by Sally Quinn
It was back to Sharon, shrink to the troubled and needy. My takeaway from a few sessions with her: I had to decide how important this was to me, what I was hoping to gain and what I was willing to give up. And, most important, I had to have a bottom line. I stopped taking my birth control pills that night. I thought about not telling Ben, but I really didn’t want to have his baby if he didn’t want it. I didn’t want to trick him into it. I had to make him realize that my happiness was his happiness (like the old Jamaican fisherman once said, “a happy wife is a happy life”) and that I was going to be totally miserable if I couldn’t have a child, our child.
Ben decided to take care of the birth control situation himself. For the next two years, though we were happy and working hard, I had an ache in my gut. It only got worse. I was seeing Sharon once a week. I couldn’t bear the idea of losing Ben, but as I got closer to forty I began to panic. I talked it through with my closest friends. Some said I should hold out for a child, that I would never be complete without one, that it was the greatest joy of their lives. Others pointed to so many successful women who had been childless and had accomplished great things in their lives. I could be one of those.
What finally got to me was that Ben’s older son and his wife announced she was pregnant. We went to visit them and took them to dinner. Ben, proud and pleased, toasted the two of them. I’ll never forget what he said: that it was so wonderful that they were having a baby because “it was such an important part of the human experience.” His words were like a knife in my heart.
I could barely get through the dinner I was so upset, and I really laid into him when we got back to our room. If it was such an important part of the human experience, I said, with not a little sarcasm, how was it that he was willing to deny that to me? How cruel could anyone be to someone he professed to love? He was pretty much tongue-tied. He really didn’t have a good answer.
I hardly spoke to him on the way home and couldn’t wait to talk to Sharon the next day. Yep. It was time for my bottom line. Here’s what I told him. I said I was going to have a baby and it was either going to be his or somebody else’s. He had a choice. I also told him that again I had a candidate in mind and I wasn’t talking about artificial insemination, either.
That focused his mind. Again he railed at me, attacking me for betraying him and not keeping my word. He was right, but I was resolute. I meant it and he knew it. I also said I wanted him to be part of the child’s life. I didn’t want an absentee father. He gave in and agreed on one condition. He was tired. He didn’t want to get up for midnight feedings. He wanted us to be able to go out without having to scramble for a babysitter, and he wanted to have some time alone without always worrying about who would watch the baby. He wanted me to promise we would always have round-the-clock help, if needed. He could afford it. He had earned it. I, of course, agreed immediately, not letting on how thrilled I was. I didn’t want having a baby to hurt our marriage. Our relationship was too precious to me to let anything change it for the worse. I knew I could do both, be a good wife and a good mother. I wasn’t even thinking about my career at that point, I was so focused on my mission.
In reality, I wasn’t even thinking about Ben or seeing his side of things. I realize now how terribly selfish I was not to be more understanding about how he was feeling. My God, I was asking a man who was almost sixty, who had helped raise three children of his own and four stepchildren, to embark on another marathon. Of course he had reservations. He didn’t want to be an old man for his child. He was afraid he wouldn’t be a good enough father or be able to do the things most fathers did with their children, afraid he would die and leave a child fatherless at a young age. He was especially worried about having a son. Ben was so vital, so alive, so energetic. His passion was working out in the woods. His ax, his chain saw, his jeep, and his tractor were his favorite toys. He wanted to share those with a son, if our child was to be a boy. What if he wasn’t physically able? He was also concerned about us. He was blissfully content with just the two of us. He knew he had made the right decision by marrying me. What if a child came between us? At this point he was the sole focus of my attention and love. He knew what happened when a woman had a baby. That baby became her first priority. Period. He was really afraid of losing me. I think in some way, once he agreed to have a baby he went into a period of grief, of mourning for our lost perfect relationship.
I wasn’t thinking of any of that. My need to have a child was all-consuming, a driving force, the most powerful urge I have ever had. I’m so sorry now that I wasn’t as thoughtful about Ben’s feelings as I should have been. I wish I had more fully understood his trepidation much earlier. In the end, I had gotten my way, and only later did I see how much he thought he was giving up.
* * *
Prince Charles and Diana’s wedding was coming up in July of 1981. I was asked by Style to go to London to cover it, but I said no. I didn’t want to be away from Ben and miss a chance to get pregnant. That July we went to West Virginia. We had a beautiful, romantic picnic on the rocks that jutted out into the middle of the Cacapon River. It was a magical day, sunny and dry. We lazed on the rocks for hours, making love, drinking wine, and listening to the sound of the river cascading over the big stones. I never wanted it to end. I felt perfectly happy. I wasn’t even thinking of the future, the baby, anything else but the present moment. I just felt so embraced by Ben and his love for me. It was a sense of feeling total gratitude. I was in touch with the divine. It was transcendent—all the platitudes that are so often used were relevant because they were so appropriate and true. This was the greatest experience of agape that each of us ever had.
