Motherhood_A Novel

by Sheila Heti

  These women are the voice of my conscience. They have no reason to lie. I have never met a woman who would not say the same thing, or who treats love lightly, like it is a game. We, the courageous, stand shoulder-to-shoulder. We cannot see our homeland. Maybe because we have no homeland anymore. We never thought we would last all the way to the end. But when the men started dying, and we all seemed so much lighter, freer, and more relaxed without them, then the children said, They should have left our fathers such a long time ago—our stupid, old-fashioned, masochistic mothers. But they grew up in peacetime. They didn’t understand the thrill of war.

  FOLLICULAR

  Yesterday, at lunch at the dim sum place before Libby’s wedding, there was a man from the wedding party who wanted to hold another guest’s baby. He said (to no one in particular, standing up from the table) that he wished his wife would agree to another child—they already had two—but she said she didn’t want another one. She wanted to return to work. He picked up the baby and carried it around the restaurant, as the baby opened her mouth wide with pleasure. She seemed glued to the man’s arm—looked so secure. And the man seemed more solid with the baby in his arms than he had looked without. He suddenly turned into a different sort of man—a man with great value. The adults in the room meant nothing to him; he took the baby to the window—It’s a nice day outside! he said. I saw him return to the baby three times during lunch, getting up from his chair and holding it close.

  *

  Miles and I were at Libby’s wedding last night, which is where we fought. The bride and groom—their love was so believable, her standing there beside him in a beautiful wedding dress. I felt certain they were going to stay married and grow a life together—in a way that felt impossible for me. I could never have enough belief in the importance of my own marriage to pull off an expensive and beautiful wedding. I could never convince someone to pay that amount.

  I know that many people accomplish this—not necessarily a happy union, but a beautiful and believable wedding—but it looked as impossible to me as flying to the moon. I saw the bride and groom as two cells whose marriage was contributing to the beauty of marriage in my mind—even though I knew that things had been hard for them, too. Yet last night, in the moment of their marrying, all their troubles seemed perfect because they only added to the triumph of the day. The most common human experiences—I have always longed for them so strongly. I cannot be critical. I am guileless before them, before all ceremony, or any ritual where humans make something symbolic together. I can’t believe we have faith in anything at all.

  Meanwhile, Miles and I fought, him glaring at me, me threatening to leave, both of us silent in the cab back home, wordless as we made our way to bed—me first, him hours later, after sitting up in the living room, playing video games for hours.

  *

  When Miles finally came to bed angry, I got very nervous—scared in my bowels—and we fought a bit more. Then he turned and pretended to go to sleep, and what came over me was the thought: Stop playing this game—this is not a game. This is your life.

  I saw that in our fighting I had been playing a role, and I saw very quickly how much of every relationship, and just being a human, is playing a role. Then I felt a surge of joy and freedom, which must have been some form of nirvana, and which lasted less than a minute, but I saw how funny we all are, and what I am—not my behavior or my roles, but this burning light inside me that is laughing all the time. All of life looked so silly, for I realized what karma is: the playing of roles. You play roles, so keep yourself in certain situations, or get yourself into other predictable situations. Lying there in bed that moment, I could no longer remember what Miles and I were so upset about, but I saw what was the cause of so many problems—this pride, this ego, not wanting to lose face. It’s as though we’re these shells and the most important thing is to tend to them, and this tending makes them real—a real substance in the world—when actually they are nothing. How silly, stupid and petty we all are! Sitting here writing it down this morning, it doesn’t feel like there is any way out, but in the place I inhabited last night, the way out wasn’t an issue—I just felt extreme joy and peace at seeing what we put ourselves through for no reason at all.

  I see how destabilizing it would be to act from this knowledge, rather than from our dramas—and I also see how radical love is, because it laughs at all the dramas, especially the drama of winning. Human life is a kind of myopia, everyone walking around, seeing only what’s in front of them, or not even that—passing each other by, embroiled in our little dramas to such an extent that we miss out on everything; making big what is small. These desperate grasps at our own meaning!—when really our lives are meaningless. Our lives are meaningless, but Life is not—Life is hilarious and wonderful and brimming with joy. Life is pure freedom and it contains everything—even this dismal, grey human world.

  *

  Now I can hear him getting up—I have an angry man in the house with me. But why should I continue the fight? All this role-playing—it’s real in the sense that it’s actual and happening, but it isn’t real in the sense that it’s not the biggest story.

  It all began when I told myself to take the situation more seriously—that life is not a game—for I realized that is how I was living it. Life is not a game, but we turn it into one. Will I win at being the perfect woman if I have children? Will I win at being an ideal woman if I do not? It seemed to me that the best thing in the world was to ride life—just be docile, accepting, happy and peaceful, and not make waves. I don’t know why, but that seemed to me like the closest a human could approach to wisdom.

  Then a person appeared to me who seemed to be in the middle of life—I saw them in a metropolis, kind of bright and floating through it. If someone called them for lunch, they went. They laughed often, and were easy—made no big issues about their choices or anything, for they knew that what they did didn’t matter. Tightness, meanness, begrudging others, jealousy—it wasn’t like the person who didn’t have affairs was better than the person who did, but rather that the person who was open-hearted, humorous and warm, who made other people laugh, was better than the tightly mean and moralistic person. That is just the way it seemed.

