by Sheila Heti
All this wondering about children is just evidence of how much a person can give up what they know is right. It would be easier to have a child than to do what I want. Yet when I so frequently do the opposite of what I want, what is one more thing? Why not go all the way into falsehood, for me? I might as well have kids. Yet that is where I draw the line. You can’t create a person dishonestly. At least I have that bit of morality going for me—that bit of right action. Raising children is the opposite of everything I long for, the opposite of everything I know how to do, and all the things I enjoy.
How not to give up all your ideals as you move through life. But also, how it’s okay to change.
*
Is it immoral to have babies, because that is trapping the immortal soul in a mortal body?
no
Is it good to trap the immortal soul inside a mortal body?
yes
So that the immortal soul can learn?
yes
Does it sometimes happen that an immortal soul, trapped inside a human body, goes backwards; becomes more ignorant?
yes
Is the immortal soul shared by all of humankind?
yes
So if the immortal soul in me learns, does the immortal soul in another person learn, too?
yes
And if the immortal soul becomes more ignorant in another, it also does in me. Then it really matters what we do. Is it possible that someone has a baby, and this having a baby makes them more ignorant, whereas not having a baby would have made them more wise?
yes
Would that be the case with me—that in having a child, my soul would become more ignorant?
no
Would my soul become more wise?
no
Stay pretty much the same?
yes.
*
I know the more I think about having a child, the more that creates the figure of the child who is not born. The more I write this, the more this not-born child becomes a real thing, a figure not there, a specific person who is being denied life. Perhaps in this negative way, that child will live. That child will live as its opposite: the never-born child. Or perhaps all of this writing will compel me to have a child, having summoned him or her in this way—summoned him by repeatedly denying him. Or maybe it will create a child whose reality in language will be enough.
Writing seems so small in comparison to motherhood. It doesn’t feel like it will fill up all the nooks and crannies of the soul. And perhaps it won’t. But even if one is a mother, are all the nooks and crannies filled up?
*
I remember being twenty and seeing several writers on a literary panel on stage—both women and men. They said that of course writing was important to them, but their children were much more important than that. I felt so put off. They seemed so unserious to me. I never wanted to be like that—to have something in my life that was more important than writing. Why would they do that to themselves?
But in the years that followed, my fear changed: could I ever hope to be a good enough writer—capture on the page what being human felt like—if I had not experienced motherhood? If I had no experience of what I increasingly took to be the central experience of life?
*
Last night, some friends came over and things got quite grim. One friend said that in her forties, a woman suddenly sees all she could have done and all the ways she could have lived if she had not made her life so dependent on a man.
Another said, All I have left now is my integrity. She had married at forty, and she so much wanted it to work, even though she knew the man wasn’t her soulmate. But she wanted a child. So they married quickly, and had a baby, then two years later, they divorced. Her mother once asked her, Would you rather have a soulmate or would you rather have a child? She told her mother that she wanted both.
I thought about the question for a moment. I would rather have a soulmate, speaking honestly.
*
When Miles’s daughter comes to stay, I remind myself to be careful: her visits are not evidence of what it would be like to have a child who would not be her, and who would be mothered by me, not her own mother, who has not indifferently dedicated her life to her care. What could be more unlike motherhood than this—that she always returns to her mother? This is the part that has always frightened me most—the endlessness of motherhood, its eternity. Seeing someone pushing a baby in a stroller, I always feel a profound exhaustion: But there are so many years still to go!
I feel I don’t have a good enough reason to make someone live and work and pay for their days, and suffer for eighty-odd years. You can’t make someone live to resolve a debate in your mind, or because you are curious for every human experience, or to fit in with your friends. I could only give a child a worse life than I was given. How do people have the confidence to ever think otherwise?
Erica once said, We had our child as a hedge against future regret. But is it right to make someone live, so you might not feel some regret?
Unlike Erica, I have always feared that I would regret having had one, more than regret not having—for it has not escaped my notice that my happy imaginings of being a mother are always about having mothered—of smiling and waving at the front door as the children move on.
I just read over a journal from a year ago and it could have been written today. NOTHING but NOTHING has changed! How maddening! After years of thinking about whether I want a baby, and writing hundreds of thousands of words thinking about it, I am in pretty much the same place, my feelings about it more or less unchanged; reason, thought, examining my desires, has brought me no closer to knowing.
It sometimes seems as if the question of having children can only be resolved one way—by having them. For even if one comes to a definite resolution against having children, hanging over one’s head remains a spectre, the possibility, that a child will come. Or that life circumstances will conspire to make you change your mind, and if not actually bring about children, then make you regret not having had them.
Yet I have to think, If I wanted a kid, I already would have had one by now—or at least I would have tried. For how long am I expected to live as though there is a second me, hiding somewhere inside? When will it finally feel safe to prioritize the me I know?
