The greatest secret I keep from myself
Sheila Heti’s ‘Motherhood’ looks at the choice to have — or not have — children
Toronto writer Sheila Heti has a knack for taking on issues that have a fundamental effect on how we live our lives. Her novel
How Should A Person Be, which landed her on TIME Magazine’s shortlist of the 100 most influential people for 2013, was a pseudo-autobiographical/autofictional mix of philosophical musings and bits of real life exploring the relationship between love and making art. This time out, her novel Motherhood tackles another one of society’s strongest conventions: making the decision to have a child (or not). Here’s a sneak peek:
Last night, I had a vivid dream, a wild dream of being with my son, who was five or so. I spent so much of the dream staring into his face. I knew it was him, knew it was a dream, and kept wanting to write it down — that this was happening; that I was encountering the face of my future son. It was clearly my son with Miles. The boy had slightly darker skin than Miles or me, and an intelligent, sensitive face. At one point, I was crying and tears were running down my face from sorrow; the boy was sitting on a windowsill in the kitchen, watching me, and I could tell he was overwhelmed by my adult feelings. I saw that I should not be putting so much of my emotional life on him; that it was too big a burden to bear. He seemed really delicate and lovely. I loved him, but I also felt like the love was not as I imagined it would be; it was not as deep to the core as I thought it would feel, I don’t know why. I felt a little bit distant from him, a little bit alienated. But I loved looking at his face and into his eyes. I said to myself, I can’t believe I’m seeing the face of my future son! I would love to have a child like that. He was caring and good.
I woke from the dream in the middle of the night, disgusted and horrified with how I have been living. For a woman nearing forty, earning not enough money, renting an apartment infested with mice, with no savings, no children, divorced, and still living in the city of her birth, it seemed I had not
thought as my father advised me to do ten years ago, after my marriage ended: Next time —
THINK. I saw I had not thought, but continued to let myself be whipped about in the waves of life, building nothing. ~
Miles has said that the decision is mine — he doesn’t want a child apart from the one he had, quite by accident, when he was young, who lives in another country with her mother, and stays with us on holidays and half the summer. It’s a risk, he says, his daughter is lovely, but you never know what you’re going to get. If I want a child, we can have one, he said, but you have to be sure. ~
Whether I want kids is a secret I keep from myself — it is the greatest secret I keep from myself.
The thing to do when you’re feeling ambivalent is to wait. But for how long? Next week I’ll be thirty-seven. Time is running short on making certain decisions. How can we know how it will go for us, us ambivalent women of thirty-seven? On the one hand, the joy of children. On the other hand, the misery of them. On the one hand, the freedom of not having children. On the other hand, the loss of never having had them — but what is there to lose? The love, the child, and all those motherly feelings that the mothers speak about in such an enticing way, as though a child is something to have, not something to do. The doing is what seems hard. The having seems marvellous. But one doesn’t have a child, one does it. I know I have more than most mothers. But I also have less. In a way, I have nothing at all. But I like that and think I do not want a child.
Yesterday I talked on the phone with Teresa, who is about sixty years old. I said that it seemed like other people were suddenly ahead of me with their marriages, their houses, their children, their savings. She said that when a person has those feelings, they need to look more closely at what their actual values are. We have to live our values. Often people are streamed into the conventional life — the life there’s so much pressure to live. But how can there only be one path that’s legitimate? She says this path is often not even right for many of the people who wind up living it. They become forty-five, fifty, then they hit a wall. It’s easy to bob along the surface, she said. But only for so long. ~
Do I want children because I want to be admired as the admirable sort of woman who has children? Because I want to be seen as a normal sort of woman, or because I want to be the best kind of woman, a woman with not only work, but the desire and ability to nurture, a body that can make babies, and someone who another person wants to make babies with? Do I want a child to show myself to be the (normal) sort of woman who wants and ultimately has a child?
The feeling of not wanting children is the feeling of not wanting to be someone’s idea of me. Parents have something greater than I’ll ever have, but I don’t want it, even if it’s so great, even if in a sense they’ve won the prize, or grabbed the golden ring, which is genetic relief — relief at having procreated; success in the biological sense, which on some days seems like the only sense that matters. And they have social success, too.
There is a kind of sadness in not wanting the things that give so many other people their life’s meaning. There can be sadness at not living out a more universal story — the supposed life cycle — how out of one life cycle another cycle is supposed to come. But when out of your life, no new cycle comes, what does that feel like? It feels like nothing. Yet there is a bit of a let-down feeling when the great things that happen in the lives of others — you don’t actually want those things for yourself.
Excerpted from Motherhood by Sheila Heti. Copyright © 2018 Sheila Heti. Published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.