by Sheila Heti
*
On the following day, sitting on the cliffs alone, overlooking the sea, I had brought my notebook with me, but with the beauty that surrounded me, I could not write. Nature’s beauty could not be captured, nor could anything I write equal its grandeur. When I returned to the farmhouse after hurrying down the hill, I entered my mother’s kitchen and saw that she had put out sliced fruit, and had turned on the radio and was listening to a show. I showered and got changed, and when I returned to the kitchen, she was preparing a dish from a cookbook for dinner, with tomatoes and balsamic vinegar, and the salmon we had picked up earlier from the fishmonger in town. When I was growing up, she had only ever made schnitzel.
My mother told me about her plans to renovate the rest of the barn. She wanted to expand it, to make an apartment for herself on the main floor with a bedroom and a tub, so she would not have to climb the stairs when she became ancient.
Since my girlhood, I had been cautious about allowing myself to imagine the beauty of being a woman alone in a house by the sea. Yet now I saw the beauty my life could become.
*
The next morning, I peered into the cabinet while brushing my teeth, and saw a bottle of blue-and-yellow pills behind the mirrored glass, nestled beside the mouthwash, some eye shadow, and several frayed and yellowing toothbrushes. My mother’s name was on the label.
When I entered the living room with the bottle and asked her about the drugs, she admitted that she had taken them on and off these last few years. It suddenly made sense: I felt I could identify any memory of my mother as either being on the drugs, or off them. On them, she is more cheerful, warm and delightful. Off them, she is sad and withdrawn, but more poignant in some ways—a towering figure with tremendous power.
*
When my mother came to my room to say goodnight, I told her I loved her, and although I have said this many times before, this time she said, with a funny smile on her face, I am surprised you love me, when I neglected you so much. She said that before the divorce, she was focused on keeping the marriage together, not on loving her kiddies. She went on, I paid attention to the wrong things. I saw what a different person she would have been if we had been her focus, but it seemed strange that it was a choice. I mean that choice seemed like the wrong word for something that to me was always just the way it was, and couldn’t possibly have been any different.
Right before my mother left the room, she spoke, with some confusion, about women who say that raising kids is the most important thing in their life. I asked her if motherhood had been the most important part of her life, and she blushed and said, No—at the very same moment that I interrupted her and said, You don’t have to answer. I was there.
*
The surprise my mother delivered to me when we sat on her couch, the day before I left—I told her that my father had been angry at her since their last interaction, and told her about my brother’s anger, too. Instead of self-pityingly criticizing herself, or making frantic plans to win their love back, as I was used to her doing, she said, So what? I’m not going to go and hang myself.
What does that mean? I said. I had never heard her say anything like that before.
She said she was going to enjoy her life despite their anger at her—she wasn’t going to go and kill herself because her ex-husband and son were upset at her for reasons of their own.
When she said this—So what? I’m not going to go and hang myself—it did something inside me. If she is not going to hang herself, then neither am I—not for any reason at all. Do you ever feel like you cannot grow beyond your mother? So it’s wonderful when your mother climbs one step higher on the ladder from where she had been standing before.
I flew south to meet Miles at a seaside town, where we would be joining his daughter and her mother. It was the town they had named their daughter after. We stayed in a beachside hotel in two rooms, and spent three days on the sand. It was an experiment, a hopeful one: the first time the four of us had ever been away together.
It was particularly hot on the second day, and Miles and his daughter went down the shore to get ice cream for everyone. Her mother and I turned to each other while lying on the beach towels and said, Do you want to go into the ocean? Yes.
Twenty minutes later, they returned from the concession stand with ice creams in each of their hands. Then Miles’s daughter stepped away from him and went to stand by the shore. Holding the ice creams, she watched us—her mother and me—bobbing far in the waves. Seeing her seeing us swimming together was perhaps one of the most wonderful moments of my life.
Here I am—back in my apartment that is filled with books. The lonely fill up their lives with books. I don’t live in nature. I don’t live in culture. I don’t live in my relationships. I live in books. What good can all the books of the world be, penned by the loneliest men who ever lived?
Tonight, neither Miles nor I could sleep, so he pulled off my pajamas and went down on me till I came, then we fucked, then I sucked him off and he came loudly, crying out into a pillow. Then we lay there holding each other, but I couldn’t sleep from the jet lag, so I came into this room and read sixty pages of a book, then I listened to the rain fall hard outside the window, with just one lamp on, and drank my hot chocolate. After that was done, I looked through the magazines in the pile on the sideboard, and determined to throw some of them out today.
This morning, I feared I might be pregnant. I felt it so strongly: But I don’t want a child! Walking home from the pharmacy, with the sunlight streaming down on me, and crossing into the park where the children played, I took the morning-after pill.
