Thank you to everyone who commented on my loss. I totally wasn't expecting it. It happened a long time ago, 18 months ago now, and I sit here, pregnant, knowing how lucky I am to have been given another chance.
I wrote a long post about this all and typepad collapsed and it all vanished, which might be a good thing actually now that I come to think of it. So all that remains is my thanks for your support, as always it is very precious and it surprised me.
I loved this book. I read it in two days and I already want to read it again. I loved Emilia's character and her friends and her whole world, even the evil ex-wife. I'm hunting down other Ayelet Waldman titles now, but first the questions for the book tour:
The other day my aunt told me about an acquaintance who is pregnant after having kidney stones at the end of her first pregnancy which resulted in an emergency Cesarean and a long stay in hospital for her and her baby. Apparently this second pregnancy is putting pressure on her kidneys and they doctors are worried about possible kidney failure. It is an awful scenario but I am ashamed to say that all I could think was, 'She fell pregnant easily. She has a child. She's already 5 months pregnant with her second. Things will probably be fine.' So much as I hate to admit it, deep down I do have a hierarchy of pain in my mind even though I agree with Getupgrrl's comment about the futility of the pain olympics, no-one can say their pain is more than anyone else's because you don't feel the other person's pain. I lost a pregnancy at 19 weeks and it was awful and at the same time it was just life. You get up, you brush your teeth, you eat lunch, life goes on and people forget and it's only now and again that I feel tearful. I have a friend who also lost a pregnancy at 5 months and she was on anti-depressants, she cried in her Pilate's classes, she cried in church and she refused to go off the pill for almost two years afterwards because she couldn't bear the pain of losing another child. Was her pain more than mine? I don't think so, I honestly don't. I think we just experienced it differently. I don't think we can judge other people's pain. Everyone feels it, people just express it in different ways. It is simply my bitterness that makes me discount someone's else's tough experience because I think I have gone through much worse and maybe that is what Emelia feels, that she has survived hell and her friend has only seen the gates.
I thought Emelia's interactions with William were very realistic. She has just lost a child and she has to look after a child she does not get with but she does it for the sake of her love for her husband. I think it must have taken tremendous emotional courage to go and pick up William at school and to spend time with him every Wednesday. It shows she is making an effort. I think I would have cancelled those Wednesday afternoons, I wouldn't have been able to cope with being in such a child-full environment. During the book her relationship with William deepens and she even speaks to the manager of Le Pain Quotidien to find out if he can make a pink dairy-free cupcake. She begins to get know William on her own terms and I thought this showed a spark of character which appealed to me and which was despite her tremendous grief.
I would have felt the same as Emilia felt about the walk to remember in the beginning, a bit dubious about the usefulness of it all. I think in the end it was healing to Emilia and it helped her to come to terms with the lack of perfection in her family and possibly it also helped her to let go a little of the grief she was carrying around with her. Despite this I am wary of commemorating my grief in my community. Perhaps it is just a certain English embarrassment at expressing my feelings publicly. I found that in the beginning my community did help me to deal with my grief. I received an enormous amount of phone calls and women telling me unexpected stories of their losses. I still get support from people I would never have expected it from and it means a lot to me. I think what bothers me is people not mentioning it, as if it's over and it's all dealt with or people saying stupid things like 'it's just a miscarriage. There is no such thing as 'just a miscarriage, you lose a child, you lose hopes and dreams and there is no guarantee that you will ever achieve these hopes and dreams. I think it is very difficult for people to acknowledge grief as you never know what the other person is comfortable with, you have to be extremely sensitive and life sometimes moves fast and something tactless gets said in the heat of the conversation. What touches me is when someone will acknowledge that I could be hurt by something that was said, even if it is just a glance at me to see if I'm ok.
And now I am off to read other people's answers as I know there are some excellent writers and thinkers out there who capture the essence of a subject much better than I ever do. Why not join me and follow the link below?
