"I got birth control by myself at 14," she says. In neither environment does she experience true belonging, compounded by her claim that her hard-working parents didn't quite show up for the job.Īs an adolescent, she experimented with drugs and there was an abortion - Walker learned young to look after herself. In her 2001 memoir, Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, she tells how in Jewish suburbia she is mistaken for her step-siblings' nanny and in San Francisco, black girls accuse her of acting white. "Exhausting" is how she now describes bouncing between families of two races and two religions.
After her parents divorced when she was eight, she spent her childhood alternating every two years between her father's new family and Jewish world in New York, and her mother's African-American artist community in San Francisco. "Part of what I wanted to do with Baby Love was to suggest that not only are you giving birth to a baby, but also you can use the experience to give birth to a new sense of yourself."įor Walker, a "sense of self" is something she values highly, principally because for so long hers never stopped shifting. The woman Time magazine once named one of the 50 most influential future American leaders under 40 is clearly high on motherhood. Today, Walker's hesitancy to enter the world of Teletubbies and sippy cups seems sweetly ironic. Can I survive having a baby? Will I lose myself - my body, my mind, my options - and be left trapped, resentful, and irretrievably overwhelmed?" "But there was something else, too, a question common - if not always conscious - to women of my generation, women raised to view motherhood with more than a little suspicion. "I had the usual questions: when, with whom, and how the hell was I going to afford it?" writes Walker.
As much as she wanted a baby, Walker, 37, a feminist writer and activist, was "wracked with ambivalence," as she writes in her new book, Baby Love, the subtitle of which is Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence.
Thirty-four years later, when Rebecca became a mother to her son, Tenzin, now two, a sense of victory also hovered overhead - this time it was not political, but personal.
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