*
A measure of impatience, a bad feeling on the walk, too many sunflowers lining the edge of the lawn, not enough sun for everyone, the distribution of love wholly unequal, the sense that one is being depended on, the sense that one is failing. The feeling that there is little in life left to strive for; something having been accomplished, not much left to do. A feeling of uselessness, of the end of the world coming, of other people’s lives having no purpose, of all of us doing whatever we feel like, no collective direction in which we’re all taking part. And another dark shadow on a dark lawn: the fact that for a woman of curiosity, no decision will ever feel like the right one. In both, too much is missing.
What can I say, except: I forgive myself for every time I neglected to take a risk, for all the narrowings and winnowings of my life. I understand that fear beckons to a person as much as possibility does, and even more strongly.
*
I should have known all along that this would happen. All the times I contemplated children, I felt a giddiness and wobbliness that are nothing like the commitments I’ve made that come from a deeper, more solid place. Those commitments feel dark, unfantastical, mixed up equally with the good and the bad. But the thought of having children always made me feel dizzy, or as elated as sucking helium, like all the things I’ve rushed into, and just as impulsively, left.
Coming back from the bank today, an old man in his garage did not look at me, even though I passed close by. It made me glad, for I never much enjoyed being looked at anyway. How freeing to escape the grip of that world, and move into another realm entirely—one not so dominated by men’s desires, but to breeze past their desires. Only when a woman is no longer attractive to men, can she be left alone for enough moments to actually think.
*
I feel so relieved that it has passed—like a storm passing over my soul. The storm has passed and the clouds have given way to a brighter day, lighting up the world all around me. I can see it again—what I saw before, my whole life long—how far out in all directions life can go. Before, when the thought of having a child was near, I couldn’t imagine any distance or depth to a life without one. It felt like emptiness, like boredom, like poverty—like all the things I loved would never be enough, would never make up for this lack; that life would always have a lacking.
But now that I am older, my oldness makes me no
t want them. My life is not a speculative life, or a blueprint for a future life. It’s just my life. This oldness is a good feeling—a feeling of nothing more to be decided. What happens now will be something other than the strain of making a decision, or the stress of fighting with nature, trying to assert what is true for me in the face of what it wants.
I experience biology’s forgetting about me as an immense relief, as a sort of bliss. If you do not have a child, at a certain age you become your own child. You start life all over again, this time with yourself. And what will I do with all this time? But time is not what you do something with—time does something with you.
Admit it when you have waited too late, when the time for something is passed. It can be too late not only for biological reasons, but because the moment has honestly passed. When the sun has set, the meal you eat cannot be called breakfast. I’m in the afternoon of my life. The time for children is breakfast.
*
I never thought that by the time I came to this part, I would be so old—that what would happen was simply aging, time doing its work, playing on its instrument—me. It’s all so frighteningly simple, the end to all this questioning—but also, unexpected. I wondered about children intensely for so long, but now that I am getting older, I am thinking about it less and less—with some relief, a bit of distress, but mostly no sentiment at all.
What I don’t realize fully is that I’m actually at the end of my childbearing years, which means that nobody is interested in hearing me ask the questions I most fear, long after the questioning entirely makes sense. I can’t completely admit it to myself—that the time for deciding has passed. I can’t say it outright, or accept that I have missed my chance, or that I did everything in my power to miss it—that I wanted to miss my chance. That it was a chance I never wanted, yet I felt obliged to consider it—to consider it until the very last second—before finally turning away.
It’s fair to say I’m missing out on something—but also that I might prefer to miss out.
I held fast against the wave that tried to sweep me into its slumber—the slumber that makes babies—for it’s certainly a kind of slumber to do what nature wants. To have avoided its grasp feels as blissful and intimate as having a child, but the opposite of a child, in how what I’ve won can hardly be seen.
I don’t have to live every possible life, or to experience that particular love. I know I cannot hide from life; that life will give me experiences no matter what I choose. Not having a child is no escape from life, for life will always put me in situations, and show me new things, and take me to darknesses I wouldn’t choose to see, and all sorts of treasures of knowledge I cannot comprehend.
*
When I was a child, and I imagined a future life with children, I always wound up at the thought that one day I would be an orphan. Part of me looked forward to this time, as though in the moment both my parents had died, I would become like a star in the sky, beautifully and profoundly alone. But if I had children, I would never be that shining thing, enveloped by a darkness, completely untouched.
Then didn’t I know it all along—that a baby would never come from between my legs? I think I knew it from a very young age—that it could not happen, and never would. My body has always experienced the idea of having a child as an absurdity and an abomination. I never thought I would die leaving a child from my body behind. If I had asked myself that question, thinking about my deathbed, I really would have known. I should have looked at my deathbed, not at the maternity ward. For as inconceivable as it is—a child from my womb—even more inconceivable is a child mourning me once I’m gone. I should have looked at it backwards.