Intrigued by the idea of a book tour and want to read more about Love and Other Impossible Pursuits? Hop along to more stops on the Barren Bitches Book Tour by visiting the master list at http://stirrup-queens.blogspot.com/. Want to come along for the next tour? Sign up begins today for tour #7 (Happiness Sold Separately by Lolly Winston) and all are welcome to join along . All you need is a book and blog.
I found Waiting for Daisy very hard to read. It wasn't the style, Peggy Orenstein writes very easily. Perhaps it was reading it while I was doing an IVF cycle and reading about someone else fail was that much harder. What I found interesting was that my reactions are very different from Ms Orensteins' and it showed me that every person has a different experience. Even someone who has gone through infertility will not tell it like I would and I don't tell it like someone else does. We all have our own stories.
And on to the questions ...
Very early in the book Peggy says something that every IF has thought at least once: "what do you do, think the first time you're ready but your body says no?" Outside of when you got your infertility diagnosis (because that could have been many cycles in), how did you feel that FIRST time your body said no?
My body has always been fine. I’ve never had a stunning figure but it always functioned well, never got sick and was strong. Now that it is struggling with infertility and diabetes seems to have got tacked on, I feel like I’ve been completely sidewsiped. As if I have woken up suddenly to find myself in someone else’s body and the worst is that I look so healthy and like a poster for childbearing womanhood, breasts and wide hips and all. I feel like my body is trying to tell me something and I have no clue what it is saying, as if it is speaking a totally foreign language. Even when the first doctor said I would have problems falling pregnant, I still thought, “No, my body is strong, it will be ok.” I just could not believe that my body would actually let me down completely and block something that I wanted so much. Before I had always been able to fight through and achieve things, it was just a question of application. Now after years of thinking and questioning and researching I have to accept that this is not a question of application, this might just be my reality. Or it might not. Maybe I do have to persevere. That is what is tough. Is your body saying, “No,” or is it saying, “Not this time,”?
Peggy struggles through the book with questions of heritage, genes, and religion. How important is it for you and your partner to have a child that is biologically yours and why? What feelings go into that decision/choice for you right now if you are still trying to have a child ?
This is something I struggle with enormously. I grew up with a very strong connection to my family, how they had arrived where we lived, where they came from, how my great grandfathers drove, what my great grandmother called my mother, how my grandfather rode for 3 hours after work to go and visit my grandmother when they were courting. My husband is also very proud of his family’s history and his culture. Hours are spent discussing who is related to who and whether someone looks more like this side of the family or that side of the family. We both essentially come from small communities where everyone discusses genes like other communities discuss sports results. My husband and I also look very different; I am fair with blue eyes and he is dark. People say, “Your children are going to be a beautiful mixture.” I look at all this and think, “How do we find our child? How do we find a child who is resilient enough to handle all this family gene pool talk and the mixture of cultures we live in and still find his or her own roots?” And like everyone else, I want a child with my husband. I want to look at this baby and see my husband’s gentleness and my family’s short little legs, I want to see us combined. I want to see our families go on, I want to see my mother’s love of dancing and my mother-in-law’s strength and my dad’s sense of humour and my father-in-law’s funny walk in our kids. I want children who are all mine, mine, mine, who I’ve protected in my womb, who I’ve known since the very beginning. I don’t know if I will and I know I have to let go of all these things to move on but it is so hard, it is letting go of a world I know and love, even if there is another wonderful world waiting for me.
On the bottom of page 62, Peggy muses that she thought Steven was getting her pregnant. If you're undergoing treatments, who do you think gets the person pregnant? The owner of the other gametes (whether they're your partner or donor sperm/egg)? The RE?
Me. I think if I get pregnant, no matter where the egg or the sperm come from, it is me getting pregnant. After that, there is the question of whose child it is and there, I think the answer is a combination of all the partners but unfortunately for the getting pregnant part, I take full responsibility and walk around wear the hair shirt when it fails.
And to read everyone's else stories and opinions, check out the organiser of this all:
Aaaah, it's 5 March and I have to post my book review. Oh well, here goes.
I love P.D. James. I love her character, Commander Dalgliesh, in her detective novels and I love her writing style which is very descriptive yet feels quite masculine in its emotional distance.
