Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World Read Free

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