Last night, lying in bed, Miles said to me,
Nobody looks at a childless gay couple and thinks their life must lack meaning or depth or substance because they didn’t have kids. No one looks at a couple of guys who have been together forever, love each other, are happy in their work, have chosen not to have kids, are probably still fucking, and pities them; or thinks that down deep inside they must know they’re living a trivial and callow life because they’re not fathers. Nobody thinks that! The idea of it is ridiculous! Or take a lesbian couple who could have had kids if they wished to, but chose not to for whatever reason. Now they’re in their fifties or sixties, one of these glorious couples you see around, with that ease and assuredness they have, like they don’t need any favours from anybody. Who looks at them and thinks they must be nurturing this bottomless regret and longing in their souls because they’re not mothers? Nobody! It would be offensive to suggest, not to mention stupid. It’s only straight couples people have these feelings about—how empty their lives must be. No, actually, it’s not even the man—people look at him like he got away with something. It’s just the woman—the woman who doesn’t have a child is looked at with the same aversion and reproach as a grown man who doesn’t have a job. Like she has something to apologize for. Like she’s not entitled to pride.
*
I realized then that in my darkest moments, I had been afraid that Miles didn’t respect women, but now I wondered if his not needing me to be a mother revealed a deeper respect for me and for women than even I had—with my endless searching deep inside to find a desire to be a mother, hoping I’d discover that self there, thinking that if only I looked long enough, I could scare her out from her hiding place and finally be her.
In my moments of greatest paranoia and hurt, I thought he must see something wrong with me if he did not want to use me for having a child. Why couldn’t I consider that he valued me simply for myself? He was not asking to use me for anything. How had I taken this as a rejection of me as a woman? He wanted to be with me for me, while I had wanted him to value me as a means of continuing himself through me. It was my mind that was warped, not his. He had seen me as a full and final person, and this had hurt my feelings and made me feel suspicious.
I wondered at myself angrily, so many times, Why did you fall in love with a man—and remain with him through your thirties—who is so hard to have a baby with? But now that question seems to answer itself: because I wanted to be with a man who would not make it easy for me to have my own baby, because I didn’t really want one—just as some women choose a partner in the opposite way, as someone to have children with.
Walking through the neighborhood, the grasses are pushing up through the sidewalk, but they all had their start beneath the ground. So maybe it’s okay that for a very long time, I have also been underground. The thickest tree was once the thinnest. What very strong thing in nature did not start off as weak? If up until now I have been weak, that does not mean I will never be strong.
*
I feel a new giddiness and wonder that I managed to pass through my childbearing years without bearing a child. It really feels like a miracle, like something I always set out to do, but had no faith that I would ever achieve. I didn’t know whether I would make it—but now there is relief inside.
Anything could happen now. I feel I have lived through the trickiest part of my fate. And how much gratitude I have towards Miles, for without him I might never have arrived in this place.
*
In the early days of writing this book, I thought it would be a trick: that I would write it and it would tell me whether I wanted to have a child. You think you are creating a trick with your art, but your art ends up tricking you. It made me write it and write it for years—the answer like something I could almost reach, tantalizingly there—the promise of an answer just around the corner, maybe in the next day’s writing. But that day never came. But the hope that it would lead me past the ages of thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, and thirty-nine—and in a few months I will be forty.
Even a few months ago, I felt like I had to finish this book—to have it done by the end of this year; imagining this book was the single thing I had to do before having a baby. But last night I imagined not racing to finish this book; not giving myself only two more months with it, but ten months
, or a year, or two years, or ten. And this felt a million times more nurturing than rushing to finish it in time to have a baby; a million times more loving and true.
Taking the knife that sat in front of my mirror, I hold it in my hands like my mother held a scalpel in that photograph of her from medical school. A corpse lies on a table before her, and she stands with three other women doctors. They seem to be having such a good time. I can’t believe my mother is wearing her watch, and her green-and-gold ring.
Taking the knife to slice it all open, what have I found in my autopsy of a body laid upon the page? And that fortune teller who I met in New York: I wondered if what she said was true. She said my maiden name would be remembered, and my married name would be, too.
She said that Miles and I would have two girls, and that we would stay together until I died. She also said I had precancerous cells in my womb. But it was my grandmother, Magda, who gave birth to two daughters. It was she who remained with her husband until she died, and she who had precancerous—and finally cancerous—cells in her womb. And it was she who had a married name and a maiden name while I only have this one name.
If it is true what the fortune teller said—that three generations of women in my family were cursed—then my great-grandmother was surely more cursed than me. She was so poor that she lived in a house with dirt floors, and she and her husband died young of the flu, because they could not afford the medicine or care, leaving behind four children. It was she whose orphaned children were taken to Auschwitz, and one of them killed in the camps. How exactly have I been cursed? I haven’t been. I have always had luck at my feet, through no good works of my own.
Yet my grandmother never wrote a book, so when the fortune teller was talking about a book, she must have been talking about this one. And I do think she was speaking about me when she said, of a man, Your life is safe in his hands.
My mother gave me the middle name Magdalen. She put her mother inside me. So perhaps the fortune teller was speaking both to me, and to the Magdalen inside of me.