Reality Chick

Nadya Suleman has had extensive plastic surgery to resemble another famous mother, Angelina Jolie. While her octuplets have turned into a national freak show and blog snark-fest, it’s not hard for me to follow her logic.

In the third issue of Exhale I discuss “Octomom” as a natural product of a deregulated fertility industry,  and highlight a memoir by another mother whose judgement was questioned. 

Creation Fixation

             Today, you have to explain your decision not to utilize the new technology if you have even the vaguest desire to have children.  Why suffer the stigma of being different in an increasingly conformist society, where being married and childless is seen as more odd than being a never-married parent, a single mother of many?

            From a front-row seat, I saw how the sexual revolution impacted my parents’ generation, who came of age and married in the fifties. It hit like a hurricane, breaking apart marriages, spawning a generation of latchkey kids, sending women to conciousness-raising groups and out into the work-force. In the same way that the pill ushered in both the sexual revolution of the sixties and the feminist resurgence of the seventies, the fertility frenzy has impacted society of the nineties and aughts; the outside of the envelope is being pushed further and further out. The business world, education system, dating conventions and even family pecking order rely heavily on the idea that the fertility industry is a safety net.  When I started a new job at 35, I was warned, off the record, not to get pregnant the first year, then brightly advised: “That’s what we have our fertility benefit for.”

But it doesn’t work for everyone; it didn’t for me. In my recent interview on Belief.net, sparked by my last month’s Exhale column, I wonder if the answer isn’t advising young women to freeze their eggs, but rather, retuning society to make it easier economically for young women to start their families at more appropriate ages: http://blog.beliefnet.com/beyondblue/2009/01/christina-gombar-an-interview.html.

The Right to Reproduce?

            Nadya’s case raises the very uncomfortable issue of whether or not having as many children as she wants, by whatever means, is as much a feminist issue as abortion rights.   In the Guardian, Jennifer Block wonders if it’s not time to “take a close, hard look at our healthcare priorities. While we have the technology and expertise to keep a 1.5-pound premie (Suleman’s tiniest) alive outside the womb, standard American maternity care is resulting in poorer and poorer outcomes for the vast majority of mothers and babies.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/feb/10/nadya-suleman-octuplets-ethics

Birthing versus Parenting

            “Any fool can have a child.” Our new president’s words, not mine – said on the campaign trail, speaking to an African American audience. Properly raising children, President Obama says, is another issue entirely.  Perhaps for their own safety, it’s a blessing that Nadya Suleman’s children will be living in a fish bowl.

In a blog post titled, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” author Karen de Balbian Verster discusses her dilemma after witnessing the abuse of one of her daughter’s playmates. She also sites an alcoholic woman who boasted of abusing her dog, but succeeded in adopting a Chinese infant.    

            De Balbian Verster asks: “I wonder why we as a society allow people who are unfit parents to become parents in the first place? It’s a slippery slope, I know, but shouldn’t there be some conditions in place before one has a child? Things like another parent, mental health, financial stability? It seems like too little, too late to worry about these things after the child has been starved in the basement, burned by cigarettes, or sexually abused. But since we can’t seem to ban assault rifles, I’m afraid licensing parents must remain a futuristic concept.

http://mysite.verizon.net/kdebv/2008.12.01_arch.html

An “Unfit Mother” Reflects

             Polio survivor Anne Finger was told she was unfit to give birth: it was dangerous, she was disabled, she was unmarried. Her 1990 book, Past Due, a Story of Disability, Pregnancy and Birth tells what happened when she defied standard advice.

        After suffering polio as a toddler, Finger grew up subject to one butchering operation after another in the vain attempt to bring life back to her atrophied leg muscles. Because of her horrendous experiences with the medical establishment, when she decided to become a mother, she eschewed traditional medicine and chose midwifery, despite the fact that she was an atypical, and potentially high risk obstretric patient.  The midwife miscalculated, the labor went on too long, and her son wound up inhaling his own fecal matter. Death, or a life sentence of severe disability was predicted by the angry medical establishment that she finally reverted to.

