Reality Chick

This week on  SilentSorority.com I tell how a trip to Russia cured my tunnel vision:

I consider myself less a survivor of infertility, than of the fertility industry. 

Let me explain. As far as I know, I wasn’t infertile during my childbearing years. But when I was married and 30 and ready to start my family, I came down with a life-upending chronic illness. You realize you’re not parent material when you can’t recognize a box of Cheerios, forget how to use a phone, and unintentionally set fires in your own home. And, oh yes, I was taking experimental meds that were in no way pregnancy friendly.

Before that, on the scale of wanting a child (1 being “No Way!” and 10 being “I Have No Purpose If I Don’t Have a Child“), most of the time I was probably a four: “If it Happens, it Happens” was my philosophy. I’d already had a premature taste of maternity, when, at 13, my mother had a fourth child and I was designated chief babysitter. Unlike many “infertiles” and even new Moms, I knew how hard the job was, and how important it was to be fully there for it.
   
For several years, as I worked to get well and fully employed again, we were a happy family of two. In my mid-thirties, I succumbed to societal pressures – some might say enablers — a generous fertility benefit at my job and a clinic just down the street.  No doctor red-flagged my health condition, but as I walked down to the little clinic at the bottom of the hill in my picturesque suburban New York village, I knew I was giving myself a toxic dose just as surely as if I were scoring smack on the Lower East Side. I wound up seriously disabled after a brain infection. This time it took me years, not months, to read, write, drive and cook safely. End of Act I, I was 38.
 
If my husband and I’d stayed in New York, I’m certain further fertility treatments would never have crossed my mind. Because of my health, I had to be realistic. Rather than being preoccupied with my fertility, I was forced to figure out how to accommodate this new semi-sick person who’d invaded my once-healthy body.  Instead of grieving a baby, I grieved the sturdy, dynamic self I’d lost to illness. I was so overwhelmed by financial challenges, I often thanked God I didn’t have a child to provide for. But when we moved to Rhode Island, we were a complete anomaly as a childless couple.

I tapped into the last few thousand dollars in my company’s benefits piggy bank.  “You have the numbers of a 25 year old!” My doctor enthused.  
   
This time I wasn’t working full time, so I didn’t get sick. I didn’t get pregnant either. I was 44.

I was never desperate until this final IVF frenzy. But in order to continue gambling with my mental, physical and emotional health, I had to define my future life without children in starkly negative terms. Terms that that were just plain false. But stuck in the fertility tunnel, I developed tunnel vision. Years later, I recognize it as a kind of mental illness.

How did I escape ? I’ve always come alive with travel. In 2006, I won a fellowship to attend a writers’ conference in St. Petersburg, Russia.  While I’d once considered traveling to Russia to bring home a child (a plan nixed because of my health and financials) I instead brought back myself. The self I’d pushed aside in my quest to become a parent like everyone else, that I couldn’t even see from inside the tunnel.

Once in Russia, I was no longer the semi-sick, middle-aged childless, purposeless person I felt at home, but someone who plunged easily into international life, knew how to get by in a strange city, picked up a foreign language in days. I was at one with the 15-year old exchange student who’d been so shy speaking English she often didn’t open her mouth all day at school, but when forced to speak only in French felt instantly at home in a foreign country.  On the streets of St. Petersburg I was taken for European, and when I explained I was American, I hastened to add, a New Yorker.

Upon returning to Rhode Island, it dawned on me I might be in the wrong place, pursuing the wrong goals. I began traveling more often back to Manhattan, and realized how much of myself I’d left behind there. I have a history there that means something profound to me.  My husband and I met in college in November of ‘81 and moved to the city June ’82. New York was the foundation not just of our adult lives, but our relationship. It is our family.
   
We went to New York in the middle of a recession worse than the current one, found work in the fields of our choice against all predictions, paid all our bills on our own, and retraced the footsteps of our immigrant, tenement-dwelling grandparents as we lived as minorities in minority neighborhoods that were often unpleasant, even dangerous.  I worked in the World Trade Center for all the big firms making news today; my husband was at the center of the dot.com boom and bust.
   
