The two of us: Rebecca - Rebecca Walker talks about her relationship with her mother, author Alice Walker - 25th Anniversay Issue

A few months ago I turned 25, and my mother called to say happy birthday to both of us. Twenty-five years ago, she said, was our birthday. I will remember our twenty-fifth year as the one in which we both began to understand that what is traditionally considered an adolescent and absolute task of individuation is really a lifelong process of leaving and returning home, of being apart and coming together. This has been the year that I have pushed hard against some of the rules of the "good daughter" and learned to really hear the message my mother has given me all my life: "I will be with you always." As in forever, into the eternal hereafter, no matter what.

But it has been a long struggle.

When I was just 8 years old, my mother had me crawl into bed beside her before asking me to take some dictation. "When I die," she said as if she were telling me which clothes to lay out for the next day, "make sure I am buried in a simple pine box. And play lots of Stevie Wonder. My funeral should be a celebration!" Dutifully, I began to write--"P-i-n-e b-o-x, S-t-e-v-i-e W-o-n-d-e-r"--on the yellow legal pad she placed on my lap. I don't remember what I felt then as my mother asked me to prepare for a time when she would no longer be present. Now, after reliving certain childhood moments in an attempt to understand them and myself better, I imagine that I did what I always tried to do for my mama. I tried to be who and what she needed me to be at the time. Instead of asking her all the hideous questions running scared through my child-mind--Mama, are you going to die? Mama, are you leaving me? Mama, who will take care of me? Mama, what about us?--I simply memorized the funeral plan to the letter and cheerfully assured her I would take care of everything.

This was the face I would show my mother again and again as I was growing up and she needed space or silence or to go away to do her work. Rather than insist on being with her or tell her that I did not want to be alone, I would nod, smile and say cheerfully, "Okay, Mama."

I am not sure if the pine-box incident marked the beginning of my fear of my mother's abandonment of me, or if it was the first time that I silenced my own apprehensions in order to soothe hers. I do know that this memory captures how I have always felt, deep down, about my relationship with my mother: If I don't do what she wants me to do, she will be gone, she will leave me. The plan I devised in response was simple: I would be too perfect to leave, too indispensable, too wonderful. Thinking I could keep her closer for longer by winning her unconditional love, I instinctively made myself into what I perceived to be "a good daughter," often silencing or ignoring my own needs.

Not surprisingly, this is not an uncommon pattern. My mother has told me that she, too, had similar though undiscussed fears about her mother, and together we think that at least three generations of mothers and daughters before us must have been similarly afflicted with the same story of silence and need. Perhaps this mother-daughter code is a legacy of slavery; cultivating a daughter's independence and sense of separateness could be one way our great-great-great-grandmothers protected a child who could wake up motherless, and toughening their own hearts to the needs of a child who might be taken away might have been our foremothers' only defense against unending sorrow.

I have heard similar fears from other women whose working mothers had leave them alone for greater parts of the day or night, depending on them to "take care of things"; or who, because of some other circumstance beyond their control, usually abuse or neglect, were unable to get the kind of constant unconditional love that young children crave. Listening to their stories, it becomes clear why individuation is often so difficult for young women. We fear that if we go our own way, off into our destinies outside of our mothers' desires, we will surely perish. We will die of aloneness.

All the way through college I lived with this fear of abandonment as one lives with unresolved childhood abuse; it covertly steered my life. It mostly affected my relationships, turning them into struggles for proof of the unconditional love that I longed for. I pushed partners to dire limits to see if they would still love me, and I stayed with partners I didn't necessarily enjoy because I couldn't stand the idea of being walked away from forever. In relationships with my peers, my belief that I wouldn't be accepted as who I was often kept me from opening up and making new friends, and with those who were my friends I felt an acute need to show a strong, supportive, everything-is-going-to-be-all-right face. In my relationships with older women and mentors whom I loved and respected, I always felt slightly uncomfortable. Was I being what they wanted me to be? Was I giving them the daughter they always wanted?

While I knew that I would have to stop always being the "good daughter" in order to reach an adulthood I could be proud of, I fretted unconsciously for a few years, taking tentative steps out of my mother's orbit. The most symbolic decision was to move to New York instead of back to San Francisco, where my mother lived, after my graduation from college. In my mind, my desire to cultivate a life full of pollution and urbanity would signify to my mother that my values were questionable, that I was less than pure. I could hear her wondering what could possibly be worthwhile enough to keep me away from healthy and politically evolved San Francisco. I also worried that because she wanted me home, my move would feel to her like the same abandonment I so feared. If I let her down, she would withdraw, and I would be, as my childself understood it, motherless.

As I feared, when I moved, she withdrew, and we have been coming together and letting go ever since. She, trying to let me go my way without judgment, trying to make space for and understand my feelings of fear; and me, trying to make my own way on my own terms, not letting the choices she has made keep me from making important decisions that are mine--according to what I want and not what I imagine she would want. Honestly, it has been a tough road, full of long silences and angry confrontations, teary reunions and sometimes frightening insights into the limits of the daughter-mother bond.

But the great news is this: At 25, I have come full out to my mother as myself, cursing sometimes, having widely divergent points of view, making choices I know she wouldn't make, even allowing myself to get angry with her to the point of yelling! And what I have learned is that much of what I fear is in my mind, my psyche, carried over from a child's logic, from another era in both of our lives. By articulating and talking about my childhood fears and feelings with my mother over the past few years, I have tested my childhood assumptions and found that not only are both my mother and my mother's love here to stay but also that the voice inside of me that said I was not loved unconditionally can also begin to change. I am no longer the powerless child at the mercy of my mother's moods. And she is no longer the uncertain mother afraid to love without question. These truths will neither kill nor divide us but will instead set us free. Being honest, being real with each other helps us to be true to ourselves and more accepting of what is real in all of our relationships.

Twenty-five has been a year of coming-of-age, in which I have realized that there is a point when you have to step out into the world on your own feet and speak from your own mouth. There is no guarantee that most people wil like you or even understand you. You must find solace in the fact that you are telling your truth and that when you speak, your words are so much your own that no others could possibly come from your lips. I have learned that mustering that courage, being that true, can only come from unconditional love--of the self.

As I hug my mother at the end of a recent visit, I realize just how long it has taken us to begin to look at the patterns that have shaped our lives. I also feel for the first time that I am not afraid to say good-bye. I don't feel the usual pangs of fear that I may never see her again; I don't doubt the depth and sacredness of our connection. I know that we will be together again, and I feel secure in the knowledge that whenever and wherever we meet, we will pick up exactly where we left off--listening, loving and trying to understand.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Essence Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group