            Despite her son’s full recovery, Finger’s trauma – first under the knife of post-polio childhood surgeries, then a well-meaning midwife unequal to the task of her  complicated delivery, and finally, the shaming of the medical establishment – scarred he.: Her thoughts, during those terrible days when her son struggled for life:  “I do know that if he dies, I will think that technology is the monstrous, inhuman, a mad scientist’s creation; and if he lives, I will think it a miracle.”

          One could as easily apply these words to the current fertility industry frenzy: “I have the places where I draw my lines about what I would and would not do; and other people … people I respect, have different lives. But I’m aware too of how social pressure can work to keep people in line: how when a technology is available it becomes harder and harder not to utilize it. If you’re over 35 and pregnant, you have to explain your decision not to have amnio, justify yourself.”

Overfertility in the Age of The Feminine Mystique

        Richard Yate’s dark 1960 novel, Revolutionary Road, is now a gripping movie starring Kate Winslet. While the narrative is one of over-fertility rather than infertility, the story throws into dramatic relief how fragile and tenuousness is this largely taken-for-granted business of birth, for the child, for the mother. How destructive, yet somehow inescapable, the issue of maternal identity – for better or in this case, for worse.

Blogs and Bits

 http://www.moretolife.co.uk

       This British site for involuntarily childless includes U.S. news, coping strategies, and personal stories. A good resource for those who wind up without.

 Easter-Island

I’ve joined Exhale  — a literary magazine for intelligent readers who have either lost a baby, or can’t figure out how to make one in the first place. I’ll be examining books, blogs, mass media and other art forms’ creation fixation.  In my first column, I wonder why the story is always Baby and Happily Ever after, when 44% of women don’t even have children. I feature the work of multidisciplinary artist Tiffany Lee Brown, whose Easter Island Project explores how a culture’s ancestor worship nearly brought creation on that island to a grinding halt.

 The myths: 

• People can go from desperately wanting a child, to “choosing” to be child-free.
• Anyone Can Adopt.
• Women wind up childless because they put off marriage to establish careers;
• Or were looking for Mr. Right instead of Mr. Good Enough.
• Anyone who wants a baby can get one, because this is America, where there is a solution to every problem.
• Pets, gardening, or spending time with other people’s children fills in for not having biological children of our own.
• People without children aren’t real adults, and don’t know what real love is.
• Infertility is a women’s issue.

Missing in these pervasive, reductive myths, mainly produced by prescriptive how-to books, are the infinite number of individual stories describing the long, complicated, and sometimes unspeakable circumstances that may have led up to someone’s childless status. There’s no category in the current zeitgeist for ‘When all systems fail.’ 

 Here’s a real story:

My friend Elsa’s older fiance had two children from a previous marriage, vetoed more. She agonized and underwent lengthy soul-searching before deciding to go ahead with the marriage, determining to embrace a child free life.  She was relentlessly badgered by everyone from neighbors to co-workers to family members to change her husband’s mind, force a baby on him if necessary. A cousin who’d tricked an older husband into a child advised the same strategy. In Elsa’s case, it would have been quite a challenge, as her husband had a vasectomy.  

Elsa and I lived in the child-centered, Westchester suburbs, outside New York City. I, too, was involuntarily childless, for entirely different reasons, but I can attest the day-to-day experience was scalding.  My friend was pitied, her husband demonized, Daily, she heard:

“You’re selfish”

“You don’t know what real love is.”

“Your husband will leave you.”

He did leave, because with so few counterparts in her workplace and community, her sense of being cheated of her rightful destiny shook the foundations of her sanity and corroded her marriage beyond repair.  

A good marriage wasn’t enough to counterbalance either her private loss or her public alienation. So much for the Child Free Myth.

 The Invisible Woman

             I come to this issue as a childless-not-by-choice woman in the midst of the biggest baby boom since the end of World War II, when newscasters tout their children on air and every actress seems to be having twins at 47.

