Baby Love (22 page)

The biggest news is that the baby is going to sleep with me tonight! I can’t believe it. The experience we’ve all been waiting for. After dinner, if he makes it without the cannula for three hours, one of the nurses is going to wheel him into my room and we get to be there together for the entire night. No tubes, no machines, no constant in-and-out of doctors and other parents. Just us: my boy and me, in the quiet dark.

It was hard to say goodbye to everybody, but easy to leave the hospital. I hugged and thanked all the nurses I could find. I accepted and read the card wishing Tenzin a happy and successful life, signed by all of the doctors. I collected all fourteen bottles of my breast milk from the refrigerator and put them in a cooler bought expressly, no pun intended, for this purpose.

Angie wheeled us downstairs as Glen pulled up in the big car we bought for just this moment. After much wrestling with straps, I settled Tenzin in his new seat.

Within seconds we were on the freeway and the hospital was far behind us. Glen put his hand over mine and I felt the warmth of it, of him, radiate through my whole body. I thought about how Glen had showed up for me and we had showed up for Tenzin. And I thought that really, when it comes down to it, that’s what life is all about: showing up for the people you love, again and again, until you can’t show up anymore.

I put my hand over his and said, We did it. We made a baby and now we are taking him home.

Glen looked at me and said, Yep. I think that about covers it.

And then we laughed.

LIKE EVERY OTHER warm-blooded woman of childbearing age, I worried a great deal about the many wonderful experiences I would have to forgo once I had a baby. Along with sleep, travel, and ready-to-wear, movies were at the top of my list of things I simply could not imagine life without. New and old, foreign and domestic, comedies, dramas, and documentaries: I watched them tucked cozily into bed at night, or lounging on the sofa in the early morning. They were like chocolate to me: delicious, transporting, and essential.

Now I can’t believe I watched so many movies. When I go down the list of films on Netflix, I am appalled by how hard it is to find one I haven’t seen. How many hours of my life have I spent on long, artfully drawn journeys into other people’s lives? Human beings crave narrative because we glimpse the universal through the specific and feel less alone. But I feel nothing but relief to be so fully occupied living my own life that I am no longer compelled to watch other people living theirs.

Call me a snob, but where I used to find the infinite ways people resolve their endlessly complicated lives fascinating, I now see a bunch of stylized variations on a theme. It’s not that storytelling or art itself isn’t valuable, because it irrefutably is. I couldn’t bring myself to write this book if it wasn’t. I am just newly aware that it may not be
absolutely necessary.
I can have a perfectly fulfilling life, without entering the mind-streams of dozens of artists trying to make sense of their temporal existence. This feels blasphemous to think, let alone write, but I have to be brutally honest here, because that’s my job.

I had a baby and yes, I am like every new mother in that all I want to do is stare at him all day. But beneath that desire is a more profound truth:
He
is the story! The fact that he’s here, that he’s mine, and that anything could happen to either of us. The incontrovertible truth that he materialized miraculously: a flesh-and-blood manifestation of a figment of my imagination, and that I have to work like hell to subject him to all of the yummy and none of the yucky stuff of my own childhood.

In this new live-it-or-leave-it modality, I realize I may be flirting dangerously with myopia, and that it could be a stage, like teething, that will pass. I may wake up one morning rabid for a trip to the multiplex, but I don’t think so. The transition from observer to participant has been inexplicably liberating. It’s the how-to-live-your-own-life version of learning to swim: Once you know how, you no longer need lessons. You just get in the ocean and go.

This, I’ll call it “life competence” for lack of a better term, is permeating my life. Now when I am lusting after a pair of boots, I have to ask myself if I’ll be wearing those to the decidedly unglamorous supermarket down the street to pick up diapers and sliced turkey, and whether or not the toe will be a help or a hindrance when it’s time to unfold the stroller. When I consider yet another price tag, for anything, I am forced to consider how much interest the same amount of money would earn in a 529 college savings plan.

I can’t say that I am completely sober, but the whole process, that holy trinity of hunt, acquisition, and display, is breaking down as my concern shifts from looking great and feeling slightly alienated to feeling incredible and looking relatively well-put-together. Instead of talking through “stuff,” I am talking to my son. I am not saying a girl can’t have it all, because I am all for making life expand to meet your limitless vision, but I am saying that, first, said girl has to know what “all” really is.

My work habits have also taken a turn. A few days ago, a friend with writer’s block asked about my favorite places to write. Was it the desert or the forest, a spa or hotel, a lonely retreat cabin or a convivial writers’ colony? Struck by the question, I flashed on all the climates and landscapes I have pursued in the name of writing, all the rooms and houses, offices and shacks I’ve spent months and years trying to transform into the perfect writing space. Where did it get me? Where is my bookshelf filled with titles?

I didn’t want to shatter the hopeful promise of the room of one’s own, that mystical and magical place the muse will be unable to resist, but again, I had to tell the truth.

My bed, I said. My dining-room table, the tiny thirty-dollar desk on casters I bought at IKEA, the sofa. At the moment, I am writing at the kitchen table. Tenzin is strapped into his carrot-encrusted high chair on my right, engrossed in picking up star-shaped banana puffs. Every five minutes, he makes a high-pitched yelp to get my attention, and I reach for a new thrill to keep him occupied, but by the end of the day I will have written five hundred words over my thousand-word allotment. As an extra bonus, I get to sneak a quick kiss or neck nuzzle in between graphs.

My friend was taken aback, but not after I explained that writing-room obsession had claimed many years of actual writing time; that the cultivation of the perfect space was my procrastination activity of choice. I told her that back when I was searching for the ideal space, I’d be lucky if I even turned on my computer, let alone banged out a few lines. I probably will never catch up to Stephen King, who at a professed eighty to eighty-five pages a day makes me sick with envy, but now I am closer than ever to writing a book a year, and I owe it all to Tenzin.