Having children, being part of the direct genetic chain of generations, is one way to be in the stream of life. It was easy to see myself as a dud in those terms.  But, being at the center of history, I realize, merely walking the streets of a great city like St. Petersburg or New York, is another way of feeling connected to the chain of of history. Understanding this restores the parts of me that that our fertility-frenzied culture said I lacked.    

http://blog.silentsorority.com/

Should IVF Coverage Be Mandatory?

           A couple of Decembers ago, I got an email from Resolve, the national infertility organization — a plea for end-of-year, tax-deductable donations. “Imagine a world where fertility treatment didn’t exist …”  began the missive.

            It had been years since I looked to Resolve for aid in my finally defunct effort to have a family. The organization claims to serve a dual purpose: to prove information and support to those pursuing children, and reconciliation to those who wind up without. But the overwhelming number of communications and services, and the only lobbying activities – urging Congress to pass laws to make insurance coverage for fertility treatment mandatory — were geared towards the baby quest.

              So I deleted their emails after a quick skim. But having planted the idea of a world where fertility treatments didn’t exist, I couldn’t resist an honest answer: “I honestly wish they didn’t!” 

           This spurred an instant response, offering a plea for my “healing” – as if only a wrong-thinking person could even question the fertility system.   

            I hit the reply key, and then typed in: “The fertility industry makes those of us for whom the system didn’t work even more of an anomaly than we already are.”

            Within minutes, a Resolve staffer called. She stressed that Resolve was there to listen to people like me. 

            “Good. All I’m saying is — if infertility is defined as an illness, then that makes those of us without children sick and abnormal, right? I can’t reconcile to my situation if society can’t reconcile itself to me. Plus – I have a real illness – having infertility over the age of 35 isn’t an illness, it’s biology.”

            The staffer was dumbfounded.

            I continued, “I’ve worked hard for the little financial security I have, so I’m really cheap and risk-averse. I knew most IVF’s in my age group failed. If it were a stock, I wouldn’t have bought it. But because it was someone else’s financial risk – I gave it a shot. But I’d never have gambled on it with my own money. I’d never have got sucked into the emotional maelstrom. And if no fertility treatments existed at all, I’d have much more easily accepted my childless state. And so would the rest of the world.”

            A lengthy conversation ensued. I insisted on a precise definition of infertility. At 28 it’s an illness that should be cured when possible, and paid for by medical insurance. At 48, IVF is an artificial prolonging of the motherhood timeline. Was it fair to make other policyholders in the insurance risk pool subsidize that? The Resolve staffer was shocked.

            But this year, the once-taboo arguments I raised are coming out in the open.

            In July, Salon’s Broadsheet column backed the Family Building Act of 2009, which calls for insurance companies to provide IVF coverage. Fifteen states currently require it, and Resolve would like to make it a national mandate.

            The financial logic behind insurer-provided IVF is that those who can’t afford the more expensive and precise IVF procedure use the cheaper fertility drug clomid, which may cause the release of too many eggs, resulting dangerous multiple births that tax the health care system more in the long run.

            Of infertility, Broadsheet columnist Lynn Harris declared, “It appears that we can no longer afford to treat its treatment as a luxury.”  

            Some commenters disagreed, with the predictable advice: You can always adopt. Which prompted corrective replies from other readers who pointed out that adoption is often more expensive and risky than IVF.

Other responder’s put the argument in the context of the larger health care crisis:  “When society can afford insurance coverage to provide life-saving treatments for all the children already here who need them, then we can spend more money creating new children.”

http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2009/06/24/ivf_coverage/

Consider Yourself Warned

          In Britain, authorities recommend giving a fertility test at 30, seeing it as an awareness tool. Fertility counseling should go hand in hand with other kinds of sex ed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/aug/09/fertility-mot-children-nhs

             A former chairman of the British Fertility Society said it was crucial to tackle a “widespread misapprehension” about the success rate of fertility treatments. The chances dip sharply with age: from 31% for women aged under 35, to below 5% among women over 41.