           But 44% of women in their childbearing years don’t have children, and some never will.  While the world is rightly concerned with family issues, the constant focus on motherhood can make it easy for a childless woman to feel that she’s less than a woman, that in failing to reproduce, she’s failed at life.

Simone de Beauvoir famously said, “You can’t have the book and the baby.” History proved her wrong. But these days, those of us who wound up without a baby find that we can’t get a book either – to read or to publish.

In making initial inquiries for this column, I found very few books reflecting my situation, and talked to more than one aspiring author who found the door to publication shut smartly in her face if her story fell outside of the proscribed norms of Motherhood Achieved, or Happily Child Free.  Uber-feminist Seal press has dozens of titles on motherhood, but not a single on the lives of women without children.

Laments my eighty-something, involuntarily childless friend Bea, “Even in the Bible, all these women who can’t have babies eventually get them!”

             At City College’s Harlem campus, my professors helped me understand why African American writer Ralph Ellison wrote a book called Invisible Man. As well as being excluded by segregation, African Americans saw no reflection of themselves in literature, government, commerce, art or advertising.

            These days, it’s the same for those without children.  When I was growing up in the 70s, there was this progressive idea floating around that a woman could live a rich, rewarding life full of close, fulfilling bonds, even if she didn’t marry and have children. In Mary and Rhoda, I saw an alternative future self on the T.V. screen.  Such depictions are nearly extinct now, as the publishing industry churns out book after book with a variation on the theme, I Overcame Fertility and You Can, Too!

 The Bubble of Silence

            In my own online search for kinship, I’ve come across dozens, if not hundreds of blogs whose purpose is to aid and abet the great fertility quest. Like a tenacious shopper at a discount warehouse, I foraged long and hard, and was finally rewarded with a shining jewel, multidisciplinary artist Tiffany Lee Brown’s blog Nymphe: Living Childless and Childfree, at http://magdalen.blogs.com/nymphe/www.Nymphe.com. Linked there was a piece published in the Oregonian Humanities Magazine, “Breaking the Bubble of Silence,”  detailing how merely relaying to fellow artist friends the subject matter of her most recent performance piece — on the grief of being childless – stopped the conversation cold.

 “If I’d announced that I was having a baby, the others would have heaped congratulations on me. If I’d brought out a photo of my lovely stepdaughter and told them of her soccer exploits, they would have chuckled and asked questions. Even if I’d softly admitted that I’d been having a hard time since my aunt passed away, they’d have offered condolences or a hug.

But childlessness is a pain experienced in silence. There is no place in civilized conversation for such discussion. No one really knows what to say, and there are no social rituals with which to mourn miscarriages or unsuccessful fertility treatments.  

The grief of childlessness visits us for many reasons. Some are infertile. Others don’t have a partner and don’t want to be single parents. The deep need to procreate hits us with a staggering intensity, as primal and undeniable as the need for food, water, and sex. The enormous role of children and family in our cultural, community, religious, and political environments reminds us constantly of what we’ve lost–what we’ve never had in the first place. Many of us feel ashamed to discuss childlessness in public for fear of undercutting the joy of parents and families. And when we do bring it up, we often hear clueless, insensitive, and sometimes cruel responses. So, most of the time, we keep the discussion safely shut away.”

          Her year-old blog offers a round-up of mini-book reviews  and links thoughtful pieces in the alternative press, like a recent Mother Jones piece on the preponderance of new “fertility movies” like Baby Mama and, And Then She Found Me, asking “where are the women without bassinets?”  

            The Portland-area artist has been deeply engaged in exploring the issue of infertility and childlessness in her art – music, visual, performance and writing.

 Her art goes beyond the issue of personal grief to explore socio-political concerns and the family-centric society.  

            Entering a childless marriage (her husband’s decision) brought into question her entire lifestyle, and all the choices she had made. Her work is engaged on a global level, examining the very concept of Creating.

            “What makes us create?” she asks. “There is this tremendous excitement in our culture about creating – whether it’s babies, buildings, or bombs.”

