Baby Love Read Online Free
Author: Rebecca Walker
today’s initial bout of uncertainty about what may be the biggest decision I’ve ever made. Is this the beginning of the end? Is this the first of many things I love that I will have to give up for the baby? First perfume and then sanity, sleep, and travel to interesting places? Is this what everybody means when they say your life will never be the same? Say goodbye to emotional stability? Say goodbye to amber, lavender, rose, and sandalwood? Say goodbye to Brooklyn, Paris, and Dakar?
Is there any peace in this process? I struggled for years to decide whether to become a parent. Now that it’s happening, I’m plagued by apocalyptic visions of how it’s going to turn out. Has it always been this way? Is this elixir of ambivalence and anxiety the universal experience of motherhood, or is it just America, circa right now?
Two
MANY WOMEN SAY that for as long as they can remember, they’ve wanted to have a baby. They say that playing with dolls was their first introduction to the idea of motherhood, that they’ve known since childhood they would give birth.
I didn’t play with dolls. I never knew, the way I knew that I would go to college and eventually earn a living, that I would have a baby. Unlike the women who can’t pinpoint exactly how or why they came to the feeling, I remember exactly when and where I felt the first pang of maternal desire.
I was in Africa, in a country so foreign that none of my old thoughts about myself could hold. I found I could live without running water and electricity. I could survive armed soldiers and random searches of my bags on public buses. I could be friends, sisters even, with women who covered themselves from head to toe in swaths of black cloth.
And, because of a man I met, I could fantasize about having a child.
Ade was and still is a devout Muslim. We met in the middle of Ramadan and spent hours on the rooftop of my guesthouse talking about his culture. In conversations I dominated, I questioned him pointedly about how women were treated. What were his thoughts about the veil? Forget niceties. I wanted to know if the women in his family were circumcised. I asked these questions, but I can’t say I was open to Ade’s answers. Though only twenty years old, I was positive I knew much more than Ade about the gender politics of his country from the books I had read and women I had befriended.
But Ade wasn’t affected by my arrogance. He listened to each of my criticisms intently, and responded with a rather (compared to mine) complex view. He told me first what he believed (women are as powerful as men and should be respected as equals), and then explained what the Quran taught (one of the Prophet’s wives was a businesswoman who financed his rise), and then finally conceded the interpretation of those with power (women should be subordinate and obedient). He was adamant that there was no circumcision, but promised to ask Fatima, a rare female friend with whom he could talk about these things, and tell me what she said.
What can I say? I fell for Ade during those conversations. Ade could talk. He wasn’t afraid of me. He seemed to know his own mind, to have considered the issues I raised and come to some decisions, decisions I respected even if I didn’t agree. He was unfamiliar with the intellectual combat I was honing at college, and his lack of competitiveness allowed me a relaxed curiosity I had not known. When he left, I felt awake and alive, as if the door of everything I had learned had been blown open.
Because of this and other factors too numerous to mention here, I stayed several months with Ade, and one day, after I had convinced my traveling companion to go to Tanzania without me and I no longer knew when I would leave Ade’s tiny island or why, I went out in a dhow with Ade and some friends. We were far from the shore, out on the open sea. I was wearing a gray T-shirt and Ade’s blue-and-white-striped kikoi around my waist. Ade was balancing himself on
Is there any peace in this process? I struggled for years to decide whether to become a parent. Now that it’s happening, I’m plagued by apocalyptic visions of how it’s going to turn out. Has it always been this way? Is this elixir of ambivalence and anxiety the universal experience of motherhood, or is it just America, circa right now?
Two
MANY WOMEN SAY that for as long as they can remember, they’ve wanted to have a baby. They say that playing with dolls was their first introduction to the idea of motherhood, that they’ve known since childhood they would give birth.
I didn’t play with dolls. I never knew, the way I knew that I would go to college and eventually earn a living, that I would have a baby. Unlike the women who can’t pinpoint exactly how or why they came to the feeling, I remember exactly when and where I felt the first pang of maternal desire.
I was in Africa, in a country so foreign that none of my old thoughts about myself could hold. I found I could live without running water and electricity. I could survive armed soldiers and random searches of my bags on public buses. I could be friends, sisters even, with women who covered themselves from head to toe in swaths of black cloth.
And, because of a man I met, I could fantasize about having a child.
Ade was and still is a devout Muslim. We met in the middle of Ramadan and spent hours on the rooftop of my guesthouse talking about his culture. In conversations I dominated, I questioned him pointedly about how women were treated. What were his thoughts about the veil? Forget niceties. I wanted to know if the women in his family were circumcised. I asked these questions, but I can’t say I was open to Ade’s answers. Though only twenty years old, I was positive I knew much more than Ade about the gender politics of his country from the books I had read and women I had befriended.
But Ade wasn’t affected by my arrogance. He listened to each of my criticisms intently, and responded with a rather (compared to mine) complex view. He told me first what he believed (women are as powerful as men and should be respected as equals), and then explained what the Quran taught (one of the Prophet’s wives was a businesswoman who financed his rise), and then finally conceded the interpretation of those with power (women should be subordinate and obedient). He was adamant that there was no circumcision, but promised to ask Fatima, a rare female friend with whom he could talk about these things, and tell me what she said.
What can I say? I fell for Ade during those conversations. Ade could talk. He wasn’t afraid of me. He seemed to know his own mind, to have considered the issues I raised and come to some decisions, decisions I respected even if I didn’t agree. He was unfamiliar with the intellectual combat I was honing at college, and his lack of competitiveness allowed me a relaxed curiosity I had not known. When he left, I felt awake and alive, as if the door of everything I had learned had been blown open.
Because of this and other factors too numerous to mention here, I stayed several months with Ade, and one day, after I had convinced my traveling companion to go to Tanzania without me and I no longer knew when I would leave Ade’s tiny island or why, I went out in a dhow with Ade and some friends. We were far from the shore, out on the open sea. I was wearing a gray T-shirt and Ade’s blue-and-white-striped kikoi around my waist. Ade was balancing himself on
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