by Sheila Heti
When I was little, I would often find my mother sitting in bed under the covers, with pens and markers all around her, highlighting through the heaviest medical textbooks. When I was five years old, my father and I went to visit her in the apartment where she was living for several months, so she could focus on studying for her exams. There seemed to be nothing so glamorous or romantic in the world as a mother who lived alone in an apartment with her colored pens and books. I wanted to grow up to be like her. I wanted to live in an apartment, too, with no one around to bother me. I loved to visit her there.
My mother put all of herself into her work and let our father raise my brother and me. It was wonderful to have such a loving father, and strange to have a mother who was hardly there. I resented how the world spoke of mothers; what they assumed of mothers and what they assumed of fathers. My father was like the other kids’ mothers. He came with us on class trips. He knew the names of all my friends and every one of my teachers. He took me to birthday parties and the ballet. He arrived home from work hours before my mother did, and never worked on weekends. I remember racing down the hall when he would come in through the front door after work, setting his briefcase down, and I—wild and dizzy with love—would run into his arms.
A friend once asked me if my mother was dead.
*
My mother wanted a dutiful girl—which I was not—who would obey her and show her respect. She was strict and wanted me to be a doctor, like her, when all I had ever cared for was art. She didn’t see what there was to care for in art. The things I loved most had no value for her, so—what felt like an open question to me—of what value to her could I be? Do I remember longing for something I did not have, like the loving gazes and touches of the mothers of my friends? I had a father, who lavished me with love.
Although my parents were eventually unhappy in their marriage—she valued achievement and work; he valued wonder and play—she was happy to have married a man who was a devoted parent, at a time when most men were not. She was relieved she could rely on him to take care of us—to do far more than most men would. In this way, she made the right match. She married the right man for her work, although he wasn’t the right man for her happiness.
Today they are sort of like brother and sister—for family is scarce in our family.
When my mother first saw a dead body, she was in medical school in Hungary. It was lying open on a table before her, and glancing over it, she felt a kind of vertigo. She hadn’t expected there would be anything more there than blood and bones and viscera, yet some part of her kept looking. Even though she had been raised without God, she was troubled to find nothing else there—no soul.
That is how I felt when I got married, quite young. I had expected that in the moment of marrying something would appear or be born of the moment—something magical, a bubble encasing us, the shiny bubble of Marriage. But just as that autopsied body revealed a startling lack of something to my mother, so in the moment of marrying I felt I’d been tricked: marriage was nothing more than a simple human act that I would never be up to fulfilling.
So I fear will be the first moments in the delivery room, after having my baby laid on my chest, when it will hit me in a similar way as to how those moments dawned: there’s nothing magical here either, just plain old life as I know it and fear it to be.
When Miles came over and stood behind me as I was writing, and put his hands on my breasts, I got tense. I got tense because I had just been looking at a picture of a big-breasted girl, and it seemed to me like there was not much for him to touch. I thought he must be thinking about the inadequacy of my breasts. Then he removed his hands. Could he tell that I got tense?
yes
Did he understand that I was feeling insecure about my breasts?
yes
Was he, in fact, disappointed by the inadequacy of my breasts, as he touched them?
no
Oh well. That’s too bad. It’s too bad I projected that onto him, just as I’m projecting onto you, coins, the wisdom of the universe. But it’s useful, this, as a way of interrupting my habits of thought with a yes or a no. I feel like my brain is becoming more flexible as I use these coins. When I get an answer I didn’t expect, I have to push myself to find another answer—hopefully a better one. It’s an interruption of my complacency—or at least that’s what it feels like, to have to dig a little deeper, to be thrown off. My thoughts don’t just end where they normally would. At the same time, by this age, I feel like I have accepted myself on a certain level, so throwing coins is not self-annihilating, which it would be if I still despised myself. Or do I still despise myself?
no
Did I ever?
no
No, no, it was all make-believe, even then. Even when it seemed like I did, I was still so grateful to have been born. Is it possible to despise oneself but love the world?
yes
But isn’t the self part of the world?
yes
Then I don’t understand how it’s possible to despise yourself but love the world. I guess a person has to fundamentally feel like they are not part of the world. Is that it?
yes
Is that the essence of despair?
yes
What’s the opposite of despair? Joy?
yes
Peace?
no
Happiness?
yes
So the essence of happiness and joy is the feeling that one belongs to the world?
yes
And is of, and part of the world—actually undivided from it?
no
Is at home in the world?
yes
At both the microcosmic and the macrocosmic level?
no
Only at the microcosmic level, like in a city, a relationship, a family, or among friends?
no
Only at the macrocosmic level, like in nature, humanity and time?
yes
I made a resolution this year that I would be happy. I so wanted to be happy, sort of at the expense of everything else, but I did not know what happiness consisted of. Now that I know, I will focus on that. Happiness and joy are feeling like you belong to the world, and are at home in the world, at the level of nature, humanity and time.
