Free Baby Love by Rebecca Walker Page A

business, like what I think about the hospital where she has privileges being public and twenty to thirty minutes away. When I asked what she meant, exactly, by the public part, she said that the hospital is well equipped and has a great neonatal intensive care unit, but serves a very different population than the hospital I usually go to.
    She said it’s not one-thousand-percent spotless, either. It’s an older building and hasn’t been renovated. For the most part, the nurses are excellent and she loves her supervising doctor, but the best thing about the place is that she has full privileges there, which means she would be in charge of the birth unless something goes wrong.
    What can I say? I wish the public and private hospitals weren’t so different. I wish I didn’t have to negotiate race and class just to have my baby. I’m going to visit and see how it feels, but I’m pretty sure I’d rather have Sonam deliver this baby in a lean-to than risk having an unnecessary C-section in some spotless shrine to the medical establishment.
    At least I think I would.

June 28
    Today I met June for lunch. We talked about our new creations: hers, a new publishing venture; mine, the little one growing in my belly. She told me she long ago decided not to have children. She said that several of her friends had children because they thought they should, only to realize too late that they didn’t make the decision consciously. Where are they with it now? I wanted to know. They’ve got kids they don’t want, she said, shaking her head.
    Yikes.
    When I asked more about her decision, she said she didn’t feel emotionally able to take care of herself, let alone a defenseless child. Her body was too weak, having weathered a few major illnesses, and her energy too elusive. Her husband wanted kids, but when she asked if it was him or the culture that wanted them he conceded it was the culture. Then she brought her sister’s kids home to prove her point. The kids exhausted both her and her husband.
    I tried not to get judgmental about her choice. I tried to minimize the whole baby thing and just talk about work stuff, creative stuff, and the machinations of the publishing world. I tried not to gush about how long I have wanted a baby, and how miraculous it is to have another human being growing inside of me.
    But it was damn near impossible.
    Am I turning into a baby supremacist? One of those people who thinks a woman without a baby is like a fish without an ocean? Who thinks a woman without a baby may be stuck developmentally just shy of true adulthood forever? As June talked about her new office and staff, I thought about how much she’s missing and how appalling it is that I can’t tell her because the whole thing is so unbelievably primal and indescribable. I thought about how hooked human beings can get on external accomplishment, but how at the moment, the most dramatic and exciting changes of my life are happening inside and I have no desire to go back.
    I know I’m setting myself up for some serious refutation, and it’s all valid. My thoughts aren’t rational. They’re hormonal, irrational, psychopharmacological.
    And so incredibly real.

Four
    IT’S NOT THE SAME. No matter how close you are to your adopted son or beloved stepdaughter, the love you have for your nonbiological child isn’t the same as the love you have for your own flesh and blood.
    It’s different.
    I met Solomon when he was seven and I was twenty-six. It was a sunny Los Angeles afternoon, and his mom, whom I had been dating for several weeks, was taking us to the beach. Solomon was wearing blue pants and carried three small action figures. He was quiet and cautious, with intermittent bursts of chattiness. His parents were in the middle of a nasty divorce, and he reminded me of myself at his age, trying to figure out who to be after my parents sat me down and told me their marriage was over.
    Within hours of meeting Solomon, I had projected a