 Mommy Oldest

            This summer, the death of a Spanish woman who gave birth at 66, leaving a toddler orphaned (she was unmarried) spawned heated debate on the blogs over whether or not there should be a ceiling-age for fertility treatments.

            In Newsweek, African American writer Raina Kelly spoke out: “Sometimes for the sake of the children-to-be, we may have to put away our longings and grieve for the children we might have had rather than go to the ends of the earth to get them. We have to think about the children, not just the having them.”

http://www.newsweek.com/id/208022

Some feminist voices argue that the reproduction playing field should be leveled – that if men can become parents at sixty, then so should women. Personally, I wonder if this is something to envy – but I’d hate to see reproduction outlawed for one sex and not the other. 

The Motherlode on Stillbirth

In her New York Times Motherlode column, Lisa Belkin asked readers how to respond to a family who’s experienced stillbirth. Again, sparks fly in the comments section, with one commentator saying that words like “tragedy” should be reserved for mass events, like the Holocaust or Hurricane Katrina.

http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/when-a-full-term-pregnancy-ends-tragically/

Which button do I push for a dead baby?

            Stillbirth is more common that Down’s Syndrome, SIDS and HIV – one in every 160 pregnancies. Few expectant parents are aware of this, and so come to it completely unprepared — in an increasingly impersonal medical environment with no protocol for addressing it.

            NPR’s Tell Me More recently ran a segment featuring two parents of stillbirths who are trying to do something about that.

http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=111063912&m=111063895

Guest Sherokee Isle, who suffered a stillbirth in 1981, is trying to make sure hospitals have on hand a copy of her book, Empty Arms: Coping After Miscarriage, Stillbirth and Infant Death.

            She and fellow guest Alan Goldenbach, who recently wrote of his wife’s stillbirth in The Washington Post  (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/06/AR2009070602918.html) point out that parents-to-be aren’t told that when movement slows down near due date, it’s a danger sign. They are lobbying for more research to find out why stillbirths occur.

In June of 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama introduced the Preventing Stillbirth and SUID Act of 2008, but it was unable to gain much traction. (”SUID” stands for “sudden unexpected infant death.”) Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.) continues the effort, “We need to know more about stillbirths to help increase awareness and prevention,” Lautenberg said. “We are crafting legislation to improve data collection so we can better understand what’s causing stillbirths and help parents looking for answers.”

For the world to listen. The tide is finally turning against the unfettered fertility quest, with the sad public examples of Octo-Mom, and Jon and Kate’s marital nosedive. Finally, last month, in British Cosmo, Cameron Diaz said it: Maybe there’s just too much emphasis on having babies. Maybe if women weren’t under such constant pressure to reproduce — “shunned” was the word she used for the childless — it wouldn’t feel so terrible when it doesn’t happen.

In the British press the single, childless-for-now star has drawn more raves than rants:

The U.K.  Telegraph calls Cameron Diaz  ”the height of responsible citizenship” – for remaining childless. Hear hear!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/5524706/Cameron-Diaz-does-the-decent-thing.html

In this month’s Exhale, I praise the forthright star and give a rave review to Pamela Jeanne Tsigdinos’s new book, Silent Sorority: 

Summer Reading Roundup

 Some Fresh Food for Thought, plus some Old Chestnuts to bite into – try not to break any teeth!  

             In books, as well as in blogs, I often find our friends across the pond speak more realistically about fertility issues than we Americans, with our unfettered optimism. (Babies for everyone! IVF at 90!)

 Beyond Childlessness, Rachel Black, Louise Scull, Rodale Press, 2005

            I have read several books on unintended childlessness, none offered the depth of comfort and shared experience as this one. The authors are two women — one single, one married to a man who forbid a family without making his preferences clear before marriage — who sought out and interviewed other women in their situation, and let them tell their stories themselves.

            This book is head and shoulders above any other “fix the problem” or memoir anthologies on childlessness, because it ventures where others dare not go. Well-meaning books like the husband and wife-authored Sweet Grapes sugarcoat some of the ugly truths. 