Of course, it’s not all chocolate and roses over here. Yesterday I heard from one of my cousins that he has replaced me in my mother’s will. I can only assume that her response to my request for an apology is to disinherit me. It hurts, but she’s been talking for so many years about how she doesn’t believe in leaving anything to one’s children, I am numb to it. Of course, now that I have a child and can’t watch the evening news without wondering how on earth any of us are going to survive, I can’t imagine not wanting to take care of my children and my children’s children.

I also got a call from the caretaker of the little house in Mendocino I spent so much time transforming. He told me that my mother told him to throw all of my clothes and belongings away.
Todo,
he said.
¡En la basura!
The truth is that what my mother is doing hurts so much I can no longer feel it, but I am more confident than ever about my decision to keep my distance. It’s not just me now getting yanked about by her anger and ambivalence, her refusal to acknowledge my right to my own story, it’s Tenzin, too. All these years I haven’t been able to stand up for myself, but now, for him, I’m willing to walk through fire. Which is about what becoming a mother without a mother feels like.

There are other complications, too. Like all the things I miss—sleep, for example. When people told me to rest while I was pregnant, I didn’t know what to think. I’m an eight-hour-a-night person, and I figured I might have to settle for six. Not two to four, interrupted every forty-five minutes by piercing screams, hurried bottle preparation, and hushed whispers to a disoriented creature in a padded box. Not so little sleep that I would be rendered virtually incompetent physically, emotionally, and in tens of other ways I am too tired to remember.

I miss being able to wander aimlessly, not knowing the time, not caring, not having to phone home to make sure baby boy isn’t having a ballistic fit. Being “responsible” for my time is undeniably a mark of my growing appreciation for its value, but God damn, it’s hell. These days, if I am on my own I am either on the clock paying by the hour, or feeling guiltily beholden to my wonderful but sometimes overwhelmed partner who has his own work to do. Naptime, no matter how much I want to believe is free time, is not. I can’t go out of earshot, and must be ready to stop whatever I am doing to attend to the babe. Gone are my two-hour mini-vacations in the bathtub.

I miss my breasts, which, while still perfectly lovely and functional, have definitely gone through some changes since performing their duties as organic milk dispensers. I miss my flat stomach. It’s coming back slowly, but I have the sinking suspicion it will never be the same. I miss having what felt like an endless supply of mental and emotional stamina. Where I used to seek out conversation, licking my lips at the possibility of a “meaningful exchange,” I am increasingly more selective about how I expend my precious energy.

And even though loving another human being a thousand times more than you love yourself is arguably the most subversive thrill left in this object-obsessed, hypercapitalist world, I miss having only myself to worry about. The constant fear for my baby’s psychological and physical well-being is noble, but enervating in every way.

Even so, as I consider the fact that I, once terrified of spiders, will now reach into my son’s crib to kill one with my bare hands, I am struck by the human ability—propensity, even—for regeneration and change. It’s true that we are what we think, but the caveat is that what we think changes, and thank goodness. If we weren’t gradually disabused of limited ideas about the world and ourselves, who would we be? Five years ago I thought I could find marital bliss with an unfaithful musician, and happiness in a house renovation. Ten years ago, I thought meat was murder and meat eaters should be forced to raise and slaughter their own suppers. Thirteen years ago, I thought I was going to marry a devout Muslim and raise ten kids on a tiny island with no running water or electricity.

That we can change our minds is the easy part, it’s figuring out what to change them to that is nearly impossible. I suggest an identity, or should I say a series of decisions, that make one happy and ensure the psychological well-being of the next generation. Isn’t that the ultimate freedom? To know you’re serving yourself and the present while at the same time taking care of the future?

I am a mother and a partner now. After all those years of wanting, denying, and being afraid, I stopped searching and embraced what was right in front of me. It’s hard, this making a healthy family, probably the hardest work I’ve ever done. But every day, when I look at this little being I have the extreme good fortune to call my son, I thank the part of me that had the wherewithal, despite all the doubt and fear, to go ahead and embrace motherhood, to get on the ride and let it take me away.

I have no regrets.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Everyone needs a team, and I feel blessed to have one so loyal and devoted.

Thanks to my literary agent, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, for being one of the toughest, smartest women I’ve ever known and for having my back. Thanks to Geoff Kloske and Sarah McGrath for leading the Riverhead charge with insight and grace, and for making this a better book. Thanks to Amy Hertz and Cindy Spiegel, who have moved on but are not forgotten. Thanks, again, to Susan Petersen Kennedy.

Thanks to Barbara Wilson and Alba Camarena for funding my SEP IRA. Thanks to Aurélie Moulin for keeping my virtual world beautiful and up-to-date. Thanks to Ekajati Moore for orchestrating my day-to-day with élan. Thanks to all of the lecture agents that keep me comfortable on the road.

Thanks to my father, for always trying to find integrity no matter how difficult the circumstances. Thanks to my mother for having the courage to live her truth and, by example, teaching me to live mine. Thanks to Randall and Nicole for being there through it all.

Finally, thanks to all the readers who find meaning in my work.

You make it all worthwhile.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Named by
Time
magazine as one of the most influential leaders of her generation, Rebecca Walker has received numerous awards and accolades for her writing and activism, including the Alex Award from the American Library Association and an honorary doctorate from the North Carolina School of the Arts. In addition to the bestselling memoir
Black, White, and Jewish,
she is the editor of the anthologies
To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism,
a standard text in gender studies courses around the world, and
What Makes a Man: 22 Writers Imagine the Future.
Please visit her at
www.rebeccawalker.com
.