Don’t hate me because I’m loving it

The book Baby Love:Choosing motherhood after a lifetime of ambivalence is about revelations and for me the revelation was maybe not one the author, Rebecca Walker is writing directly about. Walker speaks with unadulterated excitement and pride about becoming a mother (who knew I had it in me to read another pregnancy memoir?), feelings that I share deeply but which I still rarely see expressed so candidly by feminists in their writings. My revelation was the realisation that I tend to play down my love for my daughter; not to her (I’m completely into kisses and hugs and “I love you’s”) but to others. Its like I turn the volume of my love for and enjoyment of her down a few notches when I’m talking to anyone outside my family. Even here. I figured that was the kind of private talk only couples should share (seeing as sex isn’t one of those conversation topics I consider taboo enough to be contained within our relationship). After all, the other parent is someone who is as fascinated by and in love with your child as you are; someone who can completely and openly share the syrupy love of parenting with you.

I’m not sure why I do this down-playing – is it because I’m Australian? – A culture that doesn’t like to celebrate hype and gushing, a culture that never wants to be too full of itself. Or is it because I’m feminist? – I don’t want my identity to be reduced to mother and I don’t want to squash the limited space available for women (myself included) to talk about the negative sides of motherhood by broadcasting my own positive experiences. Or is it something even more personal? Is it that I’ve bought into the devaluing of motherhood, that on some level I believe its a role not worth mentioning, let alone boasting about? When I discovered I was pregnant it was all I could think about such was my pleasure with the status. But upon telling my boss that I was pregnant and that therefore he had no reason to worry about my huge bank of annual leave and whether it was an indication of burn-out for I would soon be taking it as maternity leave, I replied to his “I thought you must be saving it up for a big overseas trip” with “No, nothing as big as that”. I think we were both stunned by my inappropriate response. The strange thing was that I way lying. It was way more exciting to me to be having a baby than taking an overseas trip (and I love taking overseas trips). Is it because I am friends with lots of people who don’t have children, and who won’t ever have children, and who feel crowded out by families with children and the insistence that all women should have or at the very least want to have children? – Has my need not to offend meant that I don’t want to confront them with my motherhood buzz even when some of their views are rigid and excluding?

Having struck this insight I’m thinking further about how to better incorporate the enjoyment of motherhood into my conversations about feminist motherhood. But now – Rebecca Walker’s revelations. I’ll do my best to summarise some of her points though I do it knowing that many of her observations about herself are going to annoy the hell out of some women and that summarising loses much of the context of an otherwise thoughtful observation. Her most significant revelation, the one the book rests upon is that motherhood is all that – it is as the Mothers’ Day cards preach – it is the single most important experience of a woman’s life. Women have fought for and continue to fight hard to identify themselves as more than their reproductive components so this is not an easy observation about oneself for a feminist like Walker to make. In light of this discovery Walker questions hers and her generation’s ambivalence towards choosing motherhood. In case you haven’t guessed this is where the title of the book comes from – after a lifetime of wondering whether to have children, wondering if the sacrifices are worth it, wondering if life is full to bursting enough already – how does our generation of women decide to have children?

Can I survive having a baby? Will I lose myself – my body, my mind, my options – and be left trapped, resentful, and irretrievably overwhelmed? 

There is something else Walker argues we give up when we become mothers – being daughters. And it is in this that she says motherhood may bestow its greatest gift to women, if transitioned correctly. Motherhood frees us from childhood, it is the most important step a woman can take because it creates another human being and because it makes a woman an adult. I found this to be true for myself but I don’t know if it just me and my entanglement in some fairly intense family dynamics, or if it is true for all mothers. When I became a mother I knew there was no more room for blurred boundaries between my mother and I. We had to have a more adult relationship and it had to happen now. Steps I had wrestled with for years were taken, the agonising with guilt was finished. I can’t be there for my mother beyond my means because apart from anything else I have to conserve myself for my daughter. Our relationship has been generally smoother since. And even with my father with whom I am not as close and so not as entangled, my transition to motherhood has initiated a cut-off point for my work as a daughter to nurture the relationship. This end-point is exactly what I need to make room for a more equitable sharing of responsibility. There must be other ways to reach this level of self-realisation, but they would be very difficult indeed without something as all-consuming as parenthood to force you through it. It is not without its costs; Walker’s relationship with her mother breaks down completely during the course of the pregnancy and they remain estranged to this day.

There must be quite some baggage for Walker around feminism. How could there not be when her mother is a celebrated feminist writer who has long told Rebecca that motherhood was a hinderance, a sacrifice, a distraction, a choice she continues to feel uncertain of making? What impact on a child to know this honesty and this ambivalance from a mother? The duty of honesty to oneself as a feminist versus the duty of honesty to one’s child is for me an unresolved tension for our generation of feminists. Walker’s own experience of motherhood is very different to her mother’s, and that’s another entitlement you receive as a mother.. along with understanding your mother like never before, you can truly question her parenting decisions too. About her own feelings towards her child, Rebecca Walker says –

There is no choice involved in my love for Tenzin, and if there was some secret place where I wondered, and there isn’t, I would never tell him about it.

Another of Walker’s insights is that she now needs a man. This element wasn’t as challenging for me because for most of my adult life I have been in serious relationships with men. Consequently I’ve long been exploring the conflicts these relationships can pose to one’s feminism. Being pregnant confronts Walker with a vulnerability like no other and she decides she not only wants her male partner around but that she needs him. Needing a man goes against every survival skill you learn growing up as a woman. This element of Walker’s book has been the most controversial for she goes on to say that while your partner can be male or female (Walker is bisexual after all), in her opinion the biological bond to a child is stronger than any non-biological bond. So if you’re needing someone around to parent with then it better be the biological parent. Fairly irksome conclusions for a gay couple with kids. Out of this discussion she also questions the endless pursuit of self-sufficiency which characterises much of feminism.

I am not blaming feminism, because without parity and equality, partnership is just another word for exploitation. But I am suggesting we take another look at what we’re thinking and saying in the name of “empowerment”, and how that shapes our actual live and impacts the people we love. As a mother, I worry about how it makes boys and men feel to hear they are not needed, and can be made obsolete by the presence of enough money and a few good girlfriends.

On a final note.. because I think this has definitely become my longest post ever… I savoured Walker’s revelations around natural birth. In the beginning her labour was similar to mine in many ways and it was liberating for me to see her go from being so ‘earth mother’ (something I wasn’t) to so ‘epidurals are ok’ (something I didn’t do but probably would next time).

But may I ask one small but very relevant question? Why the hell didn’t anyone tell me how much it was going to hurt? At the moment I must document my newfound respect for every human being that has ever given birth, and I retract my judgement of every woman who has had or will have a scheduled C-section. Maybe I just have a low threshold for pain, but I don’t think so. It is outrageous. I remember screaming, somewhere in between the toilet, the birthing pool, the bed, and the shower, that I couldn’t believe every person on this earth got here this way. It just doesn’t seem possible.

Some women will be relieved to read Walker’s new book and some women will feel more marginalised than ever but regardless, good for Rebecca Walker telling her truths. Feminism at its core frees women to tell the truth about their lives. When we hear other women tell the truth we can finally tell the truth too. I do love being a mother and I am crazy about my daughter.