Reality Chick

New York Times Op-Ed columnist Judith Warner raises objections to Americans hiring impoverished Indian women as cut-rate surrogate mothers. Her article and and my response can be read at:

http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/outsourced-wombs/

My take:

• Judith Warner launches a long overdue discussion about the fertility industry and adoption complex.

Neither worked out for me, so I am qualified to speak out from first-hand experience. After twenty years of struggling with this issue, I’m finally accepting of my life situation. Unfortunately, society isn’t accepting of me.

When celebrities are showcased having babies in their forties, then fifties, society gradually sees this as normal, even desirable. Slowly, those of us who can’t have children easily and naturally feel pressured into the outer limits.

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. The perception of the rest of the players needed to make the village that nurtures the child is at least as important as that of the young women trying to have families themselves.

Several responders here suggested people like me just get on with our lives, and I am. But when every female newscaster touts her children on air, every 47-year old actress is having twins, every movie story line winds up with the birth of a child — it leaves those for whom the baby story didn’t come true feeling like we’ve done something wrong to wind up as we are.

We can’t do this all on our own. Right now, parenthood is the only game in town. There are absolutely no role models, no stories, no articles on childlessness —except on how to change that state. Nothing protects us from public approbation, like the bombardment of suggestions to take in one of the world’s needy, regardless of our own confidence in our ability to do so.

Link to the Newsweek article: http://www.newsweek.com/id/74385/page/2 and read the long, long list of comments from parents whose foster/foreign kids suffered from Attachment Disorder. Under anonymity, many adoptive parents tell how this makes their lives a misery, and say they wish they’d never done it.

A few years ago I read a story about then-54 year old, former Good Morning America host Joan Lunden, whose husband had surrogate twins, using the egg from a third woman. Lunden declared, “I want readers to know this is absolutely O.K. If they’re not her eggs, they’re not her baby.”

I’m not a celebrity, I don’t have a platform like Joan Lunden, but I’d like to float the message somehow that It’s Absolutely O.K. not to do a third world adoption, Foster Care, or a fertility treatment that seems wrong for you on a gut level.

But society, and the media especially, needs to start getting the message across that adults without children are O.K. just as they are.

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. ~~~

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

Succumbing to the flu between Christmas and New Year’s, my therapeutic T.V. was ruined by Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Now I was endowed with Parody Perception: current events sledge-hammered through dialogue: “It’s the sixties! People don’t just want music, they want a message!” Exaggerated effect: oldsters calling a harmless love ballad “devil music.” The drug/rehab/redemption story arc: star repeatedly warned-off /roped in by drug-doing band-mate happened upon indulging behind closed door. Parental estrangement: future star accidentally kills brother, father never misses an opportunity to declare “The wrong kid died!”

I sat down to a sick-night’s viewing of Shine, the story of schizophrenic concert pianist David Helfgott. I remember being impressed when it came out in ’96, but now its hackneyed soul was laid bare. Several Cox clichés appear virtually intact: crazy artist frolicking on trampoline (Look! I’m a free spirit!) inspiring love in all whose path he crosses, despite leaving bath tub running over hostess’s parquet floors;tearful reunion with Orthodox Jewish Holocaust Survivor Dad, whose movie-long mantra had been “I Don’t Have a Son!”

Painful and embarrassing to witness Sir John Gielgud exclaim, “The Rach III! [Rachmaninoff piano concerto] The Rach III has killed people!” And of course, the bio-picee’s sweat-drenched public nervous breakdown, depicted as he plays said concerto onstage in crucial competition. We are never told whether he won – it’s the Anguish that counts.

Jeffrey Rush won an Oscar for his gimicky Rain Man-derived performance, though through most of the film Helfgott was played by the fine young Australian actor Noah Taylor. As Kate Winslet declared on the comedy series Extras: “Best way to win an Oscar – play a Mental!”

Next my remote landed on Backbeat, the 1994 biopic of the “Fifth Beatle” Stuart Sutcliffe, who left the band in pre-mega Hamburg days for an art school scholarship and a girl named Astrid (typical dialogue: “Cynthia [Lennon] vants babies. John vants de vorld.”) SS repeatedly tears apart rooms, immaculately replicated in Dewey Cox’s penchant for ripping sinks from walls whenever he has a tiff with his wife-of-the-moment. (Porcelain is color-coded to indicate decade — orange for seventies, purple for eighties). Here bio-picee collapses with fatal brain hemorrhage, just as his genius as a painter is being discovered.

The only thing in this film that survived Parody Perception is the fact that Astrid was responsible for the Beatle mop-top comb-down. I know someone who at a cocktail party met someone who invented the hand-held hair dryer – a General Electric engineer accidentally reversed the vacuum engine in an industrial suction tube. Amazing how major world events come about.

On to Dreamgirls, which I only caught part of, but enough to see Eddie Murphy drop trou onstage and die an untimely death (Rick James, Marvin Gaye). Even my viewing of The Queen was affected: Tony Blair to Cherie, “This country will never be a Republic. The people wont’ stand for it!”

If you want to steer clear of the clichés, Netflix Control, the recent bio-pic of Joy Division’s lead singer/songwriter Ian Curtis, who, yes, committed suicide in 1980 just as the band was breaking worldwide. Based on an unsentimental memoir by his wife Deborah (who in a sole instance of Parody Pic story line, burdens young genius with baby.) True, an epileptic fit aborts a stage appearance, but the camera stresses less the spastic tremors than another band member’s deadpan reaction: bassist Peter Hook reaches into the convulsing man’s pocket to retrieve his cigarettes, lights up, waits for the fit to pass.

In Backbeat, the bio-picee suffers a jealousy-inspired paint-splattering rage just before death. But he and Astrid get to make the nice and are cooing lovingly again just before he grabs his temples and crashes to the floor forever.

But in Control, we witness the misogynistic blast of Ian Curtis’s final temper tantrum as his panicked wife did, and are left not with the mythologized genius of musical history, but the ill and crazed man she was trying to divorce.

No redemptive, forgiving narrative arc here, just the cruelty of a wife finding her husband hanging from a kitchen wash line. And afterward, nary a platitude from his shocked and angry band mates. (Who in case you didn’t know, went on to form megaband New Order.) ~~~