Mother load

Ebony, May, 1994 by Laura B. Randolph

The most thought-provoking thing I've read lately isn't a best-selling book or an award-winning article. Believe it or not, it is a government report about, of all things, birth and fertility rates.

Though the report merely contains information that I, like most sisters, already knew - a woman's fertility peaks around the mid-20s, starts to decline in the late 20s and early 30s and drops dramatically after 39 - it has still managed to provoke great anxiety among a number of ray childless friends.

Usually, things like this do not affect me. In the late '80s, when that now-infamous study by a Yale sociologist and Harvard economist came out saying that college-educated women who were still single at the age of 35 had only a five percent chance of ever getting, married, sisters across the country were traumatized. Some (I know a few personally) immediately went on the husband hunt, the spousal stalk, the paternity prowl.

Their reaction always puzzled me since I assumed it doesn't take a genius to know that "against the odds" does not mean "impossible" any more than "not now" means "never."

About motherhood, I have always felt the same way. I have always been sanguine enough to take a distanced view. Basically, I feel about having a baby the same way Oprah does. "I feel if it is the will of God for me to have a child, then I will," she recently told me when we were discussing motherhood and I asked her if she wanted to have a baby.

That is not to say I never think about the biological clock thing. (So does Oprah. "Ticking?" she exclaimed when I asked her if, now that she has turned 40, she ever heard hers. "It's a gong!")

Like most women in their 30s facing biology's ticking watch, I do think about it. Especially this month, as we prepare to celebrate Mother's Day. Who wouldn't? My girlfriends who have children tell me motherhood is the experience of a lifetime. A spiritual pinnacle. The ultimate high. The emotional mother lode. So yes, I think about the biological clock, but it has never haunted me.

Something else does. It is something, something about being a mother, something which no statistical report could ever provide the answers to: How do you know you have what it takes to be one? And, even if you think you have the right stuff, how do YOU know when the time is right for you?

If, like me, you can't answer either question, you don't even allow Yourself to ask the really hard ones, like: Can you make, the total spiritual and emotional commitment motherhood requires? And, fertility rates and biological clocks aside, do you have the strength, not to mention the knowledge and wisdom, to handle its phenomenal requirements? The rigors. The responsibility. The weight of the world. The Mother load.

When I wanted to be a journalist, I went to journalism school. When I wanted to be a lawyer, I went to law school. Both gave me a pretty good indication of whether I'd be able to cit it at either. But how, where and when do you work on that M.M. - Master of Motherhood? I don't know. It's the mother of all dilemmas.

As far as I know, "Mother School" does not exist, which - in addition to being pretty scary - strikes me as the ultimate absurdity since what job is more important than raising a child?

The answer, of course, is there isn't one. Raising a child, particularly a Black child in this race-conscious society, is such a complex, intricate, easy-to-mess-up thing. It takes much more than a deep belief in your own good intentions to do it right.

Wouldn't it be great if Mother Nature, the mother of all mothers, worked it out so that when you got pregnant, you also got smart? if she fixed it so that, after nine months of carrying a child, you just woke up one morning knowing all the things a mother must know?

Not just the basic stuff like how to dye Easter eggs, braid a ponytail and carry an infant in one arm while balancing groceries, Barney and a Snugli baby carrier in the other. I'm talking about the real weighty stuff. how to bring down a 2 a.m. fever and what to say about death. How to explain to a three-year-old how we know God is real even though we can't see Her. How to make a child feel safe and secure in a world that is neither.

My mother knew all of these things. it didn't matter how many times (many) I brought her my problems, or how simple (a broken toy) or difficult (a broken heart) they were to fix. Whatever the trouble, she always did the same thing: Right the wrong. Soothe, the hurt. Mike it better.

Like so many Black mothers of her generation, she carries mother wit with hell her a pocketbook. I'll never forget the time I was babysitting a friend's 4-year-old son and he cried hysterically for what seemed like hours. I tried everything - holding him, reading to him, even bribing him with promises of trips to Dairy Queen and Toys "R" Us. Nothing soothed him.

Finally, terrified there might be something seriously wrong, I called my mother. "Go get a clock and show him what time his mother will be home, she said across the phone line. Desperate, I did.