Chance of a Lifetime

The first series of questions in Motherhood comes in an imitation of the I Ching. The woman flips three coins: heads yes, tails no, the majority carries the day. She asks the coins yes or no questions, some quite loaded, about her present, her past, her relationship with her lover, and the task that lies before her. These questions form the book’s story, such as it is: a woman approaching the onset of middle age trying to figure out what the rest of her life should look like. There’s still time to change course if she wants to, but, she feels, not much time.

Despite the title of the book, the woman’s agitation isn’t exactly about whether she should have a child. Motherhood doesn’t figure into her initial rounds of coin tosses—the first question, in fact, is simply “Is this book a good idea?” (answer: yes). After some more questions, she asks the coins about something called “the soul of time”:

Letting Motherhood be guided by a set of arbitrary answers to questions is an artistic sleight of hand. A similar purpose was served by the very different conceit of How Should a Person Be? In that “novel from life,” the narrator is named Sheila, her friends are based on Sheila Heti’s own friends, and the dialogue is lifted from real life—conversations Heti recorded. The “realism” of that book disguised the ways in which it was not very realistic at all, its ambition, and its sense of humor. It was a book that was happy to change everything about itself from chapter to chapter except its subject matter—becoming a play, a monologue, a series of emails—and concerned above all with greatness, understood as something constructed out of the material of our lives rather than invented.

In Motherhood, the narrator’s question-asking is in part authority-seeking; she feels, as she tells us, “helplessly wrong” and “desperate to live as a person beyond criticism”: “I am a blight on my own life. How can I stop being a blight on my life?” So she flips coins; she consults psychics and friends with and without children; she considers her dreams and has a tarot reading. And she collaborates to varying degrees with these authorities. When the coin-flips tell her to find a knife and place it in front of a mirror, she does so. When the psychic has her undergo a ritual to expel suspected cancer, she plays along.

But the question-asking is also a way of trying to create some sort of path for her life to travel. The narrator faces the problem of how to live when you have divested yourself of the normal scripts people use to structure their lives. The early parts of life are climbing uphill; at some point you realize that your life is now what it’s going to be. What happens then?

At one point, exasperated by the answers the coins are giving, she says:

After this episode, she gives up on numismatomancy for a while. It’s awkward to use an artificial authority when you’ve admitted to yourself its artificiality. Maybe all you want is for someone to tell you what to do, but an authority you bestow is one you can revoke just as easily. Eventually, though, she comes back, because she is still a blight on her life. “Weeks have passed, and the tears, once again, are back. What,” she asks, “am I supposed to do with my unhappiness?”

One answer: Have a child, which will truly help you to create something out of yourself, really detach you from yourself in some way. Or so the theory goes. But the woman at the center of Motherhood was herself raised by a mother who was full of tears, and she knows that whatever will happen, it won’t be quite that simple. If she has been a blight on her own life, she can’t escape the feeling that she is also a blight on her mother’s. The book she’s writing is meant somehow to correct both ills; to heal her mother’s tears and her own.

Another complication comes from just about the one real authority in her life: Miles, the narrator’s overbearing lover, who responds to the statement “It might be nice to have a child” with “I’m sure it’s also nice to get a lobotomy.” He is heavy with disapproval but good at strategically withholding his input. He is happy to tell her what to write (a book on Simone Weil) or that her friends are bad for her. It is clear he does not want a child (he has one already from a previous relationship) but he leaves it up to her whether she will have one. His only request is that she be certain, which, since he is involved with a woman who is never certain about anything, amounts to forbidding it without having to say so. Life isn’t a problem for Miles—perhaps because he’ll always have the option of having another child, perhaps because he’s more secure, perhaps because he has a woman to feel all the problems for him.

Does she want a child? Though the answer is finally no, often it seems to be yes. Motherhood is its own story. If you don’t know what to do with yourself, why not create another person? Children generate their own existential crises for themselves, but for their parents, at least for the time being, they crowd out everything else.

The soul of time, the narrator tells us, has something to do with the way we exist only as aspects of time, not as individuals. The idea that we are time’s soul frees us to accept a kind of passivity; have a child or don’t have a child, either way is fine. But this idealized passivity—the desire not to be anything at all—clashes with the images of struggle and sadness that mark the book. The narrator finds herself obsessed with the image of Jacob wrestling the angel (an image also discussed in How Should a Person Be?) and feels that if she can understand what’s tormenting her, she can demand its blessing: By wrestling with her nightmares, she might “overcome my lack of trust and faith” and start “learning humility and asking to be blessed, just as my thoughts are humbled by the random throw of the coins, and my understanding is dependent on their verdict.” She sees herself on a threshold, waiting to be transformed.

But this isn’t what happens. There is no breakthrough, no great moment of either accepting or rejecting motherhood. What happens is that the narrator goes on antidepressants and all of this ceases to matter; the sadness goes away, as do the struggles. She still flips coins, still looks into her dreams. But the tension is gone. “What kind of story is it,” she wonders, “when a person goes down, down, down and down—but instead of breaking through and seeing the truth and ascending, they go down, then they take drugs, and then they go up? I don’t know what kind of story it is.” She writes up the story, sends it to her mother, and realizes her mother has gone through much the same process herself.

In a novel more question-driven than any of her others, Heti’s final question seems to be What If We Just Stopped Asking Questions? If you’re walking into a wall and someone opens a door, shouldn’t you just walk through? In life, doors do open and close, but there’s no story but the ones we tell. What if the way to come out of existential troubles really can be as simple as not picking at wounds and expecting them to heal? You could accept that you are stupid and also that nothing requires you to be sad. In a novel obsessed with finding precisely the right question to ask and have answered, the ultimate answer comes in relinquishing control and giving up on narrative payoff.

Motherhood is many things—least of them, a metaphor. It requires submitting to an animal instinct in us without really wondering if the instinct is for the best or not, if the child will thank us or not, if this will wreck our lives or not. It accepts the unanswerability of these questions and trades them in for something real and flesh-and-blood. At the last, however, the narrator’s motherhood is her decision to write a book. Life might not have a narrative payoff, but books generally do, even if you have to squint to find it. Here the payoff might come in the following observation: Some kinds of control are easier to relinquish than others.