Standard, Oxford American, Aeon, Guernica, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. I was a 2015-2016 Fulbright fellow in Oaxaca, Mexico. I'm the founder of Vela (http://velamag.com/), an online magazine of nonfiction writing by women. My first book, HOMING INSTINCTS, will be out from Pantheon in May of 2017.
Guest Contributor. I'm a writer, mother, and traveler. My work has been featured... More
Photos by Jorge Santiago
Sarah Menkedick, shown here, is an author, teacher and founder of Vela, an online magazine of nonfiction writing by women. Her new book, “Homing Instincts” (Pantheon Books), chronicles her adventures of moving into a 19th-century cabin and becoming a mother.
If you had asked me at age 15 or 20 or 25 or 29 where I would live at age 30, the last place I would have mentioned was a log cabin built in 1828 on my parents’ Ohio farm. So of course at age 30, that’s exactly where I found myself.
I had just graduated from the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh, and my husband, Jorge Santiago, and I were in limbo. One night at dinner in the house my parents had designed and built in Noble County, Ohio, my dad — perhaps sensing that we were going to move back to Mexico, where we’d lived before I started grad school — offered to let us move into the cabin. This offer was totally unexpected and strangely enticing.
The cabin sat some 500 feet from my parents’ house on 40 acres of woodlands and pastures. Just beside the front door, a plaque on the wall announced that it was on the National Register of Historic Places.
Sarah Menkedick, shown here, is an author, teacher and founder of Vela, an online magazine of nonfiction writing by women. Her new book, “Homing Instincts” (Pantheon Books), chronicles her adventures of moving into a 19th-century cabin and becoming a mother.
If you had asked me at age 15 or 20 or 25 or 29 where I would live at age 30, the last place I would have mentioned was a log cabin built in 1828 on my parents’ Ohio farm. So of course at age 30, that’s exactly where I found myself.
I had just graduated from the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh, and my husband, Jorge Santiago, and I were in limbo. One night at dinner in the house my parents had designed and built in Noble County, Ohio, my dad — perhaps sensing that we were going to move back to Mexico, where we’d lived before I started grad school — offered to let us move into the cabin. This offer was totally unexpected and strangely enticing.
The cabin sat some 500 feet from my parents’ house on 40 acres of woodlands and pastures. Just beside the front door, a plaque on the wall announced that it was on the National Register of Historic Places.
Inside was a dark, tiny living room organized around a wood stove; a tinier kitchen; and an upstairs consisting of a bedroom with two antique beds, a sliver of a room scarcely wide enough for a desk, and a bathroom with a claw-foot tub. The closest grocery store was 30 minutes away. There wasn’t a coffee shop for a hundred miles.
Jorge and I said yes. I envisioned the experience as a whimsical writing residency in rural southeastern Ohio, where I’d stay up late on the front porch, drinking beer and reading literary classics. Just over a month after we moved in, I found out I was pregnant. For me, the experience of pregnancy was one of sudden, overwhelming confinement.
Jorge and I said yes. I envisioned the experience as a whimsical writing residency in rural southeastern Ohio, where I’d stay up late on the front porch, drinking beer and reading literary classics. Just over a month after we moved in, I found out I was pregnant. For me, the experience of pregnancy was one of sudden, overwhelming confinement.
For the first time in my life, I was wholly accountable to my body, to an experience both inside of me and yet unfolding entirely independent of me. For the first time, I was truly restricted in what I could do, eat, experience, and for the first time, my focus was intensely, almost suffocatingly, interior. Discovering this in the context of a space scarcely 10 by 10 feet wide, dark and musty and constructed of sturdy bare beams made it that much more intense.
At first, I struggled. I longed to be out in the world, in wide-open spaces. In the fall, I roamed the 40 acres of the farm with my dogs, moving slowly up hills and across the creek. But as my pregnancy progressed, I began to accept this interior focus, this new and strange settling. I spent my afternoons and evenings reading and writing in front of the wood stove: a warm red belly into which we fed log after log. I spent hours in the old tub in the bathroom. I embraced this feeling of containment, in the cabin, my body, my belly.
