Rebecca Walker Measuring Out A Mother's Love....

[bliss_eternal]

Interesting article on Rebecca Walker, after the release of her book.
She is the estranged biracial (mixed), daughter of Alice Walker (Color Purple).
She makes "interesting comments" about the difference between loving her adopted child vs. her biological child.
I thought some here would find this of interest but probably disagree with her "ideas"...

Enjoy!
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Rebecca Walker, Measuring Out A Mother's Love

By Teresa Wiltz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 30, 2007; Page C04

It's been several years since Rebecca Walker became estranged from her mother, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, a rift that shows no signs of repair. But now that Walker has a new book exploring her nine-month odyssey to childbirth, that mother-daughter relationship has been opened up and dissected again, revealing oftentimes painfully squirmy details. The younger Walker, who is biracial and bisexual, has spent a lifetime -- and a career -- sorting through her issues. Her medium of choice: the memoir, which she likens to ripping off her clothes and strolling through a crowded street.

She's got a knack for self-exposure -- and for courting controversy.

"People are going ballistico," Walker, 37, said Tuesday night after appearing at Borders Books in Tysons Corner. "It's stirring up feelings on both sides."

"It" would be her memoir, "Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence" and a certain chapter where she describes the difference between her love for her teenage stepson, Solomon -- whom she still parents with her ex, the singer-musician (and D.C. native) Me'shell Ndegéocello -- and her love for her biological son, Tenzin.

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Walker says she was caught off guard by the fallout. These are her feelings, she says, her truth -- a "brutal truth," as she later put it -- but hers nonetheless. She says she's not trying to denigrate the many different incarnations of family and deem one type of love as lesser. Not lesser. Different.

"I think it's healthy to talk about different kinds of love," she says after the reading. "You love each of your children differently. We have to be comfortable with thinking that there are different kinds of love. . . . I think my first son feels differently about his biological mom than he does me. And I'm fine with that."

As an activist, she says, she's spent years celebrating family in all its guises; right now, she's working on an anthology that explores that very issue, "Walk This Way: Introducing the New American Family." After all, she once contemplated creating her own less-than-traditional family. In her memoir, she describes how she and her long-term female partner (whom she does not identify by name) approached a male friend about fathering a child for them. That union did not yield a child. But after the couple broke up, Walker met Glen (she doesn't provide his last name), her Buddhism teacher. Today, unmarried, the couple live in Maui with their son, Tenzin.

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taken from:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/29/AR2007032902320.html

[kwassa]

1. I read that article ....

and ended up scratching my head. There is something different about a person who lives a life in the public eye, as the daughter of someone famous, and also brought up as a life in the arts. It is a counter-cultural life, and a bit exhibitionistic. Her mother is also involved in lesbian relationships, though for both whether is more of a fluid bisexual life seems to be a question, too.

Rebecca has lived her life in public, and seems to have an excessive sense of self-importance, to me. It is deliberately chosen controversy.

I ended up thinking "so, what's the point, here?"

(and I like Me'shell's music, too.)

[bliss_eternal]

2. Good points, kwassa...

...honestly, I thought it was such a genuinely bizarre thing to say. I don't deny anyone their sense of "truth", but I do question the motivation behind it and the intent. I also concerned for her children. What is her adopted child going to feel seeing, hearing such comments at some point in his life? Why intentionally (or unintentionally) hurt an innocent child this way?

I would think as one that has been rather outspoken about her feelings regarding her mother's parenting skills, she may have considered that and her adopted son--prior to making such statements.

It's a real head scratched why anyone would feel compelled to make such a public statement in regard to a child.

Also, given the current climate about glbt families adopting, this seesm such an unnecessary and rather selfish statement to make. I sincerely hope it has no long reaching affects on other glbt women and men that plan to adopt children.