Excerpted from “Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence” by Rebecca Walker with permission from Riverhead Books.
For the last 15 years I have told everyone—friends, family, hairdressers, editors, cabdrivers, doctors and anyone else who would listen—that I wanted a baby. I want to have a baby, I would say with urgency or wistful longing, or both. And I meant what I said, I did, I just had no idea what I was talking about. I want to have a baby was a statement that evoked a trajectory, a general direction for my life.
The truth is, I was wracked with ambivalence. I had the usual questions: When, with whom, and how the hell was I going to afford it? But there was something else, too, a question common to women of my generation, women raised to view motherhood with more than a little suspicion. Can I survive having a baby? Will I lose myself—my body, my mind, my options? If I have a baby, we wonder silently to ourselves, will I die?
To compound matters, I had a tempestuous relationship with my mother, and feared the inevitable kickback sure to follow such a final and dramatic departure from daughterhood. Mothers make us, mapping our emotional terrain synapse by synapse over a lifetime. They know just where to stick the dynamite. With a few small power plays—a skeptical comment, the withholding of approval—a mother can devastate a daughter. Decades of subtle undermining can stunt a daughter. Muted, fearful, riddled with self-doubt, she can remain trapped in daughterhood forever, the one place she feels confident she knows the rules.
I was not the only daughter in a dyad of this kind—I saw them everywhere. Childless and codependent, the daughter did some macabre human version of dying on the vine. The mother kept the reality of her own mortality at bay by thwarting her daughter’s every attempt to psychologically leave the nest. It seemed that these mothers did not realize that they had to give adulthood to their daughters by stepping down, stepping back, stepping away.
To assuage my many concerns, at least once a week I sat conversing about motherhood with women who had done the deed and lived to tell, or who were surveying the same terrain of possibility. I spoke to single moms and partnered moms, and moms who lost their children to disease. I spoke to stay-at-home moms, working moms, CEO moms, moms on welfare.
My life was full of these elucidating encounters, but strangely, none of them seemed to bring me any closer to what I said I wanted. I remained stuck in a holding pattern of longing to give birth to a child and managing the risk of having one by viewing it as one option among many. Like choosing which coast to live on or what apartment to take, I imagined I could consider potential outcomes and make my best, informed decision.
Because I am a woman of privilege, a product of the women’s movement, and a student of cultural relativism, I believed that no choice would be inherently better than the other; the choice itself would not matter, it was how I interpreted the choice that would make the difference. And so it went. Los Angeles or New York? High floor or great location? To baby or not to baby?
Looking back now, I see it was like trying to steer a boat with a banana. I had no idea what was going on, no clue whatsoever. I didn’t know that I was already in the water, the tide was coming in fast, and I had no option other than be taken out to sea. I didn’t know that the showdown between the ideas of my mother’s generation and my own was inescapable. What I did know is that even though I doubted my ability to mother, partner, work, evolve and serve all in one lifetime, some part of this flesh body I call me was being pulled toward birth: my baby’s and my own.
Rebecca Walker is the author of the memoirs Black, White and Jewish and Baby Love and editor of the anthologies To Be Real and One Big Happy Family. Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, Glamour, Vibe, Harper’s, and Interview, among other publications, and she blogs regularly for The Huffington Post. Follow her on twitter @rebeccawalker.
