by Sheila Heti
Last night we had sex. It seems to always be the case that on the day I ovulate, Miles wants to fuck me. Somehow his body can always tell.
Marie Stopes, a birth control reformer from the early twentieth century, wrote that heterosexual couples had sex all wrong: their timing accorded to the regular rhythms of male body, not the fluctuating rhythms of the female. She said it should be timed with the woman’s body: during the week of ovulation, couples should have sex daily, or several times a day, then refrain for the rest of the month. Those weeks of abstinence will build up longing, and let the couple focus on other tasks. I once proposed this to Miles as a good idea we try, and he agreed, but we never did.
Having sex half-asleep in the middle of the night, I got scared that Miles might accidentally come in me. It suddenly felt like a prison sentence—a terrible thing that would befall us, no going back, not what I wanted, the draining of all hope. I saw both of us with our dreams crushed.
I have done so many things to avoid it—including one abortion, several instances of the morning-after pill, and only choosing men who didn’t want kids, or at least never being with a man who really did.
Besides, there are so many kinds of life to give birth to in this world, apart from a literal human life. And there are children everywhere, and parents needing help everywhere, and so much work to be done, and lives to be affirmed that are not necessarily the lives we would have chosen, had we started again. The whole world needs to be mothered. I don’t need to invent a brand new life to give the warming effect to my life I imagine mothering will bring. There are lives and duties everywhere just crying out for a mother. That mother could be you.
*
The hardest thing is actually not to be a mother—to refuse to be a mother to anyone. To not be a mother is the most difficult thing of all. There is always someone ready to step into the path of a woman’s freedom, sensing that she is not yet a mother, so tries to make her into one. There will always be one man or another, or her mother or her father, or some young woman or some young man who steps into the bright and shimmering path of her freedom, and adopts themselves as that woman’s child, forcing her to be their mother. Who will knock her up this time? Who will emerge, planting their feet before her, and say with a smile, Hi mom! The world is full of desperate people, lonely people and half-broken people, unsolved people and needy people with shoes that stink, and socks that stink and are holey—people who want you to arrange their vitamins, or who need your advice at every turn, or who just want to talk and get a drink—and seduce you into being their mother. It’s hard to detect this is even happening, but before you realize it—it’s happened.
*
The most womanly problem is not giving oneself enough space or time, or not being allowed it. We squeeze ourselves into the moments we allow, or the moments that have been allowed us. We do not stretch out in time, languidly, but allot ourselves the smallest parcels of time in which to exist, miserly. We let everyone crowd us. We are miserly with our selves when it comes to space and time. But doesn’t having children lead to the most miserly allotment of space and time? Having a child solves the impulse to give oneself nothing. It makes that impulse into a virtue. To feed oneself last in self-abnegation, to fit oneself into the smallest spaces in the hopes of being loved—that is entirely womanly. To be virtuously miserly towards oneself in exchange for being loved—having children gets you there fast.
I want to take up as much space as I can in time, stretch out and stroll with nowhere to go, and give myself the largest parcels of time in which to do nothing—to let my obligations slip to the ground, reply to no one, please no one, leave everyone hanging, impolitely, and try to win no one’s favor; not pile up politenesses doled out to just everyone in the hopes of being pleasing, so I won’t be thrown out of society as I fear I will be, if I don’t live like a good maid, gingerly.
I get nostalgic for being a teenager for this reason. It never occurred to me then to be nice to other people. I look back at that time as a time of great freedom—but that was the great freedom, that I didn’t give a fuck. I cannot give a fuck more than I already do. I feel it would be the end of me. Having children is nice. What a great victory to be not-nice. The nicest thing to give the world is a child. Do I ever want to be that nice?
PMS
Weeks have passed, and the tears, once again, are back. What am I supposed to do with my unhappiness? Is it like the fortune teller said: these tears were planted in me before I was born?
yes
Should I love them?
no
Accept them?
no
Try and work them out?
yes
By writing?
yes
Why? To overcome?
yes
Is my sadness related to the demon in my dreams?
yes
Then the thing to do is keep wrestling. I must ask for the demon-angel’s blessing, and understand how dependent I am. If I recognize my dependence, truly and deeply, will the bad feelings go away?
no
No, but at least I’ll be sitting in the truth?
yes.
*
Libby and I met for dinner last night. As the evening wore on, she became more and more upset with me. She expressed anxiety about me moving forward in my work, while she said she was falling behind in hers. With her pregnancy-brain, she felt sure she would fall behind everyone she knew and never work or make anything ever again. She was so upset. She told me not to do so much. Stop making things! she said.
When later I told Miles what she had said, he was unsurprised. You see? It’s not benign—this pressure your women friends are putting on you to have kids. They want you to be in the same boat they’re in. They want you to have the same handicap they have. He reiterated that it wasn’t worth it—parenthood. He called it the biggest scam of all time.