 
            Other books on childlessness say “it’s no use going over whose fault it is.” Actually, there’s a lot of good in that. One of the authors, Rachel Black, has worked out with her husband that when she/they are faced with the ubiquitous and painful question, “Do you have children/why not?” She says “My husband didn’t want them.” Childless women are demonized and ostracized, and assumed to be selfish. It was his decision, let him take the responsibility socially. She also made him get a vasectomy, so he wouldn’t reproduce with someone else, should their marriage fall apart under this incredible strain, and move on to a younger woman.
                 This book also exposes what an arduous and punishing route adoption can be – especially in Britain. Adoptive parents must be rich, young and healthy — a hundred times more qualified than a natural parent. One interviewee commented on the British government’s stress on keeping adoptive children in touch with their biological families. “If they’re that keen to keep in touch, why are they not looking after the child themselves? This constant having to keep in touch, we couldn’t actually break free and be our own family, and have a proper, intimate family life, there were always going to be people looking over your shoulder, who you’re answerable to.” 

Silent No More            

If you haven’t ordered Exhaler Pamela Jeanne’s Tsigdinos’s Silent Sorority yet, here’s a teaser: 

“You should never, never ask a woman when/if she’s going to have kids. If she’s already been trying for a while, it will feel like a knife to the heart. It forces her to either tell you more than she wanted to or to lie. Because if she had wanted to talk about having kids in the first place, she would have.”

 “Telling a woman who has lost a baby that ‘it wasn’t meant to be’ is not compassionate. It’s merely a way of easing your own discomfort by dismissing ours. Minimizing our pain, be it offering ‘solutions’ or explanations only serves to make yourself feel better while inflicting further hurt on us … It’s hard to contemplate the randomness of the cruel universe, where bad things happen to good people, and it may make it easier for them to sleep if they can convince themselves that there is a reason for it, and we must’ve deserved it. Telling us you know what we’re going through because it took you X months to get pregnant minimizes our feelings. You had a happy ending. We may not.”

 “I’ve been stripped down and made new on this journey. I’ve become utterly vulnerable, and forced to see the world differently.  I’ll never have the kind of optimism that some people have that anything is possible, that it will all work out in the end.”

 “I have had to take responsibility for my life in a deeper way than I ever had before. And because we live in a society where so few seem to take true responsibility for themselves and for those around them, it is very lonely. We don’t live in a world that really embraces soul-searching, and so much of this journey has been about soul-searching for me. I think a lot of the bad and unsolicited advice and glib responses to infertility (like “just adopt” or “it wasn’t meant to be”) are because people are so uncomfortable with pain and the possibility of pain with no resolution. We can’t take away the pain. All we can do is transform the response to it.”

 Adapted from Silent Sorority: A (Barren) Woman Gets Busy, Angry, Lost, and Found, Copyright 2009, Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos.  www.silentsorority.com.

Pamela Jeanne’s memoir is the first honest empty-handed one-person take since:

Why Don’t You Have Kids? Living a Full Life Without Parenthood,

By Lesley Lafayette

This book, published in 1994, is a bit dated — not in the essential common sense and truth of its pronouncements, but in that the boldness of the author’s opinions. They would be entirely unacceptable in today’s family-at-all-costs universe.

            I found it extremely reflective of my own experience, though it won’t be to everyone’s:

“Looking back, I can see now that my desperate desire to have a baby came not from some internal biological drive, nor was it the result of thoughtful introspection and practical planning. It was my response to a hysterical society, a culture that stripped me of my intrinsic worth and told me point-blank that to fail to reproduce was to fail.”

“…there was no opposing view, no voice of reason, no organization or group to provide a dialogue.”

            On giving up the baby quest: “I stopped beating myself up. You’ve heard the old joke about hitting yourself on the head with a hammer because it feels so good when you stop? It does.”

            Writes the author, “I know what it is to obsessively grieve and despair because I did not fit in to what society deemed as the norm, what my peers and the media and even my government saw as acceptable and ‘fulfilled.’ I know what it feels like to be alone, to be different, to be isolated, to be ignored.”