I would never have read The Children of Men if it hadn't been for the Barren Bitches. I really enjoyed it, although I don't read much science fiction and was surprised by how easy it was to read. What did I think of it? In a nutshell, I think it does acknowledge the pain of infertility but this is definitely a secondary theme to the main one of totalitarianism and how it can become very popular in a time of crisis. And if I move out of the nutshell, what did I think of it? On to the questions ...
1. Do you think this was based on James' own experiences with infertility? Also, what did you think of the fact that Julian was a religious person and became pregnant. Is religion her solution, as it were, to infertility? Which is probably two questions...
I thought it was very interesting that P.D. James made the first parents in twenty-five years both religious. I don't know why she did this, I also noticed it when reading the story and wondered about its significance. Perhaps she is suggesting that there is a mysterious side to having children, a side we cannot control, a side that is linked to a life-giving source in the universe. However, if this is the case, is she saying that people stopped having children because of their distance from this life-giving source? I don't think so but then why make Julian and Luke the only practising Christians in the story? Mmmm ..... It does seem like she is suggesting that this alpha baby is a miracle, like the virgin birth in a way. This baby is the messiah in a way, a baby who has been awaited for a quarter of a century and who is expected to bring hope. But why does does this baby's mother have to be a Christian in a non-believing world? Why didn't she make Julian an agnostic for example? What do you all think?
And as for this being based on James' experience of infertility? There I have no idea whatsoever. Ok, I have a little bit of an idea. James' husband was in and out of mental hospitals although they did have two daughters. Perhaps her husband's illness meant that James stopped herself from having more children because of the circumstances but would have liked more? It might be possible but I think her portrayal of an infertile world could be imagined by anyone. I did not pick up any references that hinted at a personal experience of infertility. Did anyone else?
2. Would you be able to go through all that Julian went through in order to have her baby in peace and safety?
I thought Julian became more passive once she was pregnant. In the first half of the book she was a very active character, making contact with Theo, persuading him to come to the meeting with the Five Fishes and then following up on that meeting. I hadn't thought of her going through a lot to have her baby in peace and safety but I guess she was still sticking to her guns and doing what she felt was right. I think she was following what she felt at this point, following her instincts as a pregnant mother and I think I would definitely have done the same. That is one thing I think I have learned from this whole experience; to trust my own instincts and to follow them even if they seem wacky. I ask a lot more questions now, I take time to think and often I do what I think even if it goes against friends and doctors. I think I am a lot more assertive now and I accept less crap.
3. Which male character in the book would you choose to repopulate Britain, if you chose the father of the alpha baby and why? And if you could widen the pool to include anyone in the world, which man would you choose and why?
Ok, this is my question so I feel obliged to answer it. Once I had sent it off, I started to think about what makes a father and I thought that it didn't actually matter who the genetic father was, what was important was how the baby was brought up and that is what Julian is trying to protect with her flight from Xan. When I wrote the question, I was thinking about how arrogant and power-hungry Rolf was and how he wasn't an ideal father. Then he left and and I began to consider Theo as the father. Theo changed a lot in the second half of the book, he began to accept and to foster connections with other people after fleeing them for so much of his life. Would he make a good father? Who knows, especially after he took Xan's place. What does make a good parent? And I think it is like all roles, there are probably days when you are great and days when you are not. In the end, though I would have chosen Julian and Miriam to bring up the child, the men all seem to be fighting their own demons, even Luke seems a bit absent and off in his own world.
4. What do you think is the significance of the fact that the two people who are finally able to conceive are both considered "flawed?" (Luke had epilepsy and Julian had a deformed hand)
I liked that part of the novel, that the two people who end up having a baby are not perfect. It gave me hope in the unpredictable side of life. I think James was making a comment on totalitarian societies and trying to make "the perfect baby", that things can be overlooked for a superficial reason and that the true value of things lies much deeper. I think it is also a comment on control, no matter how much you try to control something, there are always factors you cannot squash into a box. It is part of the beauty of life but in the case of infertility, it can also be part of the pain of life. I think you have to trust that there is always a flipside; on one side there are the inexplicable factors but on the other there are the possibilities for unexpected joy. Very pollyanna. Last question coming up.
