Peer-reviewed article

Incomplete Nurture

Mekiya Outini · 1 Jan 2025

Abstract

I grew up in a house that was never not under construction: a small house on a jagged plot of land in western North Carolina, a valley that had been a sprawling farm till someone raised it up and dropped it, and it shattered, and my parents’ house occupies one of those shards.There were never any workmen. There were never any contracts signed. We never relocated to motel rooms. We did the work ourselves, hauling barrowsful of soil from the crawlspace, mixing grout and laying tile, heaving the enormous, barrel-chested water heater from one bedroom to another, even cathedral'ing the living room ceiling ourselves.Sometimes, there was a window where there shouldn't be a window. Sometimes, a door yawned where there shouldn't be a door. All year round, pale plastic flapped over apertures like translucent wings, or flags.One winter, rot ate through the plywood that underlaid the bathroom's linoleum. When my mother's foot went through it, we didn't miss a beat, just moved the toilet into the garage and filled its bowl with kitty litter. For the rest of that week, starting every night at 8:00 or 9:00 p.m., after my father came home from work, we dredged dank mud up from the crawlspace, making space for new plumbing and stronger foundations, and carted the refuse out into the yard. Come midnight, we took turns bathing in the tub in the driveway under cover of bubbles.Another year, the floor that went was in the living room. The crawlspace was deeper there, maybe six or seven feet, and we had to lay a plank across the chasm so that we could get the wheelbarrow from one side to the other, and also so that when our two neurotic dogs, one ditzy, one vicious, who slept in my parents’ room, wanted to retire for the evening, my father could lift them bodily in his arms and ferry them across. The twelve cats took care of themselves.One afternoon, a boy from the neighborhood came knocking on our door. The one he knocked on was the front door, the one that faced the street, but I'd learned to consider it the back door, for it was the one less used. He peered through the pane for a minute, surely expecting a parent or me to materialize at eye level, before glancing down and finding all three of us gazing back up at him through the grid of timbers that crosshatched the crawlspace, all mud-streaked and saucer-eyed.A churchgoer, no doubt with well-defined notions of Hell, he never came knocking again. I grew up with no well-defined notions of Hell. For us, there was no church and no religion. “Purgatory” was not a synonym for “punishment,” nor “Heaven” for “reward.” “Heaven” was a Talking Heads single whose lilting refrain, “Heaven / Heaven is a place / a place where nothing / nothing ever happens” didn't make it sound like an especially appealing destination.This was but one of many metaphysical ideas that I accrued from secondary sources.At thirteen, I picked up a copy of the Tao Te Ching, in which I found this passage: Thirty spokes converge at a wheel's hub, to a hole that allows it to turn.Clay is shaped into a vessel, to enclose an emptiness that can be filled.Doors and windows are cut into walls, to provide access to their protection.Though we can only work with what is there, use comes from what is not there.A few years later, I encountered these same lines again, this time as an epigraph in a book that my father had purchased and dog-eared, but never finished reading. We're conditioned to imagine that causes derive from existing objects, states, events, or properties, argues Terence Deacon in Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, but under certain conditions, the absence of an object, state, event, or property can prove just as consequential. Just as integrating zero into mathematics enabled countless later revolutions, integrating a formal acknowledgment of such consequential absences into the sciences will enable a gestalt shift in our understanding of cause and effect and spark the long-awaited reconciliation of thermodynamics with the study of living things—or so Deacon has it. The book amounts to a love song to negative space, sung in the language of systems theory, and the author, a neuroanthropologist by training, has all the counterintuitive insight—and none of the swagger—of a latter-day prophet.If I had to choose a holy book, it would be this one.The first time I read Incomplete Nature, its transcendental qualities were lost on me. I suspect this was true for my father as well, for he never did wade through the last several chapters—though honestly, it's hard to say. He's left many things unfinished, things he never understood and things he once grasped very well. This book is only one. Both my parents hold degrees in architecture from Virginia Tech, but neither one ever climbed the corporate ladder. My mother did put in a few months at a couple of architecture firms, the only graduate from her class to do so, but she resigned from the last planning office in the wake of her first review, even though it was, by all accounts, a glowing one.Her reasons remain opaque to me, and possibly even to her, though I imagine a tangle of dissatisfaction with the corporate world's sterility, unease provoked by the cutthroat male culture, frustration with how little college had prepared her to spend her days designing boxy Harris Teeters in an equally boxy cubicle, a perennial longing for something more, and deepest of all, most irresistible of all, a corrosive, self-annihilating psychological undertow.She walked away. She alone among her siblings walked away from the chic, old-money, North Virginia world in which they were raised, to which my grandmother had struggled to cling after my grandfather's premature death. My mother has worked on plenty of construction sites. She wears men's clothes, or what were called “men's clothes,” boots and jeans and braless tees, before becoming simply “clothes.” She spends a lot of time outdoors. From these details, one might conclude that she's a self-determined renegade. In reality, there's nothing of the rebel in her. She's not even a tomboy, really: at most, a tomboy's younger sister, intrigued and imitating.In all the time I've known her, which is to say, all the time I've been alive, my mother has always seemed a little underrealized, a little starved of affirmation, which she seeks from those around her—not tactically, as