When I found out I was pregnant, I thought of two women who had nothing to do with each other—except that they lived rent-free in my head as opposite proofs.
American painter Georgia O’Keeffe chose not to have children. She built her towering legacy in the silence of the New Mexico desert, where she lived and painted on her own terms. French-American artist Louise Bourgeois did the opposite. She had three sons, and the fraught push and pull of motherhood became inseparable from her art. The spider sculptures I first saw in France, the blobs of red ink in the books I grazed through on a Saturday afternoon in my New York City apartment—all of it came from the same place: from being needed, from the terror of that need, from the way love can feel identical to entrapment if you look at it wrong. From what her own mother gave her, and what her own mother cost her.
Meetra Javed with her daughter, Ayah. Photographed by Brad Ogbonna.
In the quiet spaces of my mind, I wondered if O’Keeffe was cooler. Did she have a better career? And underneath that, was a life like mine, the one I had been building with considerable effort and genuine joy, now over?
What I didn’t understand yet was that I’d already been given the answer.
My mother came to America when I was three. She did not speak English. She had three children and a medical degree that meant nothing in a country she barely knew, and she studied anyway—relentlessly, at the kitchen table after we were asleep, in bed at midnight. I remember her making us paratha and egg or yoghurt with achar on the side on the days she was too exhausted to cook a full meal. She left us for a year to complete her residency in Texas. She came back as a doctor.