5. As a global epidemic, infertility creates an environment of desperation and chaos. How do you find this global reaction similar to your own personal reaction to infertily?
I grew up believing in an order in life; that if you had enough faith, if you lived a healthy life, if you found a balance in your life, everything would be ok. Infertility has shown me that this is not the case. You can strive and sweat and have faith until you are blue in the face but sometimes life is just like it is and this is unbearably hard to accept. I am desperate, I frequently feel desperate and hear how like a crazy woman I sound to others but I would do a lot of things I previously thought unacceptable to have a child. Infertility has also disturbed the whole order of my life. I thought I would have a child and be part of that community of mothers I see around me. Instead I am stuck in the middle, between friends who are going out and looking for a soulmate, friends who have little kids and friends who are concentrating on their careers. I fall in no category. And what do I do? I have no idea, I hop from idea to idea, from activity to activity trying to find some structure and meaning. And would a child give me that? Probably not but it is what I want, deep within me. I think. When I feel ok, I feel less desparate and scattered but when a treatment doesn't work and I am confronted with the black hole of infertility, I do fall into desperation and chaos and at that point I would do almost anything to fall pregnant. James does show this response to desperation and chaos quite well with the evangelical speakers who people flock to and the approval of the Penal Colony. When people are desperate, they cling to whatever will make them feel better. You have to be a strong person to stick to your personal beliefs. It is a strength I see in the infertility blogs and a strength I think is hugely underestimated by others. We are all struggling to make order out of chaos and find hope in desperation and I think we are doing an admirable job.
I have been thinking about adoption for a few months now and when Stirrup Queens suggested the Barren Bitches Book Brigade with Elizabeth Swire Falker’s The Ultimate Insider’s Guide to Adoption as the first book, I jumped at the chance to indulge my inner bookworm and infoholic little heart in one fell swoop.
I have broken my report down under a few headings, it’s a throwback to school I guess.
Did it provide the information I was looking for?
Firstly, I live in Europe and this book deals with the adoption process for people in the United States so there were lots of technical details which were not covered for me but I was expecting this and I think the information should be easy to find once I start contacting government departments and agencies. The section on domestic adoption in the United States seems comprehensive and the as the author adopted her son through a domestic adoption and is an attorney dealing with adoption, she seems to know and understand the whole process very well. The section on international adoption is slightly smaller but general information as well as a summary of the process for some of the more common places like China and Russia is given.
Aside from information concerning adoptions in the U.S., there was information on more general topics, such as the age of the baby you would like to adopt. I had always thought that I would like a very young baby but Ms. Falker has some thought-provoking points on the short-term realities of this decision. She talks about the strain that sleep deprivation adds to the adjustment process when you get home with your baby. A toddler or older baby already has a sleep pattern established and is not waking up every few hours screaming to be fed.
There is also an interesting section on breastfeeding an adoption child. Ms. Falker took birth control pills, to mimic a pregnancy, and then a drug to get her body to produce milk. She also pumped regularly and stored her pumped milk in the deep freeze to get her milk production going and to have a supply when her child arrived. She does, however, stress that this is not the only way to encourage milk production and that it is possible to avoid both the birth control pills and the milk-production drug. You need to talk to your doctor and decide on a course of action you are comfortable with. I had never realised that it was possible to breastfeed if one adopted a baby and I liked Ms. Falker’s comment that breastfeeding helped her to feel better about her body which was unable to carry a child to term but could still nourish a baby after it was born and how this restored some of her faith in her own body. I have always thought I would breastfeed and to be able to breastfeed a baby I adopted would be wonderful. That said, I know it is difficult to breastfeed, and Ms. Falker does not deny this either, recommending a lactation consultant in the beginning. It is just nice to know that I could try the breastfeeding route. Whether it works or not is another story, but hey, I’ve been done that road a few times now.