a grown woman might when pressed into a dicey situation, forced to play the little girl, but discreetly. Bashfully. Sincerely.As my grandmother lay dying, a tumor blooming in her brain, she assigned nicknames to each of her children, each caustic and telling. My mother, she christened “The Innocent One.” The second time I read Incomplete Nature, I was twenty-eight years old. The book still held my father's bookmark. I found it on his shelf while visiting my childhood home in 2021, the last time I was welcome there. I didn't remove the bookmark right away. Only after bringing the book back to Arkansas, where I was living at the time, and passing the page where my father had left off did I undo the dog-ear and throw the old bookmark away.By that time, my father was no longer reading at all.A small, irreverent, explosive man, he yangs my mother's yin: good with skill saws and chalk lines, good with Oblique Strategies and self-assertion, good with money, operating systems, Zen, and Tarot cards; good with a cigarette clamped in his lips, a hollow bit of driftwood stuffed with weed and lit to smolder, a tawny glass of IPA in hand; good with his hands, and good with his words, and when he explodes, it's always with his words, not like his father, never like his father, never with his hands, but only ever like himself, volcanic and verbal and abstract and fluent and overflowing.He met my mother in college. Together with my godmother, who was, like my father, neck-deep in nihilistic rebellion against a dysfunctional family and a corrupt society, they became a triad. Exactly how my parents bridged the gap between friendship and parenthood has never been thoroughly explained to me, but I do know they were drinking a lot at the time, and smoking a lot, and dabbling in other psychoactive pastimes, too, and perhaps these factors helped to catalyze the transformation. After college, they sold everything they owned, bought a van, set out on a cross-country road trip as friends, and returned as more than friends.My father made a promise to my mother, and he kept it, though his postpartum depression proved more extravagant than hers. Before he pulled himself together, he contemplated suicide. But he pulled himself together. He took odd jobs. He spent a whole winter rebuilding a Volkswagen engine, diligently keeping the grease stains away from the library book he was learning from, so that he could get to work.Certain that they could do better than North Carolina's public education system, he decided, along with my mother, to homeschool me. He's read bits of everything from Joseph Campbell to the history of Greenland. His musical tastes run the gambit from Philip Glass to Talking Heads to Throbbing Gristle. He encouraged me to follow my bliss, meaning writing, and never insisted that I pursue more lucrative careers, though he did drop rough-edged comments now and then, asking whether the characters I'd written—the father who gave up, the father who lapsed into angry, the father by his with of that no one He that his and in are not what to The more a to he the less they he is not an but something never what it not like to at or When he he and and off to a cigarette or a he like to be of When he and perhaps not always but always meaning not always at which from held not like to me that there is something with me. I became in childhood that there was something with me was to my father, what was with was also what was with our so, my and into my he did The between his not the by away from the and and and that most did him at last found From the single the by the Talking which and by over the into the into might get what but not a till the in for might a in house is out of to the of the same where many of the are the and of the later but not the words, a a living history of it up by the with a still under From the street, the house still by a just as it was when we moved and a couple of from one of whose a and still on into the as dropped from a still just a little just still its My parents at that house for still not has been no longer a little all and on the is it the of my something other, something at once and where it be where it to the the the and all the that my parents and didn't in architecture a and they it. a to all the money, and to all that is also a my mother her lines from to for a a but not to the work to a the they down made to me. I too, away in Arkansas, as the through and as through as up in as in the of We and even with between us, we to the same every side by side and down on the same and together, we as the world went off its and down a by and and and came to the and are all that and the of their house unfinished, and it would to the and to the would and would and their and their and in their and the years of and and and which been on them all their and their are and their are and perhaps their house is down as well, down around them as everything or later, not and even it it it after more than and that is more, I than they can house at the of a was a in my father's before she was a up the She has them by a I that they will and away the of their and they will living is like a valley for a living is like a a made of a door, a window to the living is like a crawlspace by a and a and like the and like the and like the toilet and on the and like the in the to be things can only work with what is there, and use comes from what is not as is an a class that also and even other words, that is in the of in or to something All living from to to of Deacon is what living things to the between the and When left to their systems to with their from more and to less and more of up now and to between systems, but these are to by are systems that and in many their as well. can across the would the of living do around in and in so a of though a is the to in to into this a of time, Deacon the of Just as his out of all living not the most of a of this is what it to at systems this in to to living by or by certain are out of the when two or more systems in such a as to the of When two or more systems in this they a system, a through which as as there is this a and that these systems a between systems, which are neither nor and living systems, which are in the two or more systems he and an even system, which the with the of those systems to and do we do on our so that we can not at the most but at the one in which most to not what in other words, but what that