How my mom (and Alice Walker) set me free
When I was younger and more difficult, I pitied my parents for having to raise me. This thought was my first foray into considering motherhood substantially — that is, beyond the pantomime of playing house. It horrified me. I recalled the years of insomnia which found me in my parents’ bed almost nightly, the way I’d snipe at them and my brother just to start something, my secret Twitter account, my imperviousness to all forms of punishment and bribery. For all the good-daughter qualities on which I prided myself, there appeared a similar number of annoyances that, in thinking about approaching them as a mother, seemed near-impossible to overcome. I hadn’t had a period yet and wouldn’t for another year, yet reluctantly began to carve out of my life the space which children would someday come to occupy. I felt the aperture of my world begin to narrow around the idea of becoming a mom.
At this age, I was still convinced that my unmarried, childless aunt would trade Brooklyn for the suburbs and settle down. It seemed impossible that anyone — a Black woman, no less — could so outwardly defy the predetermined structure of adulthood. Her hair was close-cropped and she took time out of her attorney job at odd points in the year to travel; already, her life took a shape I was not yet equipped to decipher. Thinking of her, then of my own future, I lamented that a life as robust as hers couldn’t sustain itself against the inevitability of motherhood. I was right at the age of questioning, the tender stage where the sense and order of the world begin to unravel by the hands of the word why. I was figuring out what I could want and not want, how to transgress. It was becoming clear that I did not want to be a mother.
At that time, even more than now, I was not one to fumble on my convictions. I knew I didn’t want to be a mother the way I knew I liked girls: with inflexible certainty, and without the language to explain anything beyond the simple fact. I had nothing else, not for my parents nor my friends, yet I made my declarations with brazen satisfaction. This child logic crumbled easily, as everything conceptual seemed to be doing in the face of questions. I was one with mystery, then; I lacked any compulsion to verify the source of my self-knowledge. As my vocabulary expanded, so too did my ability to justify this peculiar diversion from my friends’ visions of the future. When asked about the faces I’d pull at the thought of a child startling me out of sleep, or spitting up on my shirt, or crying for my attention, I responded with an inquiry of my own: who would ever want that?
Everyone else, it appeared. Their eyes glazed over imagining the bone-tired fulfillment only achievable by executing domestic labor, relief at the curtain call after a flawless performance. I recognized it — even at the worst of our relationship, I always appreciated my mom’s excellence in her role. Where I missed the direct light of her love as a teenager it came as a supplement in her dinners, the neatly pressed laundry left folded on my bed, the soaps and lotions always replenished, the warmth of our home, the ease. I wondered if, in the midst of conflict like ours, age-old and miraculously unique, I could humble myself enough to extend her level of care to my own daughter. With resigned guilt, I recognized that my answer was no. Indeed, it brought me great, invisible shame not to want these things I was supposed to want, to feel incapable of doing the things that were demonstrated so beautifully and consistently in my own life. I longed to return to the days where my conviction sustained me.
It was this past December, a few years removed from the first fortuitous shift in our dynamic, that my mom paused the Real Housewives of New York City to ask if I wanted children. She rolled her eyes into the question, its answer already confirmed by her maternal clairvoyance. The second between my response and her didn’t think so threatened to eviscerate me. I stood suspended in that infinity, feeling for the first time that I might be disappointing her, that a mother so gifted at the act of care might be heartbroken at the lack of grandchildren to tug at the hem of her jeans. I was prepared to offer my younger brother up as sacrifice, promising that he’d settle down and start a family without even the simplest indication that he’d begun to think of such things. I expected, as a natural segue, that she would want to step into the space my grandmothers occupy now, to host and dote and indulge without the weight of constancy. She chuckled, not necessarily… That’s still a lot of work.
In witnessing her devotion, I’d come to expect that my mother had passively accepted the prototypical journey of the adult woman. Moreover, I feared she passively anticipated that I would do the same. This was the first time she’d ever sounded noncommittal about motherhood, and I half thought she was joking. When I confirmed that she could accept my decision not to be a mother, not to make her a grandmother, she simply stated, I don’t care, girl. I only care that you’re happy. She kissed my cheek, unpaused the Housewives, and snapped straight back into her afternoon as if she hadn’t shaken the foundation of guilt upon which I’d set all my visions of a childless future.
My relieved tears felt unsuited to the casual nature of the moment, so I held them. They fell months later — last week, to be exact — when in my class on Black motherhood we read Alice Walker’s essay, “One Child of One’s Own.” For its stunning, sprawling investigation of the contradictory rhetorics around motherhood; of “Women’s Folly,” which offers mothers a frustratingly essential means of coping-by-dissociating; of the gorgeous way Walker’s life expanded around the birth of her one daughter; two simple sentences upended my perspective on motherhood for a second time.
“I don’t like stretch marks. I hate them, especially on my thighs (which are otherwise gorgeous, and of which I am vain).”
All over my copy of this essay, so vigorously inscribed that the paper is torn in places, so frantically scratched that it reads more as an abstraction than an English phrase, is the word honesty. Alice Walker is unflinchingly honest. She hesitates to have a child because she fears the implications for her own life’s trajectory. After birth, she laments the unexpected changes to her body. She considers herself first, embraces her vanity. I had not given myself the space to imagine I could do the same, to remember the ease with which I once stated my desires and left them there, whole as they were without justification. In Alice Walker, in these two sentences, I saw my past, the future, the fullness of a life lived entirely on one’s own accord. I thought of my mother, how her simple wish for my happiness could only be achieved with similar honesty. I cried, comforted by the fact that my mom and Alice Walker had given me permission to indulge myself.
A number of my closest friends are convinced that I’ll come around on motherhood one day. I think my reasons for not wanting children might read, to them, as too selfish to be permanent. I don’t want children because they’re expensive, because I’m expensive, because I want to be able to live between cities and countries and travel at will, because I don’t want to endure the same mother-daughter war my mom and I eventually ended, because I don’t want a son and if my partner or I give birth there’s no way to control that, and because I don’t want anyone to depend on me in the way a child must even after age 18. I don’t want a child because I was a difficult child; I love myself, but I wouldn’t want to raise myself. I don’t want the anxiety, I don’t want the pain, I don’t want to submit my Black, female, queer, pregnant body to the death-machine-delivery-room.
My mother’s reassurance and Alice Walker’s vanity did something tremendous for me: they confirmed that mine are fine reasons not to want a child. I don’t need to explain anything. I let my friends convince each other of the eventuality of motherhood and the certainty that I will, aged 40, per their averaged estimates, bite the bullet and adopt. I don’t want a child because I’m a true, stubborn Taurus and I want to prove them wrong. I love them, and I love that they see in me the capacity for motherly care which I might have shut off or sublimated in an act of resistance. They are future parents, and my picture of maternal fulfillment is richest and sharpest when I imagine being their children's favorite Auntie.
I want to draw from my deep well of feeling on my own volition, and to always have the choice to extend or withdraw my self. It may turn out that, like Alice Walker, I evaluate the conditions of my life and determine that children will enrich my world beyond its current scope. It’s possible that one day, my friends and I will get together with our children in tow, laughing about my crumbled resolve and relishing in the depth of love only mothers can know. I just don’t see it. I think I knew more when I knew less, when I stated my case with stark simplicity. I say now, like I said then: I don’t want children because I want to be free.