I don’t know about you, but the first time I watched the blue lines resolve on a home pregnancy test, my initial thoughts weren’t exactly blissful. The exact words aren’t appropriate for a family publication, so let me just say that they were accompanied by a craving for half a pack of Marlboro Lights, a mason-jar-sized Bombay Sapphire-and-tonic, and a backdrop of loud House music. (Yes, it was totally that many years ago.)
It took me a nanosecond to come to my senses. I mean, a) this is Minneapolis, which means any last fling was way more likely to be set to Morris Day and the Time and b) who was I kidding? I peed on the stick in the first place because my breasts felt like they’d been driven over by an ATV. The only bouncing they would endure was the short trip to the couch, where I envisioned spending the next eight months sleeping and eating.
My dismay had nothing to do with the baby. Him, I wanted and had planned for. And it wasn’t even so much the impending loss of freedom. As it was, I was already way too familiar with the cable line-up.
No, this reaction had more to do with the fear that I had finally bitten off more than I could chew. Was I parent material? Was I in fact as self-centered as I secretly feared? Critical and petty? Doomed to add one more chapter to a family history that already had its share of disappointing and dysfunctional twists?
These questions had just become academic. And if it turned out I bet wrong, well, the child the zygote would become and I would just have to fall back on the time-honored cocktail of simmering resentment and psychotherapy.
In retrospect, that anxiety seems so naïve. I had no idea that becoming a parent was a one-way ticket back to my own childhood, a no-regrets-allowed invitation to tour the subfloor of my psyche. And not just once, mind you, but at every stage of my son’s development and again but with greater depth and intensity when his brother’s conception set me to cursing at another pregnancy test.
I’ve read that behavioral scientists think memory is linked to language. You record events and experiences that took place before you had language, but you can’t necessarily get at coherent memories of them. Picture a filing cabinet without files, chock full of the building blocks of your personality, identity, and such. When baby arrives, you’re too busy not sleeping and trying to get her to latch that you don’t notice the file drawers have been jimmied and — shazam! — your subconscious is awash in baggage so primordial you didn’t realize you had it. Ghosts in the nursery indeed.
I mention all of this in the hope it explains (in part) the tremendous kinship I came to feel for Rebecca Walker while reading her slim pregnancy memoir, Baby Love. The daughter of African American novelist Alice Walker and Jewish civil liberties attorney Mel Leventhal, Walker beautifully articulates the confusing paradox of feeling ambivalent about a baby you want with a fierce intensity. Her parents divorced when she was young, and Walker grew up being shuttled from one end of the country to the other, a disjointed experience she described in a previous memoir, Black, White, and Jewish.
Walker describes her mother as ambivalent — toward her pregnancy, toward her daughter, and finally, toward Rebecca’s decision to have a child. This is tough enough stuff for any of us to contemplate, but imagine how high the stakes are when the mother and daughter in question have public profiles. (Among other things, Rebecca Walker is a prominent feminist activist.) The two are estranged, we learn in the last pages of Baby Love.
But the famous mother is only a supporting player in the real story, which is Walker’s own lifelong inner monologue over motherhood. “Mine is the first generation of women to grow up thinking of children as optional, a project that might pan out to be one of many worthwhile experiences in life, but also might not,” she writes. “We learned that children were not to be pursued at the expense of anything else. A graduate degree in economics, for example, or a life of renunciation, devoted to a Hindu mystic…. I don’t remember exactly how these ideas were transmitted, but that I imbibed them is unquestionable.”
Nor is that the only ambivalent-generation whammy Walker identifies: There’s the equally dicey reality that many of us grew up in unhappy families. “As a child of divorce, it has been hard for me to grasp the concept of a functional family dynamic,” she writes. “What does it look like? How does it make you feel? I’m so used to equating family with conflict and psychological wounding, unbridled jealousy and simmering rage, that I’ve been unknowingly re-creating it in every major relationship I’ve had.”
(A side thought: With the Walkers’ estrangement, are we getting a glimpse of what happens when two writers rub away at their own raw nerves in the service of baring their truth, only to learn that it’s not the capital-T Truth for the other? Ouch.)
So why choose parenthood? Because children, as the old saw goes, grow you up. Because the places where the ambivalence is the most uncomfortable are probably really good places to get out a flashlight and shine it into that filing cabinet. Because, as Walker notes, the process of learning to love a child unconditionally has the potential to finally teach you to love yourself that way. To realize, as you watch your babe pull up and test her chubby, bowed legs, just how frightening it can be to stand, really and truly, on your own two feet. And how liberating.
“It is shocking to think that not one person suggested that my fear of hurting my children might really have been a fear of growing up and following my own (not my mother’s) belief system,” writes Walker. “Because the fact is that until you become a mother you’re a daughter. The fact is that when you almost die so that someone else can live, you become a much larger human being. The fact is that none of the ideas we’ve gleaned about motherhood from the mothers we know and the mothers we watch on TV mean anything at all because motherhood is in the doing, not the thinking about.”
Beth Hawkins is a Minneapolis writer.
Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood after a Lifetime of Ambivalence
By Rebecca Walker
Riverhead Books, 2007, $15
