Motherhood
Welcome back to Arroz con Mango. It seems like despite my best efforts, I have resolved to posting on Saturdays now. This week we’ll be discussing Motherhood by Sheila Heti
How do you describe a woman who is not a mother, without describing an absence, a negation, or a lack? If the desire to have kids is biological, then is not wanting that unnatural? How can a woman truly make the choice of whether to have children independently of society’s pressures and her body’s demands?
In Motherhood, our narrator is 36 and is fairly certain she does not want kids. She lives with her partner Miles, a lawyer, and is deeply fulfilled by her career as a writer. And yet, the prospect that the choice remains open causes her great turmoil and pain. She launches into a 6 year exploration of her decision making process including flipping coins, visiting fortune tellers, hanging out with her friends and their kids, and reevaluating her own relationship with her mother.
Heti gets to the root of the uniquely female dilemma of constantly having to make this decision of whether or not to have children during her fertile years- there is no easy, painless way of opting out (she briefly gets an IUD, only to shortly have it removed due to the pain). It weighs her down with its permanence and its potential for eternal regret.
“On the one hand, the joy of children. On the other hand, the misery of them. On the one hand, the freedom of not having children. On the other hand, the loss of never having had them—but what is there to lose? The love, the child, and all those motherly feelings that the mothers speak about in such an enticing way, as though a child is something to have, not something to do. The doing is what seems hard. The having seems marvelous.”
Sheila is at the age where most of her friends are mothers and no longer have the time or desire to share in her more independent lifestyle. They throw around comments that soon she will want kids for herself or that they could see her being a great mother, but her doubts are more existential than whether or not she will be a good mother herself. She wants to understand what drives women to become mother and where does it leave them once the choice has been made.
“It seemed to me like all my worrying about not being a mother came down to this history-this implication that a woman is not an end in herself. She is a means to a man, who will grow up to be an end in himself.” She is happy with her life. She recognizes how blessed she is to have a career she is genuinely passionate about, and that she is able to dedicate countless hours of her life to. Additionally, she sees herself as an artist and her books as her children, so how would having actual children affect her craft? For Sheila, being a true artist requires dedicating herself fully to her work, the way mothers must devote themselves completely to their children. She recognizes plenty of women do both, yet she cannot envision it for herself.
Additionally, we get a glimpse into the seemingly precarious relationship with her partner who already has a 12 year old daughter from a previous relationship who lives overseas with her mother and does not want any more children. Other than hosting her in the summers, Miles seems to be content being a fairly absent parent. In fact, he rather looks down on people who choose to have children, claiming they view it as an admirable act in itself, which he sees as a selfish means of trying to establish a legacy. I found this an interesting idea to confess to a writer. Not surprisingly, Sheila and Miles spend a lot of the book arguing; they don’t communicate well and Miles is unsympathetic to her emotional outbursts, which confuse and frustrate her into a cycle of crying, lashing out, then coming back to Miles for forgiveness. While he ultimately tells Sheila he will support whatever decision she chooses to make, his refusal to engage with her decision-making or her emotions surrounding it, makes us question his sincerity. At the end of the day, she must make the choice for herself, on her own.
As the years go by, Sheila advances very little in her internal debate, but we do gain a little more context for some of her particular fears. Her mother’s mother was a Holocausts survivor who due to her husband's illicit activities, was forced to give up her plan to become a lawyer to support her family. In turn, her mother was encouraged to dedicate herself to her studies, ultimately becoming a successful pathologist at the expense of being somewhat of a distant mother. Sheila has great pride for her mother’s drive and independence, which influenced her to move out at a young age to pursue writing, but she also is pained by all the moments her mother missed out on her childhood. It's unclear whether or not Sheila believes her mother made the wrong decision in prioritizing her career over her family, but it is clear she admires her for her ability to own up to it. In spite of all of this, or perhaps because of it, Sheila finds it hard to want to start her own family. She writes, “I remember sitting at the kitchen table with my entire family, and suddenly knowing that I would never be a mother, for I was a daughter-existentially-and I always would be.”
I highly recommend this book. Heti is an exceptionally unique and creative writer and I greatly look forward to reading more of her work. Keep an eye out for a midweek update of much shorter book reviews/recommendations and some other funny reads. Have a spooktacular Halloweekend!