Motherhood_A Novel

by Sheila Heti

  There are so many underworlds to travel to, not just one. There are so many taboos, and places forbidden to each one of us. I cannot understand how she can so blithely go into motherhood, without any hesitation at all—take on all that it requires, accept a new life into her life, which to me looks like death. But to her, my path seems like death, or is somehow forbidden for her to enter.

  It seems we will have to travel alone. And we can’t help but resent each other for this. Perhaps one day we can accompany each other again, but for now it feels impossible. She resents my freedom, the privilege of all my questioning, and I resent the privilege of her striding into a new life, without feeling the burden of all this questioning.

  Of course, there are paths cut into any life, like in a forest of brambles you might find a clearing and proceed more easily down that path. It feels as natural for her to enter motherhood as it feels for me to entertain doubts. But my questions, for her, are no clearing in the woods, just deadly, choking brambles—just as motherhood feels to me like a garden of thorns that would prick me to death.

  How hard it is to understand what the other has done—when it looks to me like she has been stolen, and when it looks to her like I have stalled. We both look so cowardly and so brave. The other one seems to have everything—and the other one seems to have nothing at all.

  But we both have everything and nothing at all. We are both so cowardly and so brave. Neither one of us has more than the other, and neither one of us has less. It is so hard, I think, to see this: that our paths equal something the same; that having a child reflexively or not having one doubtfully are equal lives, the number of her life and the number of my life the same. That makes our hearts sink more than anything else, really, that the childless and the mothers are equivalent, but it must be so—that there is an exact equivalence and an equality, equal in emptiness and equal in fullness, equal in experiences had and equal in experiences lost, neither path better and neither path worse, neither more frightening or less riddled with fear.

  This is the bland fact we cannot take. There has to be more to it than that, so we keep on piling up the scales, to see which side tips down just a little bit. Yet neither side tips any lower than its pair. They both hover at the same height in mid-air. I can’t be any better than her, and she can’t be any better than me. And this upsets us most of all.

  I was in the grocery store when it began. I felt suddenly unafraid. I had never before realized that I had always been so afraid. The people around me doing their shopping seemed less menacing than before, when I would try to avoid them and avert my eyes. Now I could encounter them without worry, and I continued up and down the aisles, piling things into my arms. When I dropped my food onto the conveyor belt, the cashier looked up at me and said, I see women do this all the time; men always take a basket. Women always make life harder for themselves than it needs to be. I agreed. I had always thought I was saving time by not taking a basket. We laughed about this.

  Walking home with my groceries in two white plastic bags, the world seemed bright and joyous. Then I realized it was the drugs kicking in. How was it possible that antidepressants were legal? Did half the country walk around feeling this way all the time—sparkling with ease and light?

  That night, getting ready for bed, Miles sang a sweet and funny song he made up on the spot, about me, and I said to him, suspiciously, Why are you being so nice to me? Then I said, Are you always this nice to me? He said, Yes.

  Over the next week, a tremendous rush of thoughts and feelings came to me—flooded past what had been the tall, thick wall between myself and the world, a wall that had prevented me from seeing, while giving me the impression that I was truly seeing. Everything had always been too loud, too close-up. Everything had always stung me too painfully. I had wanted to think about the world, but my anxieties forced me to think about myself—as if pressing into my face an injunction: first you must solve this problem—the problem of your self. But a rotating parade of non-problems is what it was—for example, when I would arrange to see someone for lunch in three days. Before, the problem of this would preoccupy me completely, and prevent me from thinking about anything else. Days lost to thinking about an appointment—and the shaking, jittering problem of living, which was so easily being whisked away with the drugs. Before, I was always scrambling to protect myself, but now I began to feel protected from the inside—as though I didn’t have to plan ahead for every possible catastrophe, as though each cell in my body was cased in armour.

  *

  Before the drugs, sadness and anxiety was all I knew. Everyone says if you can whisk away your anxieties, you should. I had wanted to whisk them away, but I wanted to do it by old-fashioned means—means that didn’t work—delving into my past, religion, spirituality, dreams—not by modern means, which are easy, and work. So far, no discernible side effects except a little clenching in the jaw, and the ability to sleep all day, if I want to.

  Why should a modern person have to suffer twentieth-century problems? The problems of the psyche—a person living today should not have to suffer them! So I, like so many, am electing not to. To untangle my past is to indulge in more fantasies, and I indulge in fantasy enough. Just give me some drugs! At least for a few months, a year, ten years—just a break. Besides, if a cure exists, isn’t it dishonest not to take it? Isn’t that romanticism of the worst kind, almost cultish?

  *

  This is me returning. This is me coming back from an interior I did not know was so intense. I didn’t realize I’d been so separate from the world. The drugs seem to be working, that’s all I can say. The drugs really seem to be working. The fear in me, the anxiety, is quelling because of these drugs. I have never felt more strong, or so keenly aware of all the possibilities of my life.

