Motherhood

Mothers have martyred themselves in their children’s names since the beginning of time. We have lived as if she who disappears the most, loves the most. We have been conditioned to prove our love by slowly ceasing to exist... What a terrible burden for children to bear—to know that they are the reason their mother stopped living. What a terrible... See more

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

Parenthood likewise forces an encounter with the illogic of the market: good fortune means getting to pay someone less than you make to do a job that’s harder and probably more important than your own. 

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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Being told to "enjoy every minute," while undertaking such psychologically and physically demanding work, is a peculiar type of societal gaslighting.

My life as a parent seems to come at the storytelling problem differently. The experience crowds out the narration, rather than the other way around. What is there to say about omnipresence? There’s a tactility to parenting (feeding, cleaning, dressing, hugging, rocking, kissing), a primitive quality (love, protection, devotion), that resists... See more