Motherhood_A Novel Read online

  *

  Miles has said that the decision is mine—he doesn’t want a child apart from the one he had, quite by accident, when he was young, who lives in another country with her mother, and stays with us on holidays and half the summer. It’s a risk, he says, his daughter is lovely, but you never know what you’re going to get. If I want a child, we can have one, he said, but you have to be sure.

  *

  Whether I want kids is a secret I keep from myself—it is the greatest secret I keep from myself.

  The thing to do when you’re feeling ambivalent is to wait. But for how long? Next week I’ll be thirty-seven. Time is running short on making certain decisions. How can we know how it will go for us, us ambivalent women of thirty-seven? 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 marvellous. But one doesn’t have a child, one does it. I know I have more than most mothers. But I also have less. In a way, I have nothing at all. But I like that and think I do not want a child.

  Yesterday I talked on the phone with Teresa, who is about fifty years old. I said that it seemed like other people were suddenly ahead of me with their marriages, their houses, their children, their savings. She said that when a person has those feelings, they need to look more closely at what their actual values are. We have to live our values. Often people are streamed into the conventional life—the life there’s so much pressure to live. But how can there only be one path that’s legitimate? She says this path is often not even right for many of the people who wind up living it. They become forty-five, fifty, then they hit a wall. It’s easy to bob along the surface, she said. But only for so long.

  *

  Do I want children because I want to be admired as the admirable sort of woman who has children? Because I want to be seen as a normal sort of woman, or because I want to be the best kind of woman, a woman with not only work, but the desire and ability to nurture, a body that can make babies, and someone who another person wants to make babies with? Do I want a child to show myself to be the (normal) sort of woman who wants and ultimately has a child?

  The feeling of not wanting children is the feeling of not wanting to be someone’s idea of me. Parents have something greater than I’ll ever have, but I don’t want it, even if it’s so great, even if in a sense they’ve won the prize, or grabbed the golden ring, which is genetic relief—relief at having procreated; success in the biological sense, which on some days seems like the only sense that matters. And they have social success, too.

  There is a kind of sadness in not wanting the things that give so many other people their life’s meaning. There can be sadness at not living out a more universal story—the supposed life cycle—how out of one life cycle another cycle is supposed to come. But when out of your life, no new cycle comes, what does that feel like? It feels like nothing. Yet there is a bit of a let-down feeling when the great things that happen in the lives of others—you don’t actually want those things for yourself.

  It is so hard to conceive of making art without an audience who will eventually see it. I know we make art because we’re humans, and that’s what humans do, for the sake of God. But will God ever see it?

  no

  Is that because art is God?

  no

  Is it because art exists in the house of God, but God doesn’t pay attention to what’s in God’s home?

  yes

  Is art at home in the world?

  yes

  Is art a living thing—while one is making it, that is? As living as anything else we call living?

  yes

  Is it as living when it is bound in a book or hung on a wall?

  yes

  Then can a woman who makes books be let off the hook by the universe for not making the living thing we call babies?

  yes

  Oh good! I feel so guilty about it sometimes, thinking it’s what I should do, because I always think that animals are happiest when they live out their instincts. Maybe not happiest, but feel most alive. Yet making art makes me feel alive, and taking care of others doesn’t make me feel as alive. Maybe I have to think about myself less as a woman with this woman’s special task, and more as an individual with her own special task—not put woman before my individuality. Is that right?

  no

  Is it that making babies is not a woman’s special task?

  yes

  I should not be asking questions in the negative. Is it her special task?

  yes

  Yes, but the universe lets women who make art but don’t make babies, off the hook? Does the universe mind if women who don’t make art choose not to make babies?

  yes

  Are these women punished?

  yes

  By not experiencing the mystery and joy?

  yes

  In any other way?

  yes

  By not passing on their genes?

  yes

  But I don’t care about passing on my genes! Can’t one pass on one’s genes through art?

  yes

  Do men who don’t procreate receive punishment from the universe?

  no

  Do they receive punishment for neglecting other tasks one typically associates with maleness?

  no

  Men escape all damnation and can do whatever they want?

  no

  Perhaps their punishment comes not from the universe but from society?

  yes

  Does it take the form of ridicule?

  yes

  From women?

  no

  From other men?

  yes

  And is their suffering as great as the suffering of these women at the hands of the universe?

  yes

  Well, I guess that seems fair.

  yes.

  *

  Yesterday, Erica, whose first baby is due any week now, sent me a painting by Berthe Morisot. She said, This painting reminds me of you. It’s what I think you’d look like if you had a child. I wrote her back saying that the woman in the painting looked a little bored, but she replied saying that the woman was interested in her sleeping baby, and felt I would be, too. I had interpreted the woman’s hand as having been placed on the edge of the bassinet kind of carelessly, without a thought. But Erica said she felt the hand was laid over the edge of the crib tenderly and protectively.

