Free Baby Love by Rebecca Walker Page B

lifetime of alienation onto him, ascribing to him all the pain and confusion I felt after my parents ended their marriage. Within weeks I had fallen for him. I loved the way he took my hand when we were out in the city. The way he asked deep and seemingly bizarre questions like, When people die, do they remember who they’ve been? I loved that he thought he remembered being in his mother’s womb and described it as warm, red, and mushy.
    Before I even remotely knew whether a relationship with his mother was something I wanted, I dove into Solomon’s life and began trying to create the positive post-divorce family I never had. Without thinking it through. Because I thought he needed me. Because I knew my inner seven-year-old needed me. And I had to save her. By saving him.
    And so it began. The trips to the orthodontist and ophthalmologist, the monthly talks about schoolwork and conduct with the teachers of third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and then, finally, ninth grades. We had the obligatory struggles over homework, diet, and violent video games. I suffered the endless negotiation of the politics, socioeconomic and otherwise, of play dates. I hired helpers, bought and read books on teen sexuality, coalesced and counseled members of the extended family.
    I did so much that friends wondered if I wasn’t doing too much. I wasn’t his actual mother, after all. And wasn’t it true that if I did too much, I would enable her to do too little? What would happen if his mother and I should break up? Shouldn’t I legally adopt him to protect my investment in our relationship? I understood their concerns, but my inner seven-year-old was undaunted. She wanted—no, needed— me to keep going.
    I wasn’t just reparenting myself, though. I was securing my position in the relationship. Love me, love my kid. That’s what single parents say to potential lovers, partners, and spouses. Even when they don’t utter the words, it’s a running subtext. And don’t we potential stepparents respond, if we believe we can make a genuine go of it, with our own subtext? We make dinner for three and watch Princess Mononoke. To the exciting new adult in our life we say: Your child is my child. To the adorable child before us we say: I think of you as my own. When we are in deep, and can see that the well-being of another human being is at stake and his ability to trust us actually matters, we look straight into his eyes and say: No matter what, I will never leave you.
    At least that’s what I said. It didn’t occur to me that some people would predict a messy endgame and keep their distance. These people would have gone down the “Your child is my child” road with other lovers and friends, only to devastate some unsuspecting kid and get wiped out in the process. But I hadn’t yet lost a child, and so I said all of the things I said because I meant them, and because I did not see a way to proceed in the relationship without meaning them. I said them because I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I said them because I was in love and didn’t yet know how to think with any organ other than the one in my chest.
    In the end I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t save me and I couldn’t save him and I couldn’t save her and I couldn’t save us. It was an untenable situation and none of us had the skills to make it otherwise. The only thing I can say on our behalf is that we were in our twenties and early thirties and the relationship epitomized our developmental limitations. It was passionate and histrionic, fun and tragic, romantic and stupid.
    Being young and coming from families that didn’t stay together, we thought if we just loved long and hard enough we could destroy everything a thousand times and put it back together a thousand times, and then one day everything would fall into place. We thought it was like taking the train from the city to the beach. Concrete, traffic, pollution, and then a little less concrete and