            Currently, her Easter-Island project, touring and interactive on her art site, explores this issue: http://www.magdalen.com. It also gives visitors a chance to participate and offer their own tribute to their own infertility situation.  

            Lee Brown has been fascinated the South Pacific island since the age of six. “In a way, I see it as a micro-cosm of a world, tied deeply into the whole concept of creating, fertility and childlessness.  Once well-populated, the island was filled with fertile, abundant tribes, who fought each other.” Easter Island is known for its huge monolith face-sculptures, ancestral totems worshipped by islanders. The tribes were thought to have moved the figures around the island, in the process cutting down the trees, destroyed the ecosystem, and deprived themselves of the means to go out on the sea and fish. Thus, Easter Island, once a baby-happy place, became greatly depopulated and barren. 

            “It’s the idea of making babies, and making art, and the ancestral chain. People have babies as a way of connecting to their ancestors, by continuing the line,” she says.

            “Giving birth is a way of connecting with their grandmothers, an unofficial spiritual ancestor worship we all practice,” she says. “Yet, this practice helped wipe out much of the wildlife and population of Easter Island.”

            Says Lee Brown, “Our society is messed up when we’re viewed and defined by roles we’re supposed to occupy, as Mom and non-Mom. The system that tells women motherhood is going to be endless bliss, and that finds so women distressed at their real, challenging and less than blissful experience is the same one that tells non-Mom’s that they’re lacking for not being mothers. There’s the ancient regime telling us we have to be mothers – and the new one where it’s constantly in our daily lives, and a media pitting working Moms against stay at homes and Moms marginalizing and devaluing non-Moms. The divisiveness of pitting child-free or childless against Mommies keeps us from understanding each other.”

While Brown characterizes herself as feminist, she sees the issue as “Totally crossing gender boundaries. Men, women, transgendered and other-gendered people — all of us experience the pain of childlessness, whether by choice or circumstances, and prejudice as a result,

Further reading: An intelligent discussion of fertility blogs appears at:

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/blogging-infertility

A blog exclusively devoted to those who are childless at the will of their spouses: www.childlessbymarriage.com

 Upcoming: author interviews with acclaimed writers. Ann Hood, author of the novel The Knitting Circle, and memoir Comfort, both of which deal with child loss, and Elizabeth McCracken, whose recent memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination tells the story of her son’s stillbirth.  Visit www.ElizabethMcCracken.com to read an excerpt in Oprah magazine.

One in a hundred people suffer from the chronic illness schizophrenia. That’s five million people in America alone. So why is this genetic illness so stigamatized?

Staking Irish Madness has been named one of 2008′s Best Books by Slate magazine: http://www.slate.com/id/2206635/pagenum/all/

Searching for the Roots of His Family’s Schizophrenia

             A warm spring day, April 1979, broadcast journalism class at the University of Rhode Island.  Dr. Snodgrass, our instructor mutters, “Pat Tracey, not here again. That’s no surprise,” in his bizzarrely deep, newscasterly voice.  The professor was normally not sarcastic, but on the day our projects were due, he may have felt a small amount of disdain his right.

But it is characteristic of life that the one time Dr. Snodgrass took a liberty, it was unwarranted.

“His mother died,” piped a hippy girl. “A stroke.” Everyone in class, but especially the girls, emitted sounds of distressed sympathy. It seems everyone knew Pat but me.        

            It wasn’t until reading Pat’s book, Stalking Irish Madness: Searching for the Roots of My Family’s Schizophrenia, nearly 30 years later, that I learned his mother’s stroke was no random event. 

       His memoir, published by Bantam August 26, proves that, in the author’s words, “Real tragedy may be the best training ground for a memoirist.  Madness is a universal concern. It may be the deepest fear for all of us, because more than anything else we are our minds. We are a family that has experienced in a first hand way what few feel free to speak of.”

          Stalking Irish Madness has been picked by the association of independent book shop owners for their Indie Next List of Great Reads From Booksellers You Trust.

Honk if You Love Hitler

I turn to literature for the last leg of my flu. What could have induced me to indulge in the 800-pager, “The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters”?  

