Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm

Fresh, intimate, and radiantly meditative, Homing Instincts is the story of one woman¿s ¿coming of age¿ as a first-time parent on her family¿s rural Ohio farm.

After teaching English to recalcitrant teenagers on Reunion Island, picking grapes in France, and witnessing a revolution in Mexico, Sarah Menkedick, at thirty-one, embarks on what might become her most challenging adventure yet: she moves into a tiny, nineteenth-century cabin on her family¿s farm and prepares to become a mother. She never expected to want this kind of settled life, and yet she finds a new peace and inspiration in the surrounding natural world as she and her husband, Jorge, prepare for the exciting unknown.

Menkedick juxtaposes the progress of her pregnancy and the larger questions it inspires with recollections of her family history; being raised by a single and unapologetically hippie father; her paternal grandmother, Millie, whose Midwestern German fortitude informed the character of the next two generations; and her husband Jorge¿s loving but difficult childhood in Oaxaca, Mexico. Altogether, it becomes a luminous portrait of the time just before and after new motherhood.