Books: “Motherhood” by Sheila Heti

I had bought this book a few months back and kept it to read for Mother’s Day. It was, therefore, a surprise to learn the book was about an internal struggle to reconcile the body and mind to the outcome of NOT becoming a mother. I was quite frustrated with it but if I am being honest, perhaps the frustration was an expression of my own position of having chosen to be a mother. I felt attacked – like I had chosen the less traversed path, that I had given into natural instincts; attacked by a book that took random rolls of coins as a means for an answer, and when that didn’t work, anti-depressants.

 But then I shifted the perspective from “me the mother” to the voice of the book. Maybe women who don’t become mothers feel attacked too. Maybe they don’t feel whole in their love with their partners if they don’t produce a child: what was the ‘love-making’, making?

Seems like we can’t have it all. Having children doesn’t make something whole, or magically fix anything. That comes from within. Perhaps it is as the author writes: “what’s the difference between a good mother and a good daughter? Practically a lot but symbolically nothing.”

 Happy Mother’s Day to all…to those who are, to those who want to be but can’t, to those who chose it not.

“When the girl asked her mother why she tied the legs together, her mother said, ‘That’s the way my mother did it.’ When the girl asked her grandmother why she did it that way, her grandmother said, ‘That’s the way my mother did it.’ When the girl asked her great-grandmother why it was important to tie the chicken legs together, the woman replied, ‘That’s the only way it would fit in my pot.’ I think that is how childbearing feels to me: a once-necessary, now sentimental gesture.”

“The whole world needs to be mothered. I don’t need to invent a brand new life to give the warming effect to my life I imagine mothering will bring. There are lives and duties everywhere just crying out for a mother. That mother can be you.”