*
Over the weekend, my father and I watched some home movies that were shot in Florida when I was around nine or ten. In one of them, my mother and brother are in the hallway of a building where my mother’s religious cousins owned two condos; we were staying there for a week. My dad holds the video camera, and we are walking down the hall from one condo, the one we were staying in, to the other one, which had a TV. I am performing for the camera, telling my dad to shoot the ceiling fan, and announcing in a slow and deliberately performative voice, Look at the fan! It goes round and round … like someone selling a house to an idiot.
In the video, my mother leans against the door frame of the second condo, and asks my father if he has the keys, wanting to get inside and away from us. There’s a look of disgust on her face as she watches me. Stop acting! she says. Try to live your life. My parents never agreed on anything, and so my father defends me, No, she’s trying to act, because it’s a travelogue, we’re moving from our apartment to the other apartment. My mother addresses him sourly under her breath, No! I tell her sometimes, ‘Be yourself.’ But I don’t know what ‘herself’ is anymore. Her acting and ‘herself’ is completely mixed up.
For years, that video caused me so much pain, seeing my mother’s contempt. When I was younger, watching it, it was all the proof I needed that she did not love me. But now I think her criticisms were correct. Myself and my acting were completely mixed up. I wish my mother had helped me with my problems, and expressed them to me in a constructive way, helping me sort myself out. I never understood what she thought was so wrong about me, so I concluded that my whole entire being was wrong. That is the way I have always felt: helplessly wrong, and so desperate to live as a person beyond criticism, wha
tever that might mean; to prove that I was better than any of the ways she saw me, to do one thing she might admire.
Yesterday morning, my mother and I were sitting in the auditorium at Roy Thomson Hall for a three-hour ceremony in which the entire family had gathered to watch Miles’s call to the bar. Soon he would rent an office and start his own practice. There were hundreds of other people there. We were sitting high in the nosebleed seats, with Miles’s family all around us, and strangers in the rows in front of us and behind. I began telling my mother what the fortune teller in New York had said to me in the street—that the reason she and I were sad was because three generations of our family were cursed—me, her, and her mother. She got a curious little smile on her face, and when I pressed her for what that smile meant, she said she did not believe it was true.
*
After the ceremony, I was talking to a friend of the family, Sylvia, at the garden party she had organized for her son and Miles. She said it looked good, what was between Miles and me. That’s the way it was with him—she pointed at her husband’s back. She told the story marvellously, of how they first met. It was not what I expected. Both of them had been married to other people. That was twenty-five years ago. Those first years were hard—it’s still hard a lot, she said. She’s not doing her art. Their three kids have grown.
She called my former relationships narcissistic because they were all about what I wanted, my happiness. With Miles—where I second-guess myself, take pause, consider my behavior and think about what he wants—she said that’s what raising a child is like; it pushes you to your limits. Being with a man who makes you feel that way, it’s more relational, she said, and it makes you into a better person, because you are not necessarily good the way you are.
She advised me, have a baby with him, as though it’s something you do to bring the man closer. Maybe this is a bigger part of why women do it than I know. But I know that when a woman has a child to bring a man closer, often the man just gets further away.
Shopping with my mother, only a few years ago, she shook her head at a pregnant woman who we passed in a mall, who was happily holding hands with her husband. Enjoy it, my mother said, under her breath. But she didn’t mean enjoy the pregnancy. She meant the woman should enjoy the love she was getting from her husband, for pretty soon the husband would meet his baby, and would love it more than he loved her. She said, Pretty soon you’re going to be replaced.
*
After I had finished talking to Sylvia, I left the dozen guests who were mingling in the garden and went into the kitchen, and saw Sylvia’s eldest daughter leaning against the kitchen counter as her two-year-old played on the floor. I said to her, I’m so jealous of mothers because whatever else happens, they have this person, this thing. She said, That’s not right. I used to have things. I don’t have anything anymore. I don’t have my work … my daughter is her own person. She doesn’t belong to me.
In that moment, I saw it was true: her daughter was something apart from her, not her possession or belonging at all.
*
Sylvia’s daughter lived around the corner from us until her child was almost two, and for a while I would go over to help out. I have a perfect memory of changing the little one, and a routine we’d get into. As she lay on her back with a new diaper on, I would pull out pants from under the changing table and hold them up before her eyes. This one? I’d ask. Nah! she’d say in a little voice. This one? I’d ask again. Nah! she would grin. And it would go on this way as we laughed at our shared predicament, until finally she agreed to put one on.
One time, upon returning home, I related this to Miles, adding that it was the nicest thing that had happened to me in I-don’t-know-how-long, and he shook his head, meaning, Being a woman is the stupidest, most unfortunate thing to be.
*
Last night, I dreamed I was playing in the sea with my blonde, long-haired, three-year-old daughter. It was warm and we were dancing in the waves, and I thought if a vacation could always be like this, then having a daughter would be a pure joy.