  That does seem good—to lay your hand on reality. To move away from the distortions of your mind and feel what actually is.

  *

  This afternoon, I went to my doctor. She did a check-up, then asked me questions about my life, including what sort of contraception Miles and I were using. I grew embarrassed, admitting the truth: pulling out. It was what I had used with almost every man. What if you get pregnant? Would you be okay with that? I tried to answer in an easy way, but soon my sentences got twisted up.

  After the appointment, I walked in the streets and called Teresa. I brought up my worries over paths not taken, and she said everyone had those, but often when you looked back on your life, you saw that the choices you made and the paths you went down were the right ones. She said it wasn’t a matter of choosing one life over another, but being sensitive to the life that wants to be lived through you. You need tension in order to create something—the sand in the pearl. She said my questioning and doubts were the sand. She said they were good and forced me to live with integrity, to interrogate what was important to me, and so to live the meaning of my life, rather than resort to convention.

  Then to try and discover and live my values, even if it may not seem like I’m moving forward in my life, while my friends appear to be moving forward in theirs—ticking off all the boxes. Ask o
nly whether you are living your values, not whether the boxes are ticked.

  After our call, I realized the thing I always do: I try to imagine different futures for myself, what I would most like to occur. I don’t know why I do this, when any of the things I’ve hoped for—whenever I have actually got them—are nothing like what I imagined they’d be. Then why don’t I spend time acclimating myself to what actually occurred? Why not make peace with the way things are, given what I know about life from actually living? Instead I spin fantasies, when the only happiness I have ever known has occurred without my design.

  *

  Your idea about what your life is about, or should be like, occurs even before your life has had a chance to unfold. So much time that hasn’t had the opportunity to present itself, you spend in efforts trying to make the space ahead fill in exactly the way you hope it might. So what is the point in having that time? Of being in it at all? Why don’t you just die when a sufficiently pleasing idea about what your life ought to look like materializes in your mind?

  The reason we don’t just kill ourselves when we have figured out what we want our lives to look like is because we actually want to experience things. But what happens when things we thought we wanted to experience don’t occur? Or when something we didn’t think we wanted to experience does? What’s the point in living all that other stuff, the stuff we never wanted, the stuff we didn’t choose?

  Since life rarely accords to our expectations, why bother expecting anything at all? Wouldn’t it be better not to plan ahead? But that seems crazy, too, because planning and desiring sometimes works. Even if it doesn’t work, it still gets us somewhere. Or at least it seems like if we didn’t desire and plan, we’d be stuck in one place.

  It is often said that whether or not to have children is the biggest decision a person can make. That may be true, but it also doesn’t mean anything. A decision happens in the private mind of one. It is not an action. For things to happen in a life, other people must participate. You have to will it. Many things have to collaborate. Life itself has to will it. A decision in the mind is pretty small. It doesn’t make babies.

  If a decision in the mind doesn’t make babies, why do I spend so much time thinking about it? We are judged by what happens to us as though our deciding made it happen. A lot of time is wasted in thinking about whether to have a child, when the thinking is such a small part of it, and when there is little enough time to think about things that actually bring meaning. Which are what?

  Nobody completely expected it to go the way it went—their life. Nobody is completely happy with the way things turned out for them. But most people manage to find some pleasure in it anyway.

  *

  A friend of mine who was dating a man, quite early on in their fucking heard the sound and agreed to go ahead. She told him to come inside her. Then she got pregnant, and she chose to break up with him, but they remained friends. She found a boyfriend who she wanted to raise the child with, and the father takes the kid on weekends. They all love the boy and everything seems fine. What a way to live! To respond to the call and, once that’s done, make the practical decisions and make them well.

  I also heard the sound last August, deeply in my soul. I never wanted a child as much as I did that month. I remember sitting on the lakeside dock of my friend’s mother’s cottage, telling her of my desire—but not telling Miles, for he had only started articling at a criminal defence firm a month before, and it didn’t seem fair to bring it up with him then. The timing wasn’t right. Nine months later, four of my friends gave birth. What was the sound we all heard that August?

  *

  When I was younger, I told myself that if I was ever going to have a child, it would only happen if I accidentally became pregnant. Well, I did accidentally become pregnant, and I decided not to keep it.

  I was twenty-one at the time, and switching to the birth control pill. The moment I discovered I was pregnant, I decided I would have an abortion. There was no gap between finding out and knowing what I wanted to do.

  The doctor who examined me advised me to keep the baby. He showed me the sonogram, even though I didn’t want to see it. He told me it was too early to get an abortion. Because it was possible that I could miscarry, he said it would be wrong to do it now. He joked that I should have the baby and give it to him; he said I could come over to his house with bags of milk every week. It wasn’t until I left his office that I realized what he meant: milk that would come from my breasts.