Libby was so frightening last night. She said she was losing her mind. I disagreed, but I could see it, and I grew frightened, too. I saw how she might change for good—become even a little less like the person I had known. She said her brain was being wiped clean so she could learn to love a new person. She said this is what happens when people are pregnant, or when they fall in love—it’s like they get amnesia, so new pathways can be created. She spoke to me from a dream within a dream, and said such horrible things. Stop making things! You keep making things! she cried. Her body was making something, she admitted, but she was not. I said that I wasn’t making anything, but she did not believe me.
All the next day, I lay in bed with the blinds shut, despairing and numb. I didn’t rise till dark. Until that dinner, there had been no sign of a change in her. I suppose I had been living in a fantasy. Maybe we both had been. I couldn’t tell her what I’d seen. I felt she needed to push me out of her heart, so there would more room for her child to grow.
I feel terrible today—so tired. The day started off with a fight, with Miles seemingly ignoring me. When he does that, I feel like he’s trying to prove that he does not love me. Then I cried, then he got angry. Then I went for a walk and felt bad in the streets, then I came home and felt bad here. Now I’m sitting at my desk, and I’m still feeling bad. It’s going to be a long day of bad feelings. I feel so worn out and wretched, like I do whenever we fight. Just remember: you will never remember the sadness you are feeling right now. You will never even remember it. It will be like all the other moments of your life—gone. And the evening, too, is already almost gone.
There is nothing new about this time. There is nothing new about the fact that our lives will not turn out the way we supposed. There is nothing new about the fact that the great dreams we had for our lives will not turn into our actual lives.
It’s sometimes so hard to understand what I’m doing in this life, because I’m living for such strange things. Maybe we are capable of making the right choices, before we fully understand the reasons. I must accept that my choices are the right ones, but for mysterious reaso
ns. Or perhaps they are the wrong choices, but for the right reasons. Yet we do not live for the right reasons, we live for our own reasons. When we figure out what those reasons are, our choices will all make sense.
In my dream last night, I heard the words, If you want to know what your life is, destroy everything and move away and see what builds up again. If what builds up a second time is much the same as the first, then your life is pretty much as it could be. Things couldn’t be much different from that.
*
I know there is no difference between someone with children and someone without—that having a child or not is just part of what happened to them, or what time and the world made happen to them, and of course they are part of the world, and so is the person they are with, and the person they are not with, and their culture, and their parents, and their work, and their bodies, and how much money they earn, and the baby who came or didn’t come or died. The world isn’t as binary for me as it was before, with parents on one side, and non-parents on the other. Seeing someone with a child tells me nothing about the life that was in their head, or is currently in their head, just as seeing someone without a child tells me nothing about the life that was in their head. Life occurs to each of us, equally, with all its forces of randomness and care, and whatever forces act on a human life, which we can only guess at but still don’t know.
Then don’t ask questions about things that could go either way. The reason you can’t find an answer, whenever you can’t, is because the answer doesn’t much matter, in the general course of things. If something can be debated endlessly and without resolution, it cannot matter. The things that cannot be debated are the things that matter most. For some, it cannot be debated whether they will have a child, but for those for whom it can be debated, it’s probably a fine life either way. Then if it doesn’t matter to you, and it doesn’t matter to the world, do what is better for the world, and don’t have one.
There is no inherent good in being born. The child would not otherwise miss its life. Nothing harms the earth more than another person—and nothing harms a person more than being born. If I really wanted to have a baby, it would be better to adopt. Even better would be to give the money I would have spent on raising a child to those organizations that give women who can’t afford it condoms and birth control and education and abortions, and so save these women’s lives. That would be a more worthwhile contribution to this world than adding one more troubled person from my own troubled womb.
*
Sometimes I think that in not wanting children, I’m preparing for my old age. I know what I want my old age to look like, more than I know almost anything else: a simple home, a simple life, no one needing me for anything, and not needing anyone the way I do now. If a person has children, there is worry till death. Or jealousy over their young lives—someone to compare yourself to. As my mother once said to me, about me, No one else makes me feel so old.
*
When my mother was a little girl, she dreamed of being a florist, a photographer, or a figure skater, but her mother made her go to university to become a professional woman. It is not so strange to live the dreams of one’s parents, if their dreams are somehow prevented.
I remember being a little girl and my mother showing me slides through her heavy, metal microscope: blood and liver, kidneys, the heart. The slides were dyed purple and pink, and revealed all the beautiful patterns of nature, not unlike the unfolding of the flowers she loved, or the circles cut into ice by a figure skater’s turns. She would sit at the dining-room table with her slides spread out around her, then she’d stand me on the chair and lead my eyes in close to the eyepiece to see. She would say, This is your blood. It was amazing to me that those little, separate donuts, each one tender in its own way, and each one shaped slightly differently from the other ones, was the truth of my blood. Then she would pluck out one of my hairs and put it under the microscope. And this is your hair. Could that hollow reed be the truth of my hair? My mother could see to the smallest parts of everything. There was power in how my mother could see.
*
In the far distance, I can hear the banging of a hammer, children’s voices and a woman’s voice. The winter sun shines in. Overhead, there’s an airplane. A bird in a tree makes a demanding squawk, then a few gentler ones. The days are getting crisp.
