Rebecca Walker: Baby Love and Other Observations from Writing While Pregnant

By Rachel Kramer Bussel, SMITH Magazine. Posted April 30, 2007.

Writer Rebecca Walker knew at the age of 20 that she wanted to have a baby. While traveling in Africa, she had a vision of herself mothering a child with a man she encountered there, but she pushed it aside. She continued to push her maternal longings aside for fifteen years until meeting her current partner Glen, who encouraged her to follow her heart. She recounts this journey in Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence (Riverhead). Now the 37-year-old mother of two-year-old son Tenzin wants to let young women know that being ambivalent about having kids can be costly.

Exploring everything from her abortion at age 14 to her conflicted feelings towards the child she adopted with her female partner, Walker takes readers intimately inside every stage of her pregnancy and painful birth. Along the way, she also details her relationship with her mother, feminist writer Alice Walker, which that grows increasingly fraught as her pregnancy progresses. Pinning her personal journey to a broader cultural paradigm of women putting off parenting until "the time is right," Walker, also the author of Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (Riverhead, 2001) and editor of What Makes a Man: 22 Writers Imagine The Future (Riverhead, 2004), sees her book as providing advice she wished she knew while making this most important decision.

Rachel Kramer Bussel: The book is written in diary form, taking you through the very earliest stages of your pregnancy through birth. Is it culled from actual diary entries? When was the book actually written?

Rebecca Walker: It is in journal form but then there are the chapters, so I was doing some journalism but I was doing a lot of diagramming. I had huge sheets of paper taped to the wall and I was going to call it The Book of Lists. When I was pregnant I found myself making lists constantly: things I should eat, things I shouldn't eat, all the stroller options, what things induced labor, what things to take to the hospital. It was constant listmaking on huge pieces of paper. Then I started diagramming different experiences that I was having and making notes on them all.

Bussel: Was that just for you or was it with the intention of turning it into a book?

Walker: My process for writing is generally that I diagram on the wall, so I was already thinking about writing a book. But it wasn't until maybe my third or fourth month when I found myself saying, "Nobody ever told me it was going to be like that" that I wanted to document it in a way I could share it with other people who weren't informed about what it was going to be like.

Bussel: Was the actual book written while you were pregnant?

Walker: The journal was written all while I was pregnant. Some of the chapters, which are meditations on the theme, were written while I was pregnant. The last one was written when Tenzin was about six or seven months old. I would say for the most part, 85% of the book was written while I was pregnant; then there's the labor and that last chapter.

Bussel: How do you feel about the statements you make in the book when you reread them now? Did some of them change after you weren't pregnant?

Walker: It's hard to say; there is something called baby love and it is describing a temporal experience. It has to do with the rush of hormones and the intense experience of being pregnant which is a finite experience that I think affects one's view. I stand behind everything in the book, but I don't know that I feel the same things as intensely.

I was really in the throes of all that stuff. I was being confronted with a lot of feelings and experiences in the pregnancy that I don't think I could recreate. They were really motivated by that super immediate experience of having this baby inside of me, not knowing what was going to happen and feeling a lot of urges that I had never felt before. I think it would be very hard to recreate that.

Bussel: There's a sense in the book that something had been holding you back from even admitting that you truly wanted a baby, and that once you realized that truth and went with it, your life changed. What were the main things holding you back, and how did you overcome that? What enabled you to make that change after 15 years?

Walker: Being supported in the longing, having somebody who said, "Of course you should do it," someone who didn't question the urge. I think that was key because so many other people had questioned it or fed into my ambivalence about it. Meeting someone who was so decisive and so supportive was helpful. Deciding to follow my own inner callings, deciding to just not be cowed by all the different sociopolitical scripts that I'd been raised with and not to succumb to the fear that had a lot to do with meeting the right person and my maturation process. Recognizing that I had had a history of depression and being active in addressing that and resolving for myself that I didn't have to repeat some of those things that I had grown up with, all of those things paved the way for my choice to proceed with fate. I could and I would be a great mom and my life wouldn't be over; I could still be a creative and a thinking person.

Bussel: Your relationship with your mother is equally prominent in the text as your relationships with your son and partner, and the picture you paint is one of a very rocky, tumultuous relationship. How did the process of writing about it, both in Baby Love and in Black, White, and Jewish, help you deal with that relationship?

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Rachel Kramer Bussel lives in New York City. She is Senior Editor at Penthouse Variations, and a Contributing Editor to Penthouse.