Waiting for Daisy
In 2008, after two years of failing to make a child organically, we learned the doom Kathy had already been feeling for more than a year was justified: I was diagnosed with male-factor infertility. Our only real chance to move forward would be in vitro fertilization. We couldn’t afford it; we couldn’t afford not to do it. One way we tried to work through that diagnosis, our anger, and our options was to start a secret infertility blog, “Less Than a Million.” This post and what comments from 2008 that are attached to it come from that blog.—gb
Last week, I read Peggy Orenstein’s Waiting for Daisy, a memoir of Orenstein’s struggles with infertility.
This is a very engaging book. Orenstein is funny, smart, unflinchingly honest about the ways in which infertility altered her behavior to the point that she almost lost her marriage in the process of creating that coveting baby. Orenstein is a feminist, and through much of her twenties and thirties had little interest in having children—opting to focus on her writing career, in which she found more and more success as the years passed. Like many of us, she was wary of the traditional role of mother, convinced that women who chose to be stay-at-home-moms were forsaking their inheritance in the women’s movement:
Nearly all of my girlfriends were having children, and one by one…they’d dropped out of the workforce. The minds that once produced sparkling prose or defended abused children were now obsessed with picking the right preschool or competing to throw the most elaborate Pocahontas birthday party. Sometimes they seemed to me like something out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Who were these women and what had they done with my friends? Sure, a few were content, but most, if not exactly unhappy, seemed trapped—fretting over what they’d do when the kids were older, worried that they’d never escape the stroller set. I was disappointed by how readily they’d fallen on the sword of traditional motherhood, how reluctant they were to assert their needs, how loath to rock the boat of their husbands’ careers. They weren’t the role models I wanted—needed—them to be. These were, after all, women I loved and respected. If they couldn’t make it all work, how could I?
After Orenstein was diagnosed with and successfully treated for breast cancer (at the alarmingly young age of 35), she and her husband, Steven Okazaki, finally decided the time was right for a baby. But they were confronted with what has become a well-worn epiphany: They’d waited too long. The memoir chronicles the obsession that is all too familiar to infertile couples: the charting of temperatures, the peeing on OPKs and pregnancy tests, the joyless sex. Orenstein’s and Okazaki’s journey would eventually take them virtually all over the map of assisted reproductive technology—including IUI and IVF with and without donor eggs—and adoption, before they finally ended up with their daughter Daisy, six years after they began their quest to have a child.
Orenstein’s story is richer for the ways it layers the personal with the cultural, laying out the ongoing ambivalence women in our society feel toward nurturing their personal potential and building families at the same time. Her story will resonate with anyone who has gone through the agony of infertility—the lapses of rational thinking (Orenstein insists on using fertility drugs despite the fact that these drugs might increase her risk of recurrent breast cancer), the willingness to sacrifice marital harmony in the name of reproductive success, the tunnel-vision of needing to attain this one goal over and above anything else, as well as the search for some kind of grace that will allow for contentment, growth, and love despite the pain and frustration of childlessness.