I need to force myself to see things in a new way. It’s time, for god’s sake! I set myself up for so much misery. Imagine the questions of someone else, someone with a broader mind—then try to be that broader mind. Don’t ask yourself questions you don’t want the answers to, just like how Miles told me that he didn’t ask the man who was selling us the chairs why he was selling them, because he didn’t think he’d like the answer. That man was such a good man, such a likeable, warm and endearing man, in his tiny white apartment, with pictures of his children on all the walls, and signs on every cupboard and door, THINK OF THE POSITIVE.
*
I can remember—but barely—a time before I thought about having children so much—when the future was uncontaminated by the possibility of a child, or uncontaminated by the loss of not having had one. Erica said that it seems like I actually do want a child. Do I?
no
Why are you saying I don’t? Because you think you know anything at all?
yes
What do you know? Do you know my insides?
yes
Can you even remember what you answered, from one question to the next?
yes
Is all of this even writing?
no
Randomness is useless and leads nowhere! It is better to believe nothing than to believe things randomly and haphazardly. It is better to have a foundation from which to rule one’s behaviour and life, than this randomness and haphazardness, which leads as much to absurdity as it does to anything true. It is only fear that makes us interrogate too deeply into our relationships, and only a lust for power that makes us interrogate too deeply into the unknown. Nothing worth knowing can be known, and feelings, whi
ch fluctuate constantly, cannot be the things that guide us through life, which is designed to make feelings fluctuate so. We are dependent on each other and we all need so much. What matters is to overcome—to erase the boundary between the spiritual and the physical, and finally become whole. We must ask the demon for its blessings, and forget about the rest.
*
The man who was selling us the chairs—his apartment had almost nothing in it—white walls, few things. As Miles was putting the chairs in the car, the man told me that he wouldn’t accept a new pair of shoes if he already had one pair. He saw other people striving to build up their lives, moving to bigger cities, building admirable careers, buying cars and furnishings, cultivating grand connections and friends. Desires build up lives, he warned. He feared that if he began to follow his desires, he would end up buried underneath whatever they collected, until his whole self disappeared.
There must be, in the puzzle of desires, some who wait out their days, and some who desire nothing at all. Some people want to fill up their entire lives, while others want to empty them out—to shake them until everything inessential falls out.
What is your motivation? I asked him. He said, I don’t have a motivation. I live a very simple life. I do my work. After dinner, I sleep. I have no interest in having adventures.
*
In the car ride home, Miles said, Of course raising children is a lot of hard work, but I don’t see why it’s supposed to be so virtuous to do work that you created for yourself out of purely your own self-interest. It’s like someone who digs a big hole in the middle of a busy intersection, and then starts filling it up again, and proclaims: Filling up this hole is the most important thing in the world I could be doing right now.
*
I know the longer I work on this book, the less likely it is I will have a child. Maybe that is why I’m writing it—to get myself to the other shore, childless and alone. This book is a prophylactic. This book is a boundary I’m erecting between myself and the reality of a child. Perhaps what I’m trying to do in writing this is build a raft that will carry me just so long and so far, that my questions can no longer be asked. This book is a life raft to get me there. For myself, that’s all it needs to be—not a great big ocean liner, just a barge. It can completely fall to pieces once I land on the other shore.
Now my periods are getting irregular. Even a year ago they came every twenty-eight days. Now they can be off by two days or three. It makes me sad to see this drop in my fitness to reproduce, and other things. Time is running out.
Time is always ticking for women. Whereas men, apparently, live in a timeless realm. In the dimension of men, there is no time—just space. Imagine living in the realm of space, not time! You put your dick into spaces, and the bigger your dick, the cozier the space. If you have a very big dick, then space—and life—must be very cozy indeed. Imagine having a very small dick—how vast and unknowable the universe must be to the small-dicked man! But if your dick is the size of most of what you encounter, nothing could be very threatening at all. For women, the problem is different. A fourteen-year-old girl has so much time to be raped and have babies that she is like the greatest Midas. The time-span of a woman’s life is about thirty years. Apparently, during these thirty years—fourteen to forty-four—everything must be done. She must find a man, make babies, start and accelerate her career, avoid diseases, and collect enough money in a private account so that her husband can’t gamble their life’s savings away. Thirty years is not enough time to live a whole life! It’s not enough time to do all of everything. If I have only done one thing with my time, this is surely what I’ll castigate myself for later. The day will come when I’ll think, What the fuck did you waste all those years putting in commas for? I will have no idea how I could have been so naïve about how time acts in the life of a woman; how it is the essential realm in which a woman lives. All the things I neglected to do because I refused to believe, fundamentally, that first and foremost I was female.
