Baby Love by Rebecca Walker Page A

straight. It’s okay to have a baby at home, but a home birth is more for the mother. You go to the hospital for the baby.
    My first reaction was anger: How dare she pit me against my baby! If it’s better for me, it will be better for the baby. But then I started thinking about the baby, and how wrecked I would be if something went wrong. I remembered my stepmother saying that if something happened to the baby I would never forgive myself. She’s right.
    Glen is still against a home birth, and when I showed him The Birth Book, which Carl and Martine gave me, with all of the amazing pictures of people looking all natural and groovy and organic and healthy, he said, Yes, but they don’t put the pictures of home births gone wrong in the book, you don’t see those pictures. To which I countered that they don’t tell you about the hospital births gone horribly wrong, either. They don’t take pictures of all of the C-sectioned moms that could have had natural births. They don’t blow up pictures of episiotomies and put them up on the wall next to the cute one-year-olds.
    We did another blood test. Dr. Lowen doesn’t have any idea why I had the reaction I did to the antibiotics, and isn’t quite sure what to make of the fact that my counts aren’t back to normal, but she is reassured that now they are going up, and not down.
    Me, too.

July 27
    I spent a good hour this morning standing in the kitchen in my underwear trying to figure out new and exciting ways to ingest iron-rich molasses. First I tried heating soymilk and dissolving the molasses in it, kind of like a molasses hot chocolate. Barf. Then I tried spreading it like peanut butter on toast. Super barf. Then I tried just sucking on a spoonful. Oh my God, I almost passed out, it was so disgusting.
    Solomon arrives in a couple of days for orientation at the new school we decided to send him to here in Berkeley. His mother found an apartment close to the school, and we have agreed that he should live with her primarily, and see me on weekends, and for meals during the week.
    I am nervous about the whole arrangement and feeling overwhelmed. I am not going to be able to take care of him as much as I usually do, but I don’t want him to feel displaced by the baby. To calm my nerves I made a little schedule that includes a few things I know he’ll like. He’s old enough to take care of himself a bit, and also be helpful to me. Right?

August I
    Solomon left today. He didn’t help, exactly, but I did enjoy hanging out with him. Even though I am ginormous for five months, I can tell the baby thing is a bit abstract to him. I had to keep reminding him that I can’t do the things I used to do, like walk up five flights of stairs. Or work all day, go out for dinner, a movie, and then to the bookstore to look at magazines.
    Orientation at his new school seemed to go well. He came back with a big smile on his face and several new “friends.” He didn’t want to hear the lecture I gave him about throwing the word “friend” around with people you hardly know, though. After a few minutes he was like, Okay! Can we go to the burrito place now?
    Last night Glen and I talked about the difference between mothering and smothering. Mothering has to do with setting appropriate boundaries and giving kids room to be themselves. Smothering has to do with projecting all of your fears and anxieties onto kids and not giving them a moment’s peace. I am determined to do the former and not the latter, but it isn’t easy. I notice how much I problematize different aspects of Solomon’s identity, calling attention to behaviors that aren’t just so and constantly making little corrections. I notice that I want to know his thoughts and feelings a little too much.
    I asked Glen about his mother, and what she did right in raising him. She was abandoned as an infant, he said, and ended up graduating from Boston University at a time when very few women, and even fewer African-American