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Baby Love (an excerpt)
Rebecca Walker
United StatesGALLERYCONVERSATION
We learned that children were not to be pursued at the expense of anything else. A graduate degree in economics, for example, or a...
I don’t remember exactly how these ideas were transmitted, but that I imbibed them is unquestionable. It must have had something to do with my mother being a cultural icon, and the private carry-over of her public insistence that even one child could, if not managed properly, erode one’s hard-won independence. In an oft-quoted essay she wrote as a young mother, she remembers her mother’s admonition to have a second child as the single worst piece of advice she ever received.
The effect of living with my mother’s ambivalence about the role of children in a woman’s life, the role of me in her life, could not bode well for me having my own. Ambivalence itself is rarely positive. Ambivalence about one’s offspring is a horrific kind of torture for all involved. It affects me to this day, stealing my certitude at critical moments. I have sat with others and said, Well, of course my mother loves me.
People who cannot conceive of parental ambivalence have a very difficult time understanding this, and write it off as the confusion and ingratitude of children. But this is the price of ambivalence over a lifetime: It doesn’t go away. It seeps into otherwise healthy tissue and tinges it with seeds of pathology.
There was also the veiled competition that throbbed between my mother, an extremely driven artists determined to be successful on her own terms in a decidedly antagonistic world, and my stepmother, an equally educated woman who, more than anything else, wanted to give birth to and raise five children. I can’t say that these two did not get along, because in order for this to be true they would have had to spend time with each other, and they only met four times in thirty years.
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