Miles, in the bathroom, bangs things in the sink. A car parks outside my window and I can hear it idling. Miles sings lightly as he walks down the hall, then he clears his voice: Oh, sorry. Are you working? In a moment I’m going to go into the hall and say goodbye to him for the day. I can hear him opening and closing his drawers. The car is still idling, the hammer is still hammering. The floorboards creak beneath his feet.
In my dream last night, there were many women nearing the end of their childbearing years, all hanging around with each other on sofas, together. They were beautiful and alluring, but they didn’t have much in the way of men or children, and this was at once their power and their independence, and their loss and their shallowness, their lightness and their emptiness.
Many people barter with their conditions. They suspect if they willingly give something up—something they desire—the universe, in recompense, will make up for the loss. But the universe does not play tradesies, and often what is lost is gone for good.
Will I be one of those women, who, at forty, suddenly wants a baby? No one wants to be one of those women—to realize what you want when it’s practically too late. Who wants to be seen by the world as having been wrong about such a basic thing? Yet the threat of this hangs over me like an anvil that will fall on my head to the laughter of all. You are thirty-nine. People decide now. Even my doctor agreed: you have to decide now.
I know that forty is just an idea in the mind—a finish line that isn’t one. Yet I crave a finish line, just to stop thinking about this. When I hear about women having babies over forty, I feel a sinking in my chest. Won’t this time-period ever end?
Why this constant oscillation? How can one week it seem like such a good idea—and the next week it seems so wrong? How much has my deliberation won me in terms of the path of my life? Desire stems not from deliberating over what you want—it comes from someplace deeper. You can’t make something come that at the same time you don’t want. That push and pull creates nothing. It will continue to create nothing for all of time. Anywhere in your life where there is push and pull—look away from it to someplace else, to where the energy is going in one direction. Find your way into that stream and propel your life from there.
The problem is that life is long, and so much happens by accident, and choices made in a single week can affect an entire lifetime, and the decider within us is not always under our control. So as much as I can’t see having a child, it’s strange to imagine I actually won’t. Yet the not-having seems just as amazing, unlikely and special as the having. Both feel like a kind of miracle. Both seem like a great feat. To go along with what nature demands and to resist it—both are really beautiful—impressive and difficult in their own ways. To battle nature and to submit to nature, both feel very worthy. They both seem entirely valuable.
*
I feel too tired to keep writing this—drained, depressed, worn through. Thinking about children weakens my fingers, and puts me in a deep sleep, like smelling a potent flower. There are all sorts of gates to the truth. Sleepiness is one. I must fight to the other side of this exhaustion, this strange sleepiness, and know for myself what I want.
The question of a child is a bug in the brain—it’s a bug that crawls across everything, every memory, and every sense of my own future. How to dislodge that bug? It’s eating holes in everything there ever was or will be. Nothing remains intact.
How much of me thinks that my problems—whatever vagueness is associated with living—would be solved by stuffing my days with childcare, and my heart with my own child, instead of being only half an animal in the eyes of the world? This is not a good feeling to carry around
in one’s life. It can feel as though the solution to everything is just to give in to the part of me that wants to do this simple thing that opens and lifts the heart.
*
Some part of me knows that these are the years I’m supposed to have a child. Sometimes when I think about it, I can feel a pleasant anticipation and a succumbing, like there’s little in life left to do. A space has opened up inside of every molecule of an instant, where I can see a child would go. But I am not capable of putting a child there. I don’t know how to get a child into those molecules of time.
The other night I had a dream which said it was good to keep walking down the very same streets; that the longer I walked down them, the more I would find. Slowing down is important, said the dream. Repetition important. Be in the same place, differently. Change the self, not the place.
*
It’s true that a person can for so long twiddle her thumbs and call it work—call anything work but what’s truly work. To be honestly quiet, and work in true quietude—to write about things that actually deserve one’s attention. Which are what?
All I want to do is sit and stare at a watermelon all day. To rock a watermelon in my arms. Sing it songs, lug it around. All I want is to fall asleep, and sleep for a million years. Or maybe I want to have a baby—but with someone who really wants it—wants it and wants it with me. Or else to find out whether I really want a child by being with another man and seeing. With Miles, I will never know what I want, his own wants being so strong. I need to be farther from his preferences, in order to know my own.
*
I wonder if all of my thinking about having children is connected to losing faith in the bigger ideas—art, politics, romance. Childrearing is not abstract, like making art or trying to change the world. Perhaps as you get older and are more in the world, the less you care to change it.
Then maybe it is cynical for me to think of having children. Maybe it reflects a cynicism about literature—after having seen what happens to art in the world—how something you love becomes dirty, and you become dirty, too. Maybe this is what happens with children, also, which is perhaps partly why people want to have more than one. The baby’s perfect innocence and purity is gone, corrupted as they grow. The same thing happens with art. It starts off in a state of perfect innocence, and you along with it. Then it becomes corrupted as it moves through the world, and you do, too.
