Motherhood

It is hard a lot of the time and easy a lot of the time. Is this making any sense? It doesn’t make any sense to me either. And that’s the total mind-melting, incomprehensible, frustratingly indescribable, and also wonderful thing about infants. Time with them has no goal and operates in a strange nonlinear fashion, and you are doing so much but... See more

I used to watch as she read Ms. magazine, sitting upright, at the dining room table. She came of age during second-wave feminism, when women kind of had a choice and kind of didn’t. This made my mom’s ambivalence about motherhood starker and more insistent: It’s within the realm of possibility that my mom’s life could have gone a different, more... See more

But I love being a mom. I’m not always great at it—let’s be very clear about that. Sometimes I yell. I don’t enjoy playing make-believe, and I mostly leave the work of crawling on the floor and pushing Hot Wheels around the rug to Ken and the grandparents. Sometimes, I can get very caught up in my work and have a hard time focusing on what my son... See more

You can love your kids deeply and hate being a mom. You can hold your children to the bone and still proclaim how sucky it is to be a female parent, in America at least, with our lack of paid family leave or high-quality day care and the cultural insistence that “good women” should stake their entire lives on the opportunity.

From Sheila Heti, Motherhood:

“Only in the pursuit of failure can a person really be free”

“I don’t know why I don’t do the obvious thing — instead of fantasising about other lives, why not try to imagine what it’s like to be me, and live the life I’m living now”

“Happily we run away from even the brightest and best things in our lives, because we are

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