I also felt a quickening in my womb. Somehow I knew. This was the moment Quinn was conceived.
Chapter 15
My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth. Some remarkable things have turned up which will certainly appear incredible to you. . . . I dare say that we shall one day discover in astrology a good deal of knowledge that has been intuitively projected into the heavens.
—Carl Jung, letter to Sigmund Freud
I am not a student of astrology. I don’t know how to read a chart. What I do understand is sun signs and the often stunning accuracy of them from a personal standpoint. The person who really turned me on to astrology was Linda Goodman, who came out with a blockbuster in 1968 called Sun Signs. A subtitle on later editions reads: How to Really Know Your Husband, Wife, Lover, Child, Boss, Employee, Yourself Through Astrology. The book was thoroughly entertaining and mind-altering in many ways. Never had I read anything that was so detailed and so accurate about those closest to me, never mind myself. (Her later book, Love Signs, which explains how various signs relate to each other romantically, has served me well over the years in being able to offer advice to many of my friends.)
One of the amazing aspects of Goodman’s first book was that all the verses before the chapters were from Lewis Carroll. This seemed to be quite a coincidence, but although I believe in coincidences, I viewed it more as synchronicity. As I have mentioned, I had always been an Alice in Wonderland devotee and had played Alice my senior year in high school. Before me now was Alice speaking to me again in each of the epigraphs, as I devoured every page over and over again. I keep a copy of Linda’s Sun Signs on my bedside table today and also her Love Signs and refer to them both frequently—not just for me but for all my friends, even those who profess not to believe in astrology. For a long time, it was my bible.
Coincidentally, after college my brother, Bill, began taking courses in astrology from the American Federation of Astrologers. Although a skeptic, he was intrigued by it and learned how to erect a natal chart, took exams, and qualified as some kind of purveyor of astrological readings. He met weekly with a group and the leader would pose questions to them. She would give them a time, date, year, and longitude and latitude, and the students would have to create a horo
scope account of the person’s character. They knew nothing else about the person. She would choose people like Winston Churchill, Elvis, and Gandhi. After going around the room, the interpretations of the charts were almost unanimous every time. Bill says that after this experience he had absolutely no doubt about the legitimacy of astrology. Not only that, he did readings of our family members and found the same thing to be true.
Recently a group of astrophysicists came up with a theory of vibrations, undulations, waves that emanate from the different planets, which Bill and others believe offers empirical evidence that the stars and the planets in fact do affect human beings. The clearest evidence, Bill says, is the moon and its effect on the tides and the human brain.
Bill continued to learn more about astrology, but he would never consider himself a practitioner. He still firmly believes that the moon, sun, and planets in our solar system give off their own individual electromagnetic energy. According to him, mass affects mass in space, as physicists would say, and appears as emanations. These electromagnetic energies have tangible effects on the minds and emotions and “souls” of us earthlings. The nature of these effects can be argued, but the fact of these effects cannot, any more than one cannot deny that the moon affects the ocean tides or amplifies the behavior of “lunatics”—from the Latin word luna meaning “moon”—during full moon events. I prefer not to define lunatic as a “mentally ill person” but rather as someone who is “moonstruck,” or exhibits erratic behavior during a full moon, or is affected with periodic insanity, depending on the changes of the moon. My sign, Cancer, is ruled by the moon, and there are actually times during a full moon when I feel as if I’m about to levitate.
Bill points out that interpretation is the key. Anyone can learn to do a chart. In fact, most astrologers use computers now to erect charts. If you have a mathematical mind but not a creative mind, you may give a completely unsatisfactory reading. That’s why it’s important to have a reader who knows what she or he is doing and has that added understanding to bring to bear on a chart.
Goodman’s book is clearly written for the layperson, which makes it so much fun to read. She writes: “These electro-magnetic vibrations (for want of a better term in the present stage of research) will continue to stamp that person with the characteristics of his Sun sign as he goes through life.” Note that this latest discovery in 2016 seems to validate what Goodman was trying to say about electromagnetic vibrations nearly fifty years ago—and Einstein even earlier.