Under international adoption, there is a wealth of information on travelling from booking the tickets as cheaply as possible, to what to take for you and your new child and the type of hotel room to book. The booking information is pretty much common sense if you have travelled a bit but the information on medicines and clothes to take is very interesting. She recommends taking clothes that you can dump on the trip back, like sweatpants and tops from a reasonably priced store, if you need to reduce weight in your luggage. I liked the practical advice on what clothes to bring for your baby – two outfits a day for five or so days. The more I read, the more I thought, "I could do that." Ms. Falker’s style is always encouraging and reassuring, she breaks things down into manageable and logical chunks and has a very "just do it" attitude.
The most useful information
A phrase that stood out was Ms. Falker’s assertion that adoption is guaranteed if you stick it out. I found this very reassuring after having read frightening statistics on the number of applications for adoption vs. the number of successful adoptions.
Another piece of information that stuck with me was that mothers who are giving their babies up for adoption are mothers in crisis. It is unrealistic to expect a perfect family background, otherwise why would the child be up for adoption? Ms. Falker discussed this point under domestic adoptions, warning future parents about having demands that are possibly unreasonable and which upon further thought, could be relaxed a little. For the question, would you accept a birth mother who smoked, she points out that lot of our mothers smoked if we were born in the 1970’s, and we are ok (I am short buy hey, this could be smoking or it could be genetics as both my grandparents are tiny). I had never seen the birth mother’s situation described as a one of crisis but it made sense. Ms. Falker has a knack of explaining things simply and logically and showing you another way of looking at the story.
She also talks about the importance of research in all areas of the adoption. She gave an interesting example where she and her husband were asked whether they would accept a birth mother who had been diagnosed bipolar or a woman with a personality disorder. She and her husband made the decision but after talking to medical specialists, they reversed the decision and chose the birthmother they had initially refused. She recommends talking to people who have adopted, reading widely and speaking to as many experts as you feel is necessary.
Information not covered
I would have liked more information on the challenges faced by children who spend time in orphanages or foster homes before being adopted, and on bonding with a newly adopted child. There is also very little about adopting an older child. Adopting a child with special needs is touched on and Ms. Falker recommends speaking to medical experts.
She talks a little about bonding under international adoption where she recommends holing up in the hotel with your husband and your baby so you can get to know each other, but otherwise the information on this topic is a little thin. She does recommend some books on bonding.
There does not seem to be any information on what happens in a worst case scenario, if the adoption goes wrong. Perhaps this is because Ms. Falker takes a very positive, very upbeat approach but a little information on this would have useful.
Other information provided
There is a huge section on funding an adoption, both domestic and international, and Ms. Falker speaks about turning to the foster system as a possibility in this section. There seems to be an extensive table on possible tax deductions for the U.S. and there are several pages regarding different adoption laws broken down by State.
There is also a large section on one of the more frightening parts of the application process: the home study. I skimmed it as I am not sure how much of what she covers would be required in a European home study. She does provide a comprehensive section with advice on everything from child-proofing your house to being honest with your social worker, which I did find interesting. Whether you feel like talking about your student drunk driving charge or not, tell your social worker, says Ms. Falker. If your social worker has the full story, they can better advise or help you but if you withhold information this is only going to harm the relathionship and your application.
I am not sure whether a European social worker would expect security on plugs or not. I heard about a couple who went to Haiti to adopt a baby and when asked what they would like to drink, said, "Do you have any champagne?" Somehow I doubt childproof plugs would have come up in their home study. On the other hand, I could be wrong and they might have childproof plugs and a childproof lock on their fridge.
This a thick book with a lot of information and yet I still wanted to know more about certain topics. It shows how hard it is to put down everything. It is actually impossible to expect to find all the information you need in one book but this is a good common sense guide to U.S. adoption in particular and adoption in general.
The importance of research and preparation is stressed; use your skills you have gained in life, she seems to be saying and approach this as you would any other project or goal and you will succeed. This makes a nice change from fertility treatments where you never know the outcome.
The appendices to the book are extensive and full of addresses, contacts and books to read for further information so this book seems to be a good introduction, which mentions most aspects of adopting and points you towards other sources for more detail.