I woke up terrified at three in the morning, wondering, What if I’ve suppressed my desire for children so much that my desire is unrecognizable to me? I remembered that after Miles and I got together, I was alone, walking along the beach in L.A., so lit up with the idea that I might one day have our child, and how aroused I was to think of Miles with a ring around his finger, as my husband in the world; and how erotic I found it, imagining carrying a child, half his.
Sometimes I’m convinced that a child will add depth to all things—just bring a background of depth and meaning to whatever it is I do. I also think I might have brain cancer. There’s something I can feel in my brain, like a finger pressing down.
*
Maybe raising children really is a thankless task. Maybe there’s no reason to thank someone for putting their energies into a human who did not need to be born. Then should we be trying to work against this impulse—as Miles said—pass through our childbearing years without bearing a child, no matter how much we might desire it; but to selflessly and with all our might do whatever we can to avoid it? To find our value and greatness in some place apart from mothering, as a man must find his worth and greatness in some place apart from domination and violence, and the more women and men who do this, the better off the world will be? Miles said we value warring and dominating men, the same way we revere the mother. The egoism of childbearing is like the egoism of colonizing a country—both carry the wish of imprinting yourself on the world, and making it over with your values, and in your image. How assaulted I feel when I hear that a person has had three children, four, five, more … It feels greedy, overbearing and rude—an arrogant spreading of those selves.
Yet perhaps I am not so different from such people—spreading myself over so many pages, with my dream of my pages spreading over the world. My religious cousin, who is the same age as I am, she has six kids. And I have six books. Maybe there is no great difference between us, just the slightest difference in our faith—in what parts of ourselves we feel called to spread.
BOOK TOUR
On my first night abroad, in a small restaurant in Stockholm, my thirty-two-year-old Swedish editor began telling me about how she and her girlfriends (all of whom have husbands and children) have one friend who has been with her partner for the last seven years, and this woman is the only one of their original circle from university who doesn’t have a kid. She says that her friend and her friend’s husband don’t want one, but when this friend is not at dinner, all her friends talk about her, and feel sorry for her, and speculate that it is he who does not want a child, and really she does. Her life is the focus of much interest. I said that maybe the friend actually doesn’t want a baby, but it was hard for my editor to accept the possibility; not, I think, because she couldn’t imagine some other woman not wanting to have a child, but because this friend has been well-cemented in their circle of girlfriends as the one they can feel sorry for, and feel sort of superior to, and who they believe they have special knowledge of (more knowledge than the friend has of herself). They need someone who they feel their lives are better than. She serves an important role.
I thought it must be awful for the friend to have to be still in contact with her university friends. She must know that on some level they pity her and don’t believe her account of her life. I wished she could find some new friends, and suspected that she probably did have new friends, and perhaps socialized with her university friends only when she had to, which was why she sometimes wasn’t at those dinners where her friends gossiped about her delusions and her lack.
*
A tall, dark-haired American writer who I met at the festival said that with women our age, the first thing one always wants to know about another woman is whether she has children, and if she doesn’t, whether she’s going to. It’s like a civil war: Which side are you on?
We were at an ordinary bar in Dublin, late at night, packed with young men who we
re dancing with gusto, enthusiasm and affection under rotating lights. They huddled together, grabbed each other’s asses, bumped together, chest against chest, and hit on us without hope. We gave them the chilly edge. Then she went to the bathroom. You’re not leaving me alone here, are you? I said. While she was gone, I kept my eyes fixed on the dolled-up ladies on the large TV. As I was watching, I thought about how unfair it was that she and I had to think about having kids—that we had to sit here talking about it, feeling like if we didn’t have children, we would always regret it. It suddenly seemed like a huge conspiracy to keep women in their thirties—when you finally have some brains and some skills and experience—from doing anything useful with them at all. It is hard to when such a large portion of your mind, at any given time, is preoccupied with the possibility—a question that didn’t seem to preoccupy the drunken men at all.
*
In Munich, the producer of a half-hour television arts program—short, with straight blonde hair pulled back, who appeared to be about six months pregnant, and who was holding a large, heavy clipboard—overheard me talking to the host of the show. She said that she was forty-one and pregnant with her second child. Pointing at her belly, she remarked, This is not the only life I could have had. I could have made a different choice. It’s not necessary to be a mother—it’s just one thing.
The interviewer was in his mid-fifties. He said he had always wanted a child, but only with the right woman, who he did not meet until he was forty-five. She was in her late thirties then, with a four-year-old son. They discussed what they should do, and she said the decision was his. He finally chose not to, because by then he felt too old.
He said that between him and his siblings, none of them had kids. His parents had split up after twenty years, and he said he thought that was the problem. What was? I asked. The fact that they broke up the family, he explained, means we didn’t feel obliged to carry it on.
*
Last night, my Dutch publisher was telling me about how he has two children with his current wife and one kid with his ex. His eldest daughter is twenty-four; the boys are nine and twelve. He said that after the third child, he told his wife, Enough! He felt too old to have any more, so he got a vasectomy. But in the years since, he’s had many moments of regret, because once the boys got a little older, he said he wanted it again—the experience of cradling an infant in his arms.