            She begs the mass media to: “Have some characters who don’t even want kids and enjoy a happy life nevertheless. Have someone opt for an abortion occasionally rather than turn wistful and blushing about her pregnancy as if she drank a cup of Instant Mommy, as if all the problems of the world will be solved when she has her baby.

            “The fact that more than a million abortions are performed each year in this country is a testament that not every pregnancy is a wanted one. Writers should be free to portray real life and not the sugar and spice that conservative advertisers force upon them … tell the truth.”

            She describes taking part in a T.V. talk show on women and childbearing where she was the only dissenting voice in a panel of “talking uteruses” – including a woman who, with grown children in their 30s, had an egg-donor baby at 52.

            “Each and every one of them … had one goal and one goal only in her life: to produce an infant as quickly as possible, spending whatever money she had and all of the time it might take – even going into debt and emotional quicksand if necessary.”

            Lafayette’s opinions would be unacceptable in today’s media environment. The trajectory of the book leads towards a directive to embrace a “Child Free” identity – to form groups and make friendships with others similarly situated. It’s a great idea, but my concern is that this further segregates the Child Free/Childless from mainstream society, when what is needed is mutual respect, interaction and consideration. 

            The Child Free Network she began but seems to have distanced herself from has a spotty web site that seems to have drifted from the author’s original worthy aims, degenerating into snarky commentary about “breeders.” There are articles complaining about other people’s “noisy, stinky” kids.  This is certainly disappointing. Still, the original book is an honest, interesting read to balance today’s fertility-centric media message.

                                                            ###

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.

Therese Borchard's Beyond Blue

My interview in Therese Borchard’s blog, Beyond Blue, reached 3 million subscribers through Belief.net, and was picked up worldwide.  I argue that women without children wouldn’t feel so depressed if society were more accepting:

http://blog.beliefnet.com/beyondblue/2009/01/christina-gombar-an-interview.html#more

 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.  

            When her own infertility situation hit, it 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,

Infertility Is a Men’s Issue

  “I very much wanted to have lots of children,” says Patrick Tracey, author of Stalking Irish Madness, Searching for the Roots of my Family’s Schizophrenia – named one of Slate magazine’s Best Books of 2008. After an idyllic childhood as the youngest of five siblings, the first of two sisters succumbed to rapid-onset schizophrenia when he was eighteen. “One after the other. I realized that like my mother, I could be a carrier. Or worse, might go schizophrenic myself.”

Schizophrenia generally manifests by 30, and when Tracey cleared that bar, he began to think earnestly about marriage, and worry “fervently” about paternity. 

“Marriage would’ve suited me fine,” says Tracey, still single at 50. “But every woman I met was frantically running out of eggs.”

He tried to tell them he was not Daddy material, given his questionable gene bank and progressively heavy drinking.

“I was hit hard by my family’s collapse.” Before he graduated college, his mother died suddenly of a brain aneurysm, he thinks, spurred by “grief and loss”  soon after her youngest daughter was diagnosed with the hereditary illness.

“I felt there was not much point to life if something like schizophrenia–or a similar life-shattering tragedy–could just come along and take someone out.”

He became a serial monogamist, “An outgrowth of my commitment-phobia, itself an outgrowth of my fear of passing on this severe hereditary mental illness. I tried to disguise myself as a noble alcoholic savage.  Truly I was all over the place.” 

 It wasn’t until he hit bottom, alone, that he straightened out. Traveling to Ireland, he found the roots of schizophrenia in maternal malnutrition due to famine. While doing his research, he lived on a campsite where he observed families at close hand, with a raging storm of feelings.

“I am endlessly fascinated by families,” Tracey admits. “The way they interact, their dynamics, what makes them tick, why some find a measure of happiness where others do not, how some play a bad hand well and others with the best cards toss them away. My family was torn asunder, schizophrenia cast a shadow over us all, the sane obsessed that we might be carriers.”

Why didn’t he just find a nice girl and adopt?   “The ugly truth is that I was not fit to parent. Drinking was a form of self-laceration — survivor’s guilt, a way of going crazy myself every night — a mixed-up man’s way of crying.”  