what we but what For the that we to as our we can out the we into that ever from that can be or that the of thermodynamics will us in the the that my parents’ home in and in with and across the against the foundations, and not to the that their among the and the are a are also a mother and to and with them in a that across the and into not not an but a sprawling and of every time she a she that it will not it will a it will no formal training, she that her for turns of and that she her as good as my her with She and and and for a that everything she will of and in and She cats and and and from and them in She even an might say, not of an at the of her but of a time she a she that she will time she she that it her of She and her to a to all the her, from which she things are and still For my mother to be with her they no be there's at the of I to the I've always to Only now I to from the the the the and the that me for My first when I was six years old. I that me. I once my mother that I wanted to She I wanted to off the the where we were I my the didn't for mother's my father in up, I never or did hard never or never or or on less than me. I was I went on to a I my mother's I didn't love I didn't like I that there was something with I in 2021, it was to my parents to my now my might that the of our and of her my my me and by me would my this though it to me, is not one she can I would certain things the certain certain to my mother, was an and I was to my father, I was never is I was never to my mother, she was never by my I her when she that he has ever parents are very of My parents are very of never me or each my father's were and were and an was a and the none of it had my mother as a I I do that were a of among and like know that she's very of not to be a of I know that they are very of them very of the into which they were for the that I in her the in her certain the of our such for how and when back to work, and whether like me to and whether she would like to me, and whether she will ever again, and whether she has and whether she's the woman she's always to be as for and as for her to my father, her her to not me, even when he there as for all not the same my mother me in one of our last she she a a she not at she she the same as I the same she of her father, of when she was years the family into and her, I now in a of my mother, my grandmother was a and but she to up her as a in to a who in the to not her. My mother's father had many but also my grandmother as his that I my do it she she she she how the was back she it's just the things I that my father has up is in He's up reading He still and and from and and from the He all night in his which has in still on its the house and and to the of the garage has always been his He to there when that had the door on his are not living and be The door that he was the back door, the one that did not the street, though for years I it was the front door it was the one we he would me to follow Sometimes, I would follow of my that I him and and his for things would be an two or I would or or on the floor while he me, for my or or that there was something with me. He me never never with his hands, the and the that himself, the so old it for the heater in the the he would himself to a He would run his through his He would his back and at the he would me and into my as to he never me. and then, he would to his or into the little that on his or a and off into space as to of the The was nothing but a of plywood into a its cut with a for nothing that my parents make is also as everything in that garage is His my father of for everything that of he His to to to is one of his over his father, he as the who could only ever things of his is his our there, in the I would follow him back into the or the living room. it would be just the two of us, all my mother would there in a from a glass of never my father, never she would him do all the she would in with of he was the same in her him only was in The was but all been The was but the in that of North in been for and now we were together. We been a my father had been into The The The The The The The The The The The The but for a to my mother to not those things she even they are I especially they are shouldn't we be to our time while we she didn't a my father his through his like for these to our whole are to it all under the like nothing is I do then, my mother been to do a few months in after my father and I had but before the new had my mother a of me a was passing through my me to When she that this was not my father's on she and she wanted me and was that her my system, the and days I had to spend and the that every of from other or of not my and again, all this proved mother, it has been by my my father's been by in around him in on one and on the other, the to the he in to cling to of now that even his is no longer his For the of has been by the of He all and and and and all and in in the and he or as as their and can he in for in He not work, or or When he He He it's not or he the his and my mother's they across from one at a while he her with of and He me was in that I where I was and to I I did as I always I did as I was even and he the on his the house after more than years and at a on at and no longer becoming at is He He his For three there was a at the of my and it was I their I my childhood had been though I also that I had not been I that they had all their none for me to though I also that in I that I I was to was This been a of the plot were from me, it very to my I the which I the as I had only two to into those or to be the I like an I was a on a which I was of to with at the none of which I could I was my childhood on the in This my mother's but it also her. of them of was a they could a with which they could be are no longer with their though made its and and not with me. the I remain the still under the as a on for all to my is on father never finished reading He grasped the to but his before he the love He will not the zero to its though it, the The on the and its jagged as the zero its we will remain in the of as the we will remain not but no living can which can only be in though even then, place where nothing / ever place called and the and the and the and the of the and the the the the the the these are not of the but of to not of our or but of our of our of our to all that we are not but could I've to it will not be for is