  I know that writing this down is a ridiculous act, the act of someone who has forgotten what she learned last night. Yet by writing it, I am bringing myself back to that same feeling of peace, happiness, lightness and joy. I can feel it returning now, even on this miserable day, when Miles and I are in the worst fight ever.

  Yet that our lives are touched by, or made possible by, this absolutely incredible force—brighter than every human life put together—feels to me like the greatest gift. Life is persistent, and it doesn’t flag in its loveliness, and it was a joy to have known it for just a moment—even if I can no longer feel it, because right now I’m too upset about other things—Miles and what we’re going to do.

  I think I am coming out of a very dark period, coming out of it as I speak. I just hesitated before asking a question I didn’t want a no to. The question began Is it my destiny to…? How much more careful I am now than I was last year, when I would have asked the coins any question at all. But now there are questions I don’t want the answer to, and questions I don’t feel it’s right to ask.

  Miles is out at dinner with his brother. What is one night in the long stretch of forever? Yet from the first moment it always seemed like we would never have enough time. And we don’t. There will never be enough time, because I love him beyond time, bottomlessly, foreverly. Is that him now, stomping the snow from his boots? Is he going to come in and up to the second floor? No, no. It’s the boy downstairs.

  I don’t want Miles to come home yet, bringing with him anxiety and chaos—but why must there be anxiety? Why must there be chaos? Why does my whole self pull towards him in frustrated desire, frustrated everything?

  I just got out of the shower. The day is already dark, and the lamp is on beside the bed. I can feel the sadness
in my heart of whatever was on the Internet, of all that I saw and read. There is no coming back from that sadness as the day turns dark. I want Miles to come home. I want him at home right now, but there is nothing I want to do with him here. I still have to wash the dishes. There is a tightness in my chest, the feeling of being an alien in my own life, no way home. I am sitting in bed with the empty-Internet feeling inside me, and there is nothing to do but feel empty—after that visit to absolutely nowhere at all. All the emptiness is inside me as night comes in—as the coldness comes in, and the sadness comes in, and the empty-hearted feeling comes in, and it comes in, and it comes in.

  Last month, I began thinking about the soul of time as having something to do with cocoons. And I put a picture of a cocoon on my desktop—this one:

  I recently learned that what happens in a cocoon is not that a caterpillar grows wings and turns into a butterfly. Rather, the caterpillar turns to mush. It disintegrates, and out of this mush, a new creature grows. Why does no one talk about the mush? Or about how, for any change at all to happen, we must, for some time, be nothing—be mush. That is where you are right now—in a state of mush. Right now your entire life is mush. But only if you don’t try and escape it might you emerge one day as a butterfly. On the other hand, maybe you will not be a butterfly at all. Maybe you will become a caterpillar again. Or maybe you will always be mush.

  *

  I am sitting here, writing, in order to discover the simple secret of my existence—what sort of creature I am. And I am beginning to feel a widening in my chest. The aloneness of writing is coming to me again—the light, good feeling of being alone—the total aliveness of being alone.

  Perhaps the cocoon I am meant to make is the cocoon that forms around me while writing. Then every day to go into it—into that cocoon of time and space, where everything stills, and my self becomes mush, and something new is formed. Inside this writing place, time and space are completely without form. Life has some defect of soul.

  This is the me I most recognize as me—a self without fear, the self I most like to be with. It is not a me that is concerned with making choices or anything; it’s a self without form, unimprisoned. The answer I gave when I was a child when someone asked me what sort of animal I wanted to be, always was, turtle. Maybe because a turtle is always at home? Even then, I always preferred to be at home. Perhaps I can carry my home on my back, if home is nothing but this cocoon, in which I can write and feel fine.

  I want to be in this cocoon for as much of every day as possible—to remain within it as long as I can, and spend as much of my time as I can within it, and for it to be my shell, my protection against the world. No one can be in here with me. In here I feel no tears, I feel no emotion at all; no pleasure or pain.

  But when I stick my head out of my shell to interact with people again, all of that disappears. The shell, the cocoon, the mush.

  Somehow you think that in visiting the Internet, you can get the same pleasures you get in here. Why do you go there when you really want to come here? Thinking about the Internet, I can feel the tears coming back. That is my body materializing. That is my body coming back. It must mean that I’m no longer in my shell. My body materializes, speck by speck, and I’m no longer part of the void. I am a self again, no longer no self. I am no longer a paradoxical thing. The feeling of being on the Internet goes away in a few hours, like a common cold. That’s what the Internet feels like—just a common cold—for it is common, and it is cold. Then don’t go there at all. Or do. A little cold in your heart is not such a bad thing. But you do not need to be there every hour of the day. Besides, you should be working. I really need an infinity amount of time to work. Infinity sounds so dauntingly impossible!—but infinity can be accessed in moments like this one. It does not mean that to write this book, I need an infinity amount of time, but rather that I need to access infinity in time. Infinity is not a duration of time, it is a quality of time. I can reach it in moments like this one.