Though eight years have passed since his last drink, at this stage of his life he’d rather help his ill sisters and his nephew – the sole offspring among his four siblings — than start his own family.
        But he feels he’s paid a big price for his choice. “I could’ve been a good father and family man if I hadn’t got lost in despair.  I’ve had some great relationships, and vent my paternal spleen through my nephew.  The care of him fell to me from the late 1980s through the 1990s, but I never dared spread my own seed.”

When he’s around a particularly well-adjusted family, he can’t help but feel like an outsider:  “Families gather with other families, and in Ireland they were out in force.”

But he felt less the odd man out when he saw himself reflected in the community. Every other village, he found, has a Bachelor Walk or some bachelor legend. “Ireland has a rich tradition of bachelorhood,” he discovered. Only the oldest sons were financially eligible for marriage, and they had to wait until they inherited the tiny potato patch. The younger brothers were either sent to the seminary, abroad or became bachelors.

Men’s Biological Clocks                    

            Ironically, Tracey learned, this primogeniture of oldest sons – who only inherited the family property at 50, when their own fathers died – is one of the major contributing factors to schizophrenia itself. Recent studies have linked the schizophrenia gene to a mutation in elderly sperm, detailed in the memoir. www.stalkingirishmadness.com.

 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.

 

Chronic Illness strained my marriage almost to the breaking point. I chose to stay; Julie took a different path when she and Steve hit the rocks.

Expiration Dates: A Short Story of Friendship and Money in Three Parts.

Featured in Rita Watson’s nationally syndicated Relationships blog. www.ritawatson.com

 “You know,” I confessed over our Cobb salads, “when I was cleaning out my closet, I thought of throwing out the dress I wore to your wedding.”  It was a cheap, pale green catalogue dress from my days as a freelancer, when I watched every penny while saving the down-payment that finally liberated us from our suffocating New York apartment. “That was the only time I wore it,” I said. “I was only holding onto it for sentimental reasons. I guess it’s O.K. to throw it out now.”  She agreed.

There was another reason I wanted to toss faded green dress — it signified bad times and I was ready to embrace a new future.

I was enviably thin in those pictures at Julie’s wedding. I smiled, but my eyes belied deep distress.  If anyone had asked me then if I thought my marriage would make it, I couldn’t have answered. 

At the time Julie married, I had just found my husband out in a betrayal. He’d run up debts that nearly canceled out all the money I’d been scrupulously saving and investing for house, baby, and our future.  His betrayal of trust wiped out years of dreams.

Somehow, putting that pale green dress in the bag for Good Will, gave me a new sense of purpose. I wanted to believe that I could put an end to the hurt that I experienced during those four years between Julie’s wedding and her divorce dinner. 

I watched her eyes and wondered if people would see pain in my own if I chose to end my marriage rather than stick it out?   My husband and I managed to get out of debt and heal the emotional wounds, but overwhelmed by the strain of working full time while battling my illness, I lost my health and any hopes for a normal life.   

Perhaps learning from my example, Julie chose another route, refusing to take a financial hit for a man. Since she and Dave had moved in together six years before, she’d switched jobs several times, doubling her salary to afford the modest home they’d purchased in their third year of marriage. 

Dave, on the other hand, was in the same job, earning the same money, so they could barely afford their new mortgage payments. Despite her constant encouragements, which degenerated into nagfests, Dave did not jump-start his career, see a therapist, get tested for a range of physical maladies, lift a finger around the house bought with only Julie’s money, learn to balance the checkbook, shop or cook, or get a car so Julie wouldn’t have to drive him everywhere, as if he were the teenage son she never had.

Julie tired of screaming. As she explained over our salads, she was basically a happy, peaceful, loving person. Under the current circumstances, she could no longer act kindly towards her husband. “I just see myself as an embittered old hag at 50. I want to get out while I’m still young enough to meet someone else.” 

But I was worried about how she would manage. Under my fiscal guidelines, she and Dave could barely afford to run a house together. She claimed she could do it on her own, for at least a month or so. Then she’d get a roommate. 