At first, I struggled. I longed to be out in the world, in wide-open spaces. In the fall, I roamed the 40 acres of the farm with my dogs, moving slowly up hills and across the creek. But as my pregnancy progressed, I began to accept this interior focus, this new and strange settling. I spent my afternoons and evenings reading and writing in front of the wood stove: a warm red belly into which we fed log after log. I spent hours in the old tub in the bathroom. I embraced this feeling of containment, in the cabin, my body, my belly.
In a way, the cabin held me just as I held my baby. Constructed for harsh pioneer life, it sat steeled and sturdy against the changing seasons. It got so little light that I could sleep upstairs for 14, 16 hours straight, awaking dazed as if from another life. It created a stark contrast of interior — home, incubator for family life — and exterior: wildness, a terrain for roving and exploring and seeing. It taught me how to come into my motherhood in quietness and focus.
Yet I could never have made it through that year in the cabin had I not been able to wrestle on my muck boots and open the door to land sprawling down to a valley and rising to low hills, traced by water and spread thick with leaves.
Yet I could never have made it through that year in the cabin had I not been able to wrestle on my muck boots and open the door to land sprawling down to a valley and rising to low hills, traced by water and spread thick with leaves.
The contrast between the cabin and its porch is stark. Simply stepping outside, one is struck with a view of pastures and woods, the horses grazing on a distant slope, the moon rising over the valley.
Suddenly, space. I could step off the porch and walk for miles, watching the leaves of the beeches go gold with winter, and the trilliums bloom above the creek and crowd the abandoned house in surprising green.
And then I would return, catching a glimpse of the cabin as I imagined early settlers once had, from the woods above, a thin rope of smoke unwinding from its chimney, stalwart and beautiful in its simplicity. I would open the door and be hit with the smell of wood, of centuries-old must. I would settle my aching body and my growing belly into an old, fuzzy armchair before the fire.
And then I would return, catching a glimpse of the cabin as I imagined early settlers once had, from the woods above, a thin rope of smoke unwinding from its chimney, stalwart and beautiful in its simplicity. I would open the door and be hit with the smell of wood, of centuries-old must. I would settle my aching body and my growing belly into an old, fuzzy armchair before the fire.
The cabin reinforced that liminal period of pregnancy, and then, when my baby was born, it strengthened the surreal, otherworldly, extraordinary and boring experience of infant care. All mothers are at somewhat of a remove, physically or psychically, during this period, and the cabin made this manifest. I lived in my own universe of milk and diapers and squalling and tall summer grasses and tiny breaths and wood and blessed sleep in quiet darkness.
The cabin allowed me to blend with the world and to live apart from it. I stepped outside and walked through the woods with my baby snugged to my chest, listening to her little squeaks and hums, and I sat inside at 3 a.m. and noon and 6 p.m. in the perpetual dim and nursed, and all of it felt the same and utterly removed from any sort of life I’d lived before. It was the most heady, distinct, beautiful, unique experience of my life.
And then gradually, when the baby became a toddler, and my husband’s and my careers gained traction, the cabin was too small and too isolated. We left. We packed up the incongruous plastic toys and we took our books off the shelves, but other than that, we had very little. We began a more typical life in a house in the city, busy now with things, but every time we go back to the cabin, I feel again that singular sensation of being both more in the world and removed from it.
I walk with my daughter through the woods. The everyday concerns that seem so important fade. Once, soon after my daughter turned 2, we went inside the cabin on a sunny day. She stopped at the threshold and took a dramatic exaggerated breath, as 2-year-olds do. “It smells,” she said. I laughed. Like you, I wanted to say, like us, like the time this place held and remade us.
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We've all heard of cabin fever, but there's an all too common affliction not being talked about enough - Cabin Envy.
It's debilitating when there are so many orders to process, and we're all here thinking about a really awesome cabin in the woods.
Nice read, BTW.
This story just gave me chills. What a beautiful place to bring a baby into the world to.
Such a beautifully shared story of home, of bringing a child into the world, of a sanctuary where life and breath continue to play in our minds, if not in our sight. This story made my day!