Motherhood

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

... See more

But strictly speaking, ambivalent is precisely the word two years in, because my feelings on the experience of motherhood do not add up to a tidy conclusion in the positive or the negative, but in a miles-long bracket that includes every possible feeling.

Year Two was emotionally on par with running back and forth between a hot tub and an ice bath,... See more

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

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