You women who wish to live in the realm of space, not time—you will see what gifts the universe has waiting. Will I? Yes. Just look around. But some women are happy! But some women are not. How do I know which I will be? You cannot know until it’s too late.
My mother told me, when I was a child, You know that in my family the women were always the brains. So I also wanted to be the brains: to be nothing but words on a page.
*
When I was growing up, my mother kept a framed photograph on the piano. It was the only photograph of her mother’s family that survived. In the picture, Magda is twelve years old. She stands in a portrait studio with her parents and younger brothers. They are skinny and unsmiling. The family is so poor that the boys don’t have shoes. The photographer had to paint shoes on the print: thin grey lines marking laces, eyeholes, leathers. My grandmother’s face looks identical to mine. When I was twelve, and she was twelve, we could have been the same person.
When I was a child, part of me wondered, if our faces are so similar, what else about us might be similar? Are our minds, our feelings, identical, too? Who is to say that my grandmother’s soul—in the fallow year between our lives—didn’t reach into my body, and take up shelter there?
*
My mother could never please her mother: she was never smart enough for her mother, could never get good enough grades. She worked fifty times harder than anyone else. She let her mother’s dreams become her own. She lived to please her mother, even once she was a mother, and even once her own mother had died. She lived her life turned towards her mother, not towards me.
*
How far beyond your mother do you hope to get? You are not going to be a different woman entirely, so just be a slightly altered version of her, and relax. You don’t have to have all of what she had. Why not live something else, instead? Let the pattern which is the repeating, which was your mother, and her mother before her, live it a little bit differently this time. A life is just a proposition you ask it by living it, Could a life be lived like this, too?
Then your life will end. So let the soul that passed down from your mothers try out this new life in you. There is no living your life forever. It’s just once—a trial of a life—then it will end. So give the soul that passed down from your mothers a chance to try out life in you.
As a custodian for the soul passed down through your mothers, you might make it a little easier for it this time around. Treat it nicely, because it’s had a hard time. This is the first time in generations it can rest, or decide with true liberty what it will to do. So why not treat it with real tenderness? It has been through so much already—why not let it rest?
Low tear count today, although the feeling of tears was in me yesterday. Still, there is a pressure, stretched-ness and dryness all around my eyes.
Someone cursed me, and my mother, and my mother’s mother before me. The person who cursed us is now dead. It’s a curse that turns me towards fixing my mother’s sorrow, just as she was turned to fixing her mother’s. My mother lived to fix the problem of her mother’s life, given how Magda was cursed. I have taken on the curse as my own. We do not pursue happiness in marriage. We do not look for happiness with children. We think mainly of our work, to solve the problem of our mothers’ tears.
My grandmother would not have wanted her daughter to be sad, and she would not have wanted her sadness to carry on through me. No one who has been through what she went through would have wanted her family to carry this sadness on.
*
I know only one other story about my grandmother’s life in the camps. The women in Magda’s barracks were told by a guard that the Germans were looking for female prisoners to help in the camp kitchen. They were told that anybody interested in volunteering should step forward. Magda stepped forward. Everyone stepped forward, including a woman who Magda’s future husband had dated prior to the war.
A German soldier yelled at my grandmother, Not you. He roughly hit her and she fell back from the gr
oup. The woman my grandfather had dated was chosen. Magda never saw her again. Later she learned that none of the women who stepped forward to volunteer were taken to a kitchen. They were all taken to the German army, raped by the soldiers, and then shot to death.
To have grown up knowing this story, I think gave me a strange feeling of the naturalness of family lines ending, as if our family line was supposed to end there, but it managed to slip by, but just barely—the way someone who has been shot might stumble forward a few more steps before collapsing dead. That is how my life has always felt to me: like those last few bloodied and hobbled steps after the bullet has pierced the body.
*
When I think about everything that could be or couldn’t be, I think I don’t want our flesh—my mother’s flesh, my grandmother’s flesh—to just be divided and replicated. I want their life to be counted. I want to make a child that will not die—a body that will speak and keep on speaking, which can’t be shot or burned up. You can’t burn every copy of a single book. A book is more powerful than any murderer, than any crime. Then to make a strong creature, stronger than any of us. To make a creature that lives inside many bodies, not just one body that is so vulnerable.
A book lives in every person who reads it. You can’t just snuff it out. My grandmother got away from the camps. She got away so she could live. I want my grandmother to live in everybody, not just in one body from between my legs.
I do not feel I have the luxury to have a child. I do not have the time. My mother worked hard to justify her mother’s life. She worked for her mother, to give meaning to her mother’s life. She was turned towards her mother, not turned towards me. And I am turned towards my mother, too, and not towards any son or daughter. We turn our love backwards to make sense of life, to make beauty and significance of our mother’s life.