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Improve Access to Maternal Healthcare
Help Family Care International ensure that mothers everywhere have safe births though improved access to maternal healthcare services.
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Lifewraps Save Lives
Simple, affordable, and reusable, the Lifewrap helps prevent further bleeding in women suffering from obstetric hemorrhage—the leading cause of maternal death. Help get this technology out to mothers who really need it.
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| | • | According to a 2006 UNIFEM Report, single mothers in Russia suffer doubly – as women and as single mothers – from Russia’s vertical and horizontal job segregation and pay discrimination (Russian women earned only 56% of the average male salary in 2000). | | | • | In the West and in the former Soviet Union, births outside formal marriage have become more common. | |
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EDITOR'S NOTE
An excerpt from “Baby Love" by Rebecca Walker, copyright (c) 2007 by Rebecca Walker. Used by permission of Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc
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Like many women my age, I spent a good deal of time and energy trying not to have a baby. I may be speaking too broadly here, but I don’t think so. Mine is the first generation of women to grow up thinking of children as optional, a project that might pan out to be one of many worthwhile experiences in life, but also might not.
We learned that children were not to be pursued at the expense of anything else. A graduate degree in economics, for example, or a life of renunciation, devoted to a Hindu mystic. To live life as one long series of adventures in a sensual exploration could be added to the list, along with becoming president, or at least secretary of state.
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. In a poem written around the same time, she compares me to various calamities that struck and impeded the lives of other women writers. Emily Dickinson had X disease and the Bröntes had Y. My mother has me, whom she lists as a delightful distraction, but by context and comparison, it’s clear I was a hindrance just the same.
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. But in the very next moment I will purse my lips and squint my eyes and tilt my head back and remember all of the indices of ambivalence, and the thought will arise with an even greater clarity: or maybe she does not.
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. Did my mother love me? Will I love my own child?
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. But their respective choices, the extremely divergent ways they constructed and displayed their femininity, loomed large in my mind. So large that the tension between the two of them as individuals, typical stepmother-birthmother tensions, with the added challenges of being from different races and socioeconomic backgrounds, was transformed into my psyche as a tension between ways of being a woman.
Because these things are impressed upon us often before we realize we have a mind that can be impressed upon, I instinctively felt that I must be loyal to my mother’s version. This meant maintaining my autonomy at all costs. To stop working and raise children, to be weighed down with tots like so many anvils around my neck, none of these were acceptable. They smelled of betrayal and a lack of appreciation for the progress made on behalf of women’s liberation. Worse, they suggested a kind of ignorance about the truth of the gendered world, which was that unless women refuse, their children would enslave them. Which was that the myth of blissful motherhood was just that, a myth, and the reality was much more insidious.
The only problem with this program was my stepmother. She wasn’t especially well known or respected in her field, and she too, as a stepmother, had her share or ambivalence about being in a relationship with me. But my stepmother brought enthusiasm and predictability to my life. Enthusiasm about children in general and being a parent specifically, and predictability in that I could count on her to be the neurotic and intrusive maternal figure that Jewish mothers are often characterized as being. While my own mother could be counted on to recommend a life-changing book and to take me to a fascinating but remote village in Indonesia, my stepmother could be counted on to keep the refrigerator with low-fat but tasty food, and to bring at least one camera to all events at which any of her children was to be featured.
Because divorce was not yet the exhausted psychological terrain it is today, there were no adults in my life who had the wherewithal to identify my dilemma and help me navigate it. There was no one who said to me, the way we say to kids who are mixed race or bi-religious or have two daddies, Isn’t it wonderful that you have these two role models and they are both so different! No one said over and over (because that’s how many times it takes) or even once, When you grow up you can love being a mother and still accomplish great things. It seems absurdly obvious now, but growing up, I swear, I could not fathom it.
I dealt with the impossibility of my predicament by pretending it didn’t exist. I made the requisite strides toward personal fulfillment through professional achievement, telling myself that I would think about having a baby when the time was right. Because I believed that there would be several if not dozens of other possible partners, at twenty I abandoned the first man with whom I could actually imagine having children, and didn’t make another serious attempt until ten years later.
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A childfree by choice lifestyle is still an evolving concept in India. It is often looked down by many as the ultimate “unwomanly” thing to do. Everyone is responsible for their actions and decisions and if someone genuinely feels that...
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