BABY LOVE
Rebecca Walker
Riverhead Books
Memoir
ISBN-10: 1594489432
ISBN-13: 9781594489433

The final and most wonderful benefit of pregnancy --- the baby! --- doesn't keep the process from being exceptionally difficult. Even the easiest nine months are marked by bouts with morning sickness, a rapidly expanding body, an endless series of tests, and decisions, decisions, decisions. In Rebecca Walker's world, those nine months of fitful preparation for motherhood became a battleground with her own mother, American literary icon Alice Walker. As she battles her own childhood demons and tries to find some peace with her difficult and demanding mother, Walker realizes that baby love comes with some price tags higher than co-sleepers at Babies "R" Us.

With exceptional candor, Walker gives us a nine-month rundown, with the appropriate personal historical context, of what it took for her to find her own truths about motherhood. As any mother will tell you, the immensity of the undertaking and the lifetime commitment it requires is enough to scare anybody from even trying it. But Walker's double-edged sword is made of not just the fears that our culture builds up in its attempts to encourage you to spend lots of money "preparing" for the blessed event, but the realization that her mother's honest ambivalence about her coming into being may be a legacy that the author doesn't wish to pass on to her own offspring.

Instead, Walker tries to redefine love and mother without the anger and lack of commitment she found in her own upbringing (she has a good relationship with her father, but since he lives in New York and her mother is in California, Walker spent her childhood shuttling back and forth). It's pretty clear that she never got what she really needed as a kid --- her mother's unconditional love --- and she's determined to give her own son that which she was denied. Therefore, BABY LOVE is not your usual happy and crazy road to motherhood.

Walker's writing style, although chatty and conversational, has a distinctive cadence to it, and the reader can sense that her intelligence as a writer never gets in the way of her commitment to relaying the facts as she sees them with unconditional honesty. It is a rather searing story --- gossipy at times when she discusses her mother's inability to give her love (rather shocking if you read THE COLOR PURPLE, which is all about finding and giving love, to others as well as yourself) --- but is pointed and poignant when Walker gets sick enough to land in the hospital, putting her baby at risk, or when she battles with her need for antidepressants even though they may harm her fetus.

As a Buddhist, Walker has some particularly beautiful ideas she wants to impart about calm and abundance playing important roles in one's life. Her relationships are hard-won --- she describes past relationships and what she has learned in order to make the one she currently is in sound enough for a baby to enter into --- and her bisexuality is discussed without any big to-do about it.

BABY LOVE is a fantastic addition to the pantheon of books about pregnancy and motherhood. First-timers especially will find the trials and tribulations of Walker's pregnancy most fascinating, as she deals with religion, culture and family in order to attain the perfect balance of elements in which to bring forth her son into the world. This is an age-old tale told with stunning modernity --- a must read!

   --- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano

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