Two weeks after our divorce dinner, Dave was still in the house. He couldn’t find a place he could afford. Julie dropped hints; I offered a loan to hasten his departure. I’d lent her money before, for her down payment, and she’d paid it back in full and in a timely fashion.     

“All relationships have expiration dates,” she announced philosophically at our next lunch.

“You’re getting a roommate soon, right?” I said, handing her the check.

But month after month went by, and no roommate, and no loan repayment. I knew she needed time on her own, without the additional stress of sharing her home with a stranger. But I couldn’t help noticing she had money for new clothes to cheer herself up, for entertaining her young co-workers from the city, for buying wedding gifts for people she hardly knew.

(End of Part II)

  

A Short Story of Money and Friendship in Three Parts

Featured in Rita Watson’s nationally syndicated Relationships blog: www.ritawatson.com.

When my best friend Julie told me she was splitting with her husband, it didn’t come as a complete surprise.  She’d sounded uncharacteristically tense when we talked on the phone over the past few months. We hadn’t had an in-person heart to heart since the winter before, when on her 41st birthday, she talked in desperate tones about facing the future with her husband, Dave. 

Since then she had stopped complaining about her husband, hardly mentioned him at all. Our telephone conversations skittered over the surface of things – updates of her hectic job and crowded commuting days, contrasting with self-deprecating anecdotes drawn from my less eventful life – which went from a corporate whirlwind to a first-time suburban housewife – thanks to a relapse of a chronic illness about which I am often in denial. Nonetheless, courtesy of my company’s short-term disability insurance, I felt a mixture of childlike glee and adult guilt at my first laid back summer in decades.

With the anticipation of a child going on a favorite play date, I awaited seeing Julie in person for the first time in months.  When I flung open the door to embrace her, standing before me was a woman with a pinched, tormented face.  Her emaciated frame said it all before she delivered her news. It was painful to see her lovely, happy-go-lucky self suppressed; I was glad she was exiting a torturous situation.

She told me of her plans to divorce just before we sat down to watch a dance recital held in the Riverside Cathedral, whose majestic grey stone silhouette dominates the western shore of the upper west side of Manhattan. Four springs before, Julie and Dave were married just a few blocks east, in another great Cathedral, on a small budget but in great peripheral splendor, in one of the chapels of St. John the Divine. 

Four years before, I had shopped with Julie at Laura Ashley for her wedding dress, observed her arrange the entire event elegantly but cheaply — negotiating with chaplains and cajoling florists and caterers to offer their services as wedding gifts. I’d seen her research, book, and single-handedly pay for the honeymoon.  

The misty weather that day suited a ceremony in the dark cathedral. Outside, the spring foliage was bright green and new, the trees just bursting into flower.  She’d instructed the minister that Children and the Will of God be mentioned during the service. To honor her husband’s Scottish heritage, bagpipers played Amazing Grace at the exit, and the sounds moistened our eyes. As if on cue, one of the peacocks that prance around the rectory burst into plumage: a good omen. 

But four years later, as I look back, I see it was a false omen.

At the reception, as dry ice clouded the stage, eastern flutes piped over the soundtrack, and the dance performance began. The dance’s theme centered on the ancient Greek legend of the Minotaur — the half-human, half-bull god who, the program notes explained, “represents the collective dark roots of humanity that have been denied, repressed and locked away.” 

It was a bit too obvious an analogy to the realities of marriage Julie and I both knew too well — realities white-washed by images of happily ever after, Baby Gap and Range Rovers. We both knew what it was like to feel, within the framework of marriage, like the Minotaur, his dual nature a shame to be hidden by the ruling gods.

Julie and I didn’t have to talk much about the problems that killed her marriage, or the ones mine barely survived. We’d dissected them endlessly over the course of our eight year friendship, analyzing the challenge of asserting our feminist selves within the framework of marriage, deconstructing each power struggle in detail, all the while looking forward to the happy resolution when career, husband, home and child fell into place.

After the performance I drove us up to the suburbs where we now lived, and bought my friend dinner. The end of a marriage called for a solemn observance of its own. (End of Part One)