Hey! This is issue #6 of the Sheila Heti Summer Slow Read, a five month journey through the novel Motherhood. New episodes drop every Sunday from May-September, 20 issues in total. If you want to start at the beginning or read more about what the hell we’re doing here, head on over to issue #1.
Today’s issue features my oldest friend, Megan. 🥹 And by oldest I mean we met when we were 11 or 12 (she’ll tell you how/when we met during the episode, I didn’t remember!!) and we’re still close friends 25 years later. Our lives have taken eerily similar paths in a completely unplanned way – on paper, she is absolutely the person I have the most in common with in terms of what we’ve done and where we’ve been in our lives. Until (dramatic pause) Megan had a baby a year ago, and now our paths have diverged in the most significant way since we met as wee children in elementary school.
Megan is really fucking cool and I probably should have grilled her a little more (lol) but she really makes parenting look easy and fun. We’ll get into some potential reasons why, including the pie chart of a person’s total available time, which fits in well with some of the work-related stuff I’ve been going on and on about lately.
#6. As soon as things are good (pages 121-122)
“Last night, I dreamed that Miles wanted to have a baby with me – really, really wanted to. There was such a sweet, serious longing in him that I started to think that maybe it would be a good idea to go ahead, just rush ahead with that feeling of excitement – it was like being pulled along – although secretly I felt I didn’t want to. So I said no to Miles in my dream. I felt that if I said yes, I would abandon my child. Still, there was something flattering or totally awesome in him wanting to have a baby. No one had ever asked that of me before.
Waking up, I said to Miles, it might be nice to have a child. He said, I’m sure it’s also nice to get a lobotomy. All the work he’s done these years to build himself up into the sort of person he can respect – talking about throwing that out the window; how the hardest thing in life is really to make something of yourself. He said, Two people who can help hundreds of people – that they should put their energies into one half-person, each? This is a human life we’re talking about here! What do people – as soon as things are good – suddenly want to change everything?” – Sheila Heti, Motherhood
Here’s what we talked about:
0:30 – How and when Megan and I met when we were like 11 or 12
2:00 – Introductions and some deets about our weirdly parallel lives
5:10 – Reading today’s prompt
6:20 – How do you know when it’s the right time to have a child, fears about fucking everything up, and feeling pre-nostalgia
9:20 – Is there a good/better/perfect time to have children?
10:45 – Some thoughts on why both Megan and I left L.A. in 2022 (and career considerations)
16:20 – How Megan finds balance between working and parenting
19:25 – The pie chart of different ways you spend your time, the fixed nature of time, and the “acceptability” of slowing down
24:00 – The productivity trap (!)
28:15 – The spectrum of change from an outsider’s perspective (mine lol) and making the effort in adult friendships
33:35 – The piece of advice Megan has for anyone on the fence (and feeling opposing emotions at the same time)
38:30 – My reaction to today’s prompt, what I was never able to get over when it came to considering parenthood, and the chaos of dating in my 20s
44:50 – A closing tangent regarding the “fear mongering” around having children after the age of 35