  *

  Yet I fear I don’t have the right to speak anymore, given these drugs. I can’t pretend I have come to any answers, or any great wisdom. I think the drugs are the reason I am feeling less bad, not something I realized. All those years, when I had been leaning on epiphanies to make me feel better, the feeling would last for ten minutes, or a day, but it wouldn’t really change anything.

  Am I annoyed? Am I disappointed? A little bit, yes. I wanted my own magic to get rid of the pain, but I suppose one’s private alchemy never works as well as drugs. Philosophy, psychology, God, writing down one’s dreams—they work as well as a bloodletting, or leeches, or any medical intervention that does not work.

  What kind of story is it when a person goes down, down, down and down—but instead of breaking through and seeing the truth and ascending, they go down, then they take drugs, and then they go up? I don’t know what kind of story it is.

  Has this book, all along, just been evidence of my deep fear of everything, of all of life, and the things that matter to me most?

  yes

  Then is this the book of the devil, or the devil’s book?

  no

  Is this the book of the angel, or the angel’s book?

  yes

  Because I have been wrestling with an angel?

  yes

  And now I am not afraid?

  yes

  Of these same things will I ever again be afraid?

  Early this morning, before leaving home to visit my mother in her new house out east, I dreamed I was lying on the lawn of a synagogue near where I grew up. Sitting on the other side of me was a woman who was professional, attentive, not very emotional. We were talking about my mother and how she wasn’t around much when I was young. The woman, whose name was Tou Charin (I remembered this when I woke, because her name spelled touch if you put the first and last names together), couldn’t understand why I had to have so many babysitters. She understood that my mother was a doctor and worked, but to her this didn’t automatically mean that I had to have these substitute mothers. I explained that it wasn’t so bad, it was nice—I said my babysitters were very warm. It was nice for me as a child. I remembered one taking me into her different neighb
orhood and into her brother’s wonderful home. The different smells, the different furnishings, carpet on the stairs; I loved being there. I was getting choked up and distressed about it all. Finally, Tou Charin said she had to go, and she crossed the street, and went towards the subway. Hurriedly, I asked her for her email address. It was toucharin@gmail.com.

  Watching her go, I realized that when I was a little girl I had made up a story: that a woman who works or cares deeply about her work can’t also be a loving and attentive mother; that it was not possible to be both—that in order to explain my mother to myself, and to justify why she kept so much distance from me, it had to be because existentially one couldn’t care about both one’s work and one’s child. So it wasn’t my mother’s fault. And it wasn’t my fault, either.

  *

  I realized, while dreaming, that Tou Charin might be Charon, the ferryman to Hades, the land of the dead. So I pushed myself deeper into sleep and hurried across the busy, four-lane thoroughfare, pausing briefly on the grass-covered island as the traffic rushed past me on both sides, then I crossed the rest of the way and entered Eglinton West subway station through the glass doors, and rushed past the ticket booth. I went down the high escalator, onto the southbound platform.

  As I was following Tou Charin, I wondered if she actually was the babysitter who lived with us, who held my hand when I was six years old. Travelling on the subway together, a strange man was following us, or I thought he was—staring at us in a way that made me feel scared. I remembered holding my babysitter’s hand and telling her that I was afraid. She hugged me close and said, You don’t have to worry. I prayed for us before we left. I had never before heard anyone say anything like this. My mother didn’t believe in God, and my father had contempt for people who believed. So the fact that she had this faith, this thing—I wished I could have it, too. I so badly wanted to be religious, as I understood her to be. It was a superpower, really. But I also knew I would never have her faith—that I was already too old to have it, because I knew that God was not true. But for her it was true, or it was as true as it needed to be, because she wasn’t scared.

  *

  At the bottom of the escalator, I found Tou Charin standing there. I went over and stood beside her.

  I noticed that on the opposite platform, among the people waiting for the train, were two large dogs. I had seen them running into the station when I entered, bounding in large, wide loops, then down the stairs. After a couple of minutes, the train pulled in. The doors opened. When the doors closed and the train left, only one dog remained on the platform, looking around for its friend.

  I watched that dog, worried for it, and sad. It was distressed about its missing friend, and it looked anxiously down the platform. Then my train arrived. I realized I hadn’t paid the fare, but had just slipped by the conductor’s booth upstairs.

  How much is it? I asked Tou Charin.

  Three coins, she said.

  I hesitated a moment, then gave them to her, and got on.

  In the train, I felt I was being borne away, even farther from my mother friends and from Libby, like a dog who stepped onto a train going in the wrong direction from its companions, not realizing what it had done, not knowing what it meant.

  My mother opened her front door with a proud, sweet smile. She led me through her house, which had once been a barn, but which had been renovated to look like any ordinary, middle-class home. She admitted she rarely left it, for even in her retirement she is somehow still working. She didn’t mind. I used to worry that I was missing out on all the things happening in the world, she said.

  I worry about that, too.

  But nothing is happening in the world. Don’t worry, she told me. You’re not missing out on anything.