In fact, aside from having what I considered to have been psychic moments, I have experienced and even practiced mental telepathy. I don’t see anything particularly controversial about it. It doesn’t seem any more complicated to me than having a very high antenna where certain signals can be picked up. Nobody would have believed in the telephone, the radio, the television, or the Internet a hundred and fifty years ago. I believe it is just a matter of time before we don’t have to speak to one another anymore. We will learn how to communicate telepathically. What a nightmare! What will we do about negative thoughts if we can read each other’s minds?
I think telepathy works especially with someone you love. I always had telepathic moments between my mother and me and have had (and continue to have them) between Quinn and me. My mother always knew when I was in trouble or in pain and I her. The same with Quinn and me. They say you’re only as happy as your least happy child. There are days when I wake up with a nagging sense of depression only to find out that Quinn is having a problem.
I also send loving, happy, and encouraging thoughts to him and others I care about, especially if I know they will be in situations of stress. They say they get them. Some people might call it praying. Maybe I am praying for them. Whatever it’s called, it works. When Quinn was young, he was often in the hospital, and all the years he was sick and sometimes near death, I had many friends who would tell me they were praying for me or him or us. Part of me was a bit embarrassed by the overt expression of faith at that time, as I was calling myself an atheist. On the other hand, I genuinely felt buoyed by their prayers or thoughts or wishes for Quinn’s recovery.
Studies show that sick people who believe in prayer and are prayed for have a faster recovery time than those who don’t and aren’t. All I know is that it worked for me. Of course there have been many children at hospitals who were prayed over and died and many parents who prayed and their prayers weren’t answered. My feeling is, I’ll take all the help I can get.
Imaging is more or less the same thing. I try to carry positive images with me in my head. When Quinn was in heart failure and we were afraid he wouldn’t live, an artist friend of mine, Susan Davis, told me that I had to imagine the two of us sitting on the beach together. She did a beautiful watercolor of the scene and gave it to me. I kept that image in my head all through his illness, during the surgery and afterward. I hung it on the wall in my bathroom where I could see it every day. A couple of years later, he and I were sitting on a beach together laughing and playing. He was totally healthy and happy. So was I. Then I remembered the painting and realized that that image I had been carrying around in my mind had actually materialized for me. When I want something good to happen for me or for someone else, I simply try to imagine it. That could be a way of praying as well. It really doesn’t matter what you call it.
* * *
I believe reading one’s astrological chart can be at least as valuable as therapy, sometimes more so—assuming you have a good astrologer. Astrology has always helped me in dealing with family, friends, bosses, and coworkers, but never has it been as useful as when I am interviewing people, particularly doing profiles. I always look up a person’s sign before I see them and it generally gives me a huge advantage. For one thing, as a theater major at Smith, I practiced the Stanislavski method. What that means simply is that you don’t play the character, you become the character. I use that approach in interviewing. I learn a person’s sign and then I take on the characteristics of that sign. It gives me a huge affinity for the interviewees because I feel I can empathize with them. It’s not fake. I really do empathize with them. It definitely seemed to work for me. People did open up to me in ways that they normally didn’t, and I was always being asked how I got people to say the things to me that they did. I never told them I read their signs first. They might have thought I was crazy. Maybe they still will, but I don’t care anymore. My motto these days is “whatever works.” That’s certainly my motto for religious beliefs or the lack of beliefs. I don’t call anyone else crazy, including those who don’t have any beliefs at all. I expect the same respect for me.
Christopher Hitchens, well known for being an adamant atheist, once confided to me that he actually read his daily horoscope and considered it good luck if he found a penny. Richard Dawkins, also a well-known atheist, told me that he’s afraid to step on a crack for fear of breaking his mother’s back and that he is terrified of haunted houses and would never spend the night in one.
On my desk I have a framed horoscope, which I had a calligrapher copy and on which is drawn a blue Cancerian crab. It is from the day that I had a meeting at the Washington Post to decide and agree to spin off my website, On Faith, and join a start-up in New York called Faith Street. It was a huge and scary decision. Even though I had been associated with the Post for over forty years and would continue to be on a part-time level, it was a wrench because I had no idea where it would go. I was about to back out that morning when I picked up the paper and read my horoscope. Here’s what it said: “You may feel caught in between two worlds: cut off from what you are leaving behind, but not yet connected to your new future. Step forward in FAITH” (Cancer, May 26, 2013).
I did the deal.
* * *
Although I find it helpful, I have never allowed astrology or any other area of occultism to determine my life. The readings I have are always very personal, almost like sessions with a therapist, focused on my strengths and weaknesses. However, though not prognosticators of e
vents, these interpretations of my chart are a guide to how I can or might move forward. If I am under the influence of Saturn (not good), I just know that I have a hard time ahead and I can prepare for it. If I come under the influence of Venus, it’s a