Part 2 of Baby Talk with Rebecca Walker
With her new book, ‘Baby Love’, Rebecca Walker is advising young women to factor children into their life-plan much earlier and more realistically than they are currently doing. With this in mind, I am curious to know Walker’s opinion of medical advancements in fertility treatments. In an interview with ABC she had said ‘the fertility window is finite’ and I also know through reading ‘Baby Love’ that she is quite sceptical of western medicine. So, I wonder, does Walker think it’s a bad thing that women have IVF et al as a get-out clause?
“I have a friend who has just finished a book called ‘Her Own Sweet Time’ which is about freezing her eggs and I think that’s great. It’s extremely expensive, so it’s not available to most women but if [such treatments] work and people are happy with them then what-the-hey, you know!” Walker says, smiling. “Still, I really do think that if it’s something you want, better to try to do it naturally a little bit earlier, because the hormonal stuff is brutal.”
It takes two to tango when it comes to conceiving naturally and this is something that Walker spends time addressing in her book. Although it is now common to hear stories of women who so crave a child that they become parents alone, this doesn’t seem to have been an option for Walker. As she recounts her past partners throughout the book, she tells of how she would evaluate each one as a potential parent. She questions me at this point, with questions that she hopes other young women will be asking themselves;
“What does it mean to have a suitable partner? Do you really want to have a serial monogamous lifestyle for the rest of your life or do you want to try to find a way to create some sort of stable long term relationship? What do you need to do in order to do that?”
A child of divorce, Walker is keen not to go down the same path as her parents. She and her partner Glen seem to have a very supportive and understanding relationship, one that can definately benefit a child. Theirs is a relationship kept together through hard work, rather than laws or vows (the couple are not married), with Walker feeling she needs to try especially hard not to take her partner, or her child, for granted;
“One of the most difficult aspects for me in becoming a mother has been negotiating the feminist impetus for autonomy and independence and trying to learn what it means to be interdependent with another human being rather than a solo person who has this appendage partner. Trying to learn how to negotiate and co-operate and not dismiss masculine wisdom, it’s very difficult for me because when I was growing up co-operation and intimacy was not as prioritised as being your own woman.”
Walker’s family set up could seem from the outside to be quite traditional; a man and woman working in partnership to raise a child. But it has not always been so, as Walker relates in the book. Before settling down and having a child with her male partner, Walker had been in a relationship with a woman where they had discussed raising a child together. They had even got to the point of finding a donor dad. Walker is also a step mother to a son, Solomon, of a previous girl-friend.
I have to admit my feeling to Walker that her message of ’settle down and have a child’, if it were coming from a straight person, would seem to me to be old fashioned, conservative and stifling. To hear this same advice from a bi-sexual person it feels like ’settling down’ could just be common sense…
“Or it could be one option among many…” Walker interjects. “I really think that the message of the book is to try to find someone who can commit to you, if that’s something that you want, if it’s a man, a woman, a transgender person, an inter-sexual person. Someone who really is ready to show up for you and to provide the kind of support for your desires that you need.”
Looking back to her attempt to become pregnant with her last partner, a female musician, she says; “It just happened that the relationship with my ex partner just wasn’t that.” It is an interesting read though, this section of ‘Baby Love’ (that is jovially prefixed with the words ‘What on earth was I thinking?’) that documents their very real quest to become lesbian parents. It was something that Walker would have considered doing again;
“If Glen had been a woman, it would have been no problem. If a woman had arrived and said ‘I totally want to help you do this, it’s going to be great and I’m down for the cause’ then that would’ve been wonderful. It was quite fortunate [that Glen was a man] because it was much easier and I didn’t have to go searching for sperm donors”
Walker’s account of her other relationship, in which she took on the role of step mother to her girlfriend’s son, has raised eyebrows and blood pressures with many people. The controversy has come from her describing the realisation that, once pregnant, she felt a different kind of love for her unborn child than the one she felt for her stepson, Solomon. Walker’s blood-is-thicker-than-water message has meant she has come under fire, but she feels her admission was the right thing to do;
“I really do believe that we need more discussion of the issue of biological and non biological bonds. It’s a taboo subject to raise. I got lot’s of angry responses from adoptive parents who felt that to question their love for their children was tantamount to heresy, and then I got very many letters from adoptees saying ‘thank you so much for raising this issue because I’ve always had a longing to know my biological parents but I’ve been afraid to even bring it up with my adoptive parents’. I think [biological and adoptive parenting are] very different experiences and they’re both profound. I have a lot of admiration and respect for [those who adopt] and I don’t know if I could do that.”
I wonder if Walker, whilst unworried about wider social criticism, had found the admission difficult to make in light of the affect it might have on Solomon? Was the effect her words might have on him something she considered?
“Yes it was! I really tried to honour the relationship that we have. The whole chapter, I thanked him for what he brought to my life. I feel him to be a great gift for me, that in many ways I wouldn’t have had my son now if I hadn’t fallen in love with Solomon because he showed me that I could love another human being in that way.”
Walker is working on a new anthology right now entitled ‘One Big Happy Family’. Due to come out this winter, she says it will look into a huge range of family set-ups, from trans-racial adoption and living with differently abled children to co-housing and polyamory. Did the idea for the book come out of the ‘Baby Love’ controversy, I wonder? Walker says not, and that she wouldn’t feel the need to respond to her critics in that way. Besides, the new book was signed up long before ‘Baby Love’ hit the shelves.
The hot topic of biological and non biological bonding is not the only area Walker has received criticism in. Alexandra Jacobs, when reviewing ‘Baby Love’ in the New York Times called Walker’s documented experience ‘a pregnancy of privileged contemplation, achieved with relative ease under the ministrations of a homeopath – just one in a “small army of healers” she assembles for ailments that often seem more psychic than physical’.
“I acknowledge in the very beginning that I’m a child of privilege.” Walker admits.
Whilst her book does read like a recommendation of having ‘writer’ as your profession if you want a pregnancy that will fit around your career, Walker isn’t blinkered. ‘I know all of this, and I am grateful that I have the luxury to hole up and hide out,’ she writes in Baby Love, ‘I don’t have to do makeovers at the Macys cosmetics counter, I don’t have to harvest rice from sunrise to sunset, I don’t have to sit in front of the computer fielding interoffice emails because I am worried that while I am on maternity leave someone will steal my job.’
Still, while Walker acknowledges her privilege, I felt that there were some aspects of motherhood that I was still worried about after having read her book. As a member of her target audience I have to admit to still feeling ambivalent. But then, ‘Baby Love’ isn’t really a book of answers, it is a book that raises questions…
“It’s not a political rallying call necessarily, it’s more of an introspective. But, y’know, I really feel like I’ve walked away from ideology as a modality for actually creating long term change. There’s so much that’s embodied in the book; equal parenting, a father that is dealing with masculinity issues and can be supportive and stay at home while I work, issues of bisexuality and sexual choice, to think about home schooling , the medical system and midwiffery, issues of inter-generational feminism, worrying about college and how to pay for it… In any case there’s quite a bit being done now around all these issues and I think that contributing to that by talking about motherhood is a good thing.”
‘Baby Love – Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence’ by Rebecca Walker is out now.
By: Sarah Barnes, 20.06.2008 | Comments (0)