  *

  We sat and talked in armchairs that were covered in rich velvet the color of pomegranates. And the walls were painted a soft yellow. The wood trim was stained walnut, and there were tchotchkes everywhere—a porcelain bear holding a dish sponge, bear magnets on the stove, and other bears, stuffed and sweet, on the cabinets and the windowsills.

  Her study on the second floor was lined with shelves, and on them were books about mythology, astronomy and anatomy—books that had something real inside them, which corresponded not only to the human world, but to the world of nature. They had something in them of the grasses and shrubs that were stirring on the hills just outside her home, and something of the waves lashing onto the rocks; something of the saltiness of the sea air, which rose up against the cliff’s edges, where the sheep grazed in pastures near where she lived.

  Her study had a Persian rug covering the floor and more soft chairs. In the study, she opened a door that I thought would lead into another room, but I was startled to see the door open onto the vast and cavernous barn that her house had been built up from. Light poked down through the slats, and there were angled and rotted boards, and dust and cobwebs and darkness everywhere. I felt dizzy—like she was showing me her unconscious, the basement of her mind. How far away can we get from our mind’s darkest structures? It seemed to me like her living space would never be far enough from her deepest self—it would always be so close, right there, behind a closed door. And that this was the same for all of us—one could furnish the darkness and put in couches and try to live happily there, but just open the door and you would drop down into the darkest shadows.

  *

  Late one night, after my mother was asleep, I wrote my former Classics professor and I asked her about the words tou charin, which had remained in my mind. Earlier, expecting nothing, I had search for the words online, and found they appeared in Aristophanes’ play The Frogs. So I asked her if she could explain it to me—what tou charin meant. Her reply came the next day:

  In English we’d pronounce “tou charin” as “to karin” with a hard k and sounding like the woman’s name Karen. Charin is a very close cognate to Charon, the ferryman of Hades who crosses souls over the river Styx.

  On its own, charin could mean grace, favor, an act of kindness, but with the added tou it becomes a phrase, like por favor in Spanish. Charis appears in the phrase, For her pleasure. For talking’s sake. For the sake of my flesh. An offering in consequence of a vow. Tou Charin might mean On account of, for the sake of, because of, by reason of, in favor of, for the pleasure of—this.

  So Dionysus says, “I came down [to Hades] for a poet.”

  “For what reason?” (tou charin)

  Some sources of the play have Dionysus asking himself this question rhetorically. Others have Heracles asking it of him directly. So either Dionysus is asking himself, For what reason do I do this (act of kindness)?—meaning his descent into Hades. Or else, in the voice of Heracles, Why do you make this descent?

  In Greek literature, a descent into Hades always has something of a dreamlike quality, Hades and dreams being very much linked. And the reason Dionysus gives for the descent is to bring back an old, great Tragedian. Making him return to the living world of people would be a succor to the failing Athenians in their time of need.

  *

  Over the next few days, my mother drove me through her tiny village, but the entire time I felt half-asleep. I apologized to her for being so tired. She wanted to have lunch with me by a canal, where two swans floated under a wooden bridge, but I kept yawning, and I was desperate to get back to the house and sleep. We finally returned, and I napped on the blow-up mattress, which I blew up by myself.

  In my dream, I saw before me a mirror, and I knew I had to get beyond the mirror—so summoning all my strength, and knowing it required a huge act of faith, I leapt through it. Then I found myself falling down a tubal organ—a vagina or a trachea. As I was falling, I told myself to fall with abandon, because I knew I was in a dream, so I could not get hurt, and I wanted to go even deeper into my psyche, which I knew is what the falling represented. When I landed at the bottom, I found myself in the dank basement of my childhood home; there was a photo album on the floor, and I began to lo
ok through it. I found a photograph of my mother’s face, with the expression she had always worn when I was a child: full of mistrust, unhappiness and distance. Then I turned the page and saw a close-up of another face—smiling, and full of big, white teeth and happy eyes. When I woke up on the floor—the mattress having sunk down—I felt different, as though I could choose the happiness of that smiling face, or the unhappiness of my mother. Not everything had to be so heavy all the time. But how deep inside me my mother’s face was! How it lay in the basement, the unfinished barn, of my soul—so close, right there.

  *

  It happened so often during my childhood that our family would be sitting at the kitchen table, eating dinner. Then, without any warning, my mother would suddenly be crying, and she would get up and hurry off to the bedroom, in tears. Many times I followed her, but she would not open the door, would tell me to go away—she was unwilling to see me or be comforted.

  After a while, I stopped following her. We would remain at the table, and just continue talking as though nothing had happened.

  *

  I rose from my nap and went into the kitchen, and my mother and I sat at the table and drank the coffee she had been boiling on the stove. She said, Your father said to me on the phone last week that maybe it’s a good thing we don’t have grandchildren—given the horrible state of the environment, and what the world will be like in fifty years.

  The intimacy of my mother and father belonging to the same fate—maybe it’s good ‘we’ don’t have grandchildren—made me feel strange, like I was a young child: sheepishly responsible for binding my parents together in an endless experience of parenthood.