  I spent the days before my next appointment doing nothing but waiting for my abortion—smoking pot, eating candies and chocolate and chips, drinking and smoking too much, as if to poison the little thing that was growing inside me, that was making me nauseous all day.

  Only today, as I’m writing this, does it occur to me that he was lying; he wanted me to change my mind. You don’t have to wait for an abortion. But I was too young then, and too all alone, to see it.

  *

  Why are we still having children? Why was it important for that doctor that I did? A woman must have children because she must be occupied. When I think of all the people who want to forbid abortions, it seems it can only mean one thing—not that they want this new person in the world, but that they want that woman to be doing the work of childrearing more than they want her to be doing anything else. There is something threatening about a woman who is not occupied with children. There is something at-loose-ends feeling about such a woman. What is she going to do instead? What sort of trouble will she make?

  This afternoon, I went to see my friend Mairon in her new home. She held her baby on her lap like he was a delicate toy. She said, Oh—I just realized! One day you will call me and tell me you’re pregnant! She said I seemed very fertile—as if becoming a mother had made her psychic, as if she could gauge someone’s fertility by being near them.

  She said the first time she saw her son, she thought, Oh my god, I almost didn’t do this! She hadn’t always wanted a child—in fact, up until the moment the baby came out, she didn’t know whether she did. Her husband had proposed it as a kind of game—take the plunge with him!—and she agreed.

  She lit up like a sunbeam when she learned that Miles and I were still together. She said, One man is no better than the next—unless he beats you, gambles, cheats or drinks, it’ll be the same issues with any other man that you have with Miles. She explained that she and her husband had recently decided that they would not get divorced.

  How interesting, I said, that it’s a separate decision from the decision to get married.

  It is, she said. All we fight about anymore is money. We leave the trivial stuff alone.

  Every particle in her wanted me to settle down and make babies. She admitted it, too—that she wanted all of her friends to be married off with babies, like she was. I agreed that it did seem like an adventure, and it was flattering to be told, as she did, You’d be very good at it.

  Is there some part of me that knows whether or not I’ll have a baby? Will I do my time, as Mairon put it, like how the men once did their time in the army? Will I marry Miles, then promise not to divorce him, and never have an avant-garde life? Mairon chided me when I said this was what I wanted: That’s making too much of an intellectual puzzle out of it. That’s not the truth. That’s not what life is. There is no such thing as an avant-garde life.

  As I was leaving her house, I ran into a former professor of mine. It was in her Classics course years ago that Mairon and I met. She was on her way up the steps to visit the baby, and we stopped to say hello. I told her about my visit, and about what Mairon wanted for my life. She said, Please, don’t have children. The professor had a daughter who was thirty-five. I knew she was trying to save me from drudgery and pain. I said, But wasn’t having a daughter the greatest experience of your life? She paused for a moment, then admitted it was.

  *

  What to do about these dangerous and beautiful sirens, like Mairon, whose songs, though irresistibly sweet, are no l
ess sad than sweet? The term siren song refers to an appeal that is hard to resist, but that, if heeded, will bring the one who heeds it to a very bad end. Their song takes effect at midday, in a windless calm, and lulls the soul and body into a fatal lethargy—the beginning of one’s corruption.

  Then resist like the monks who resist lying with women—no matter how good it would make them feel. Sing your songs more beautifully to yourself than the tempting mothers sing them. Sing your songs so beautifully, for the charms of their music, and the songs they sing, will soon make you forget your native land.

  *

  Yesterday, Miles and I had a long conversation about women artists having children. He said many things about why it was so made up, the joys of parenting, and that really it’s like tilling the field. And why should people with other work to do also till the field? Why should everyone have to? He went on to say what a lot of time it was, and that it sort of blows your load, parenting, because it’s the perfect job—it’s very hard but only you can do it. And isn’t making art like that? he asked. If you can get that existential satisfaction from parenthood, would you feel as much desire to make art? He said that one can either be a great artist and a mediocre parent, or the reverse, but not great at both, because both art and parenthood take all of one’s time and attention. These are the sort of thoughts I always try to push from my mind. It caused me some sadness to hear him talk this way, but I have also never really understood myself to be a mother, even if in moments I thought I could be. He says we do not have the money, we’d have to move, change everything. We’re not made—cut to the cloth—to have normal lives. Finally, he was talking about how cultures have always held places for those who don’t want children: in the clergy—nuns and priests; scholars and artists. As for the vow of chastity demanded by the church, he thought ultimately it had to do with the fact that those given over to difficult spiritual work should not have to be chasing children around, and that societies feel these people contribute in other ways and give them a pass. All morning I felt a kind of coldness in my chest towards him. Why must I be one of the people he’s talking about?