  *

  Waiting for Miles at the top of the stairs, I felt like the turtle I had wanted to be when I was a child. My head was stretched out of my shell, but I could feel the shell on my back, which I had created while I was writing.

  And going to sleep, there was a bubble of happiness in me, or I was a bubble of happiness, a happiness I had not felt in such a long time. The bubble of happiness was my shell protecting me. And even lying in bed with Miles, I felt as if I could pull my head inside, and find my happiness there.

  *

  I spent four hours last night on the Internet, reading accounts of women who suffer from their moods in ways that feel so familiar—they want to run away from their life half the month, and the other half, life feels fine. Since tracking my periods, I see it’s the same for me. But how can I tell whether there’s something wrong with my life or not—when half the month all is roses, and the other half all is thorns? Which perspective should I trust? Is either one the truth?

  Some women take antidepressants for one week, or two weeks, before their periods come. Others take drugs the whole month. Some women are politically against drugs—but not, it seems, the ones who are suffering. At first, the ones whose relationships with partners and parents and children were in shambles didn’t want to believe it—to give those around them the satisfaction of having identified their problem as PMS—especially because, while having PMS, they spent so much of the month hating these people.

  I don’t want to be like them, to need to be medicated in order to live—to admit there’s something inside me that cannot be helped through will alone. But more than that, I can’t live like this until menopause comes, spending half the month crumpled in tears. Half the month tearing everything down, and the other half building it up again. The idea makes me want to die.

  Then, perhaps I will talk to my doctor—or try.

  OVULATING

  That sense, a long time ago, when we were fucking, his dick deep in me—I felt in the core of that darkness that he and I were, or would be, ancestors. I could understand us, our fighting, the complexity of things, when I understand us as ancestors.

  With other men, I couldn’t fall asleep beside them, or their cock felt strange inside me—just wrong. With Miles, everything fits so beautifully. The first time we fucked, I saw that my body always held itself back, even slightly, from other men. But my body rejects no part of his when we are naked together.

  Perhaps life has stuck me with this man because it wants us to reproduce. Even if you think you don’t want to, some magnet pulls you towards him, sticks you in an apartment with him, makes you think about marriage and children—tries to lead you there.

  Perhaps you can resist the having of children, but you are still living with a man after all these years. And what are you doing with your mind? Is this the condition of being a woman—remaining obstinately in one place, because her body thinks that if she stays in one place long enough, she will have a child? She doesn’t want a baby—but her body doesn’t believe her. On some level, no one believes her. On some level, she doesn’t even believe herself.

  *

  I have, for too long, relied on these coins. Shouldn’t I be listening to my reason more?

  yes

  And shouldn’t I be listening more closely to my instincts?

  no

  But it doesn’t feel that way. It feels as though I should be listening to my instincts more. Or is that what has got me into trouble for so long?

  no

  Have I, in fact, not got into trouble?

  no

  No, I’ve got into trouble?

  no

  Difficulty in communicating?

  no

  Difficulty in understanding what is being communicated to me?

  yes.

  *

  From now on, I want to follow my heart, do what is true for me. Instead of trusting myself, I’ve trusted the world more. Why have I done this for so long? All the times I’ve listened to myself, has it ever been a mistak
e? Often, yes. But wasn’t the freedom to make those mistakes greater than all the advice in the world?

  Today I met Libby’s baby, two months old. It was asleep in its blue bassinette. Libby told me that the moment she held her child in her arms, she thought, I never need to meet anyone ever again. Having met her child, it was enough for her. She felt finally filled up in a way that all the musicians, poets, painters, princes, filmmakers and phonies hadn’t filled her up, who just left her hungrier than before.

  Lying there in its bassinette, the baby seemed to be just waiting out its life in this magic web—this web that has caught another soul in it, to trap it here for so many years, then finally let it go again. The baby seemed to me a glimmering fish in a silvery net, a shining and throbbing soul; it didn’t matter what it did with its life, just being here was the thing. I saw how our lives are not about action, are not about contemplation, they’re just about being here, suspended in life’s net—here for such a short time, glinting and glittering against the sun, lifted out of the ocean’s depths to where everyone can see it, then plunged back in again—anonymous, gone.

  Why would I brine a baby in my belly? What could ever persuade me to do such a hopeful thing—pull a glittering fish out of the deepest sea, to trap it in this beautiful life, a shimmering fish in a silvery net?

  Libby said that I was a young soul, or must be, still discovering the world—she meant I was not an old enough soul to want to make a baby. But I said maybe I’m too old a soul to actually go through with it—to exhibit that hope, that patience, that care. Probably I’m just an old and stony mountain, hardened and crabby, who doesn’t want any picnickers, any happy families, crawling all over its belly.

  *

  Libby has gone somewhere I can’t—or won’t—in raising a child that comes from her own body, which I am too cowardly, or know myself better than to let myself do. I’m incapable of doing it, or I don’t want to—travel on the train to the underworld where she is going. She has gone to an underground that feels taboo for me, personally, and I am travelling to a place that feels taboo for her. It is the thinking about it, and the wondering about it, where she cannot go. It frightens her as much as to have a child scares me.