Well, I love the witty work of eldest Nancy (who comes in for a bashing over the course of this book), in the family-biographical novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, which lampoons her own upper classes. “I think I may say we put India on the map,” a pompous colonial diplomat’s wife declares, “Hardly any of one’s friends had ever heard of India before we went there.”

Nancy’s skill of telling made this rarified world seem not only comprehensive, but inclusive when I first read the books while working as a janitress in London’s back streets during my own version of the Grand European Tour, double digit inflation early-80s student style.

The sisters are magic at nicknames. The Queen Mother is forever dubbed “Cake,” for her wild exclamation at sight of said sweet at a social function. The sister Pamela is called Woman, for embodying the arch-typical female qualities of steadfastness, soberness, and virtue, as personified in some medieval pageant. Boud, Birdie and Bobo for Hitler acolyte Unity (as if her given name and politics weren’t enough); Honks for ethereally beautiful Diana, another Friend Of Adolph. (Another sister, Jessica, became a Communist, eloped with her cousin, and emigrated to America to become a left-wing activist.)

I expected to skim this tome, confronted with the hard reality behind the delectable confection of Nancy’s gossipy novels, which left out the Hitler connection. But I was drawn in by the letters, touched by the mutual support as the sisters (well, most of them) rushed to the deranged Unity’s aid when she fired a bullet in her brain the day England and Germany declared war. She was 22 and lived another eleven years, brain damage having the beneficent effect of shifting her fanatical devotion from fascism to Christian Science.

As the sisters aged and one by one dropped their perches, the sea of letters, 60,000 in all, kept flowing. What devotion, what family feeling, I thought, as Woman nurses Nancy through her four years’ battle with the cancer that ended her life at 66. “Love, darling,” ninety-something Honks signs every letter to Deborah (AKA “Nine” for her reputed mental age). Compliments spurt forth regarding each others’ loving kindness.

But why do the knives have to come out when it comes to the subject of maternity? Nancy’s “Waspishness” is attributed to her thwarting – she suffered miscarriages and a fertility-ending operation in her late thirties, at which time she divorced, moved to Paris, and became a fabulous success as a writer, fashionista and socialite. Debo dismisses this: “She didn’t have a real husband and children, just the writing, an empty sort of reward.”

Only after her death did the others learn that during World War II, Nancy informed on Honks, AKA Lady Diana Moseley, wife of Sir Oswald Moseley, founder of the British Union of Fascists. Thanks to Nancy’s testimony, the two were imprisoned during the Second War. Diana chose separation from her four young sons (one eleven-weeks old) rather than denounce Hitler. Which I guess tells you who really suffered thwarted maternity.

Likewise, the married and childless-by-choice Woman, (Pam), took in two of Diana’s sons when their mother was in the lock-up. What thanks does she get? Honks attributes a completely unrelated perceived insensitivity (Pam “had no idea how ghastly prison really was, the lav, etc.”) to her lack of children. Diana sued Her Majesty’s Government for lack of heat, and with proceeds bought a mink coat to wear in jail.

Nancy comes in for the worst scalding. While I noted the novelist’s enthusiastic interest in her sisters’ offspring — full of praise, never jealous, sad or lamenting her own fate – the mothers cannot refrain from attributing her character flaws to barrenness. If she was difficult, my guess it was not due to Terminal Childlessness, but Oldest Girl Syndrome.

First-born barrier-breaker in the upending twenties, Nancy was followed by a bevy of sisters, one more beautiful than the previous, which did not cease till was fifteen. She set the joking tone, originated the family wit; they all traded on Nancy’s ground-breaking success as a writer.

In the last batch of letters, Debo and Honks buck each other up, saying that they have their children, grandchildren and “greats” as comforts in old age. No doubt these offspring meant a great deal to the sisters at the end of their lives — they don’t get much mention earlier.

But Nancy left behind something to benefit the rest of the world — satire that transcends poisonous politics and laughs at her own snobbishness. Something, I’d venture, that continues to comfort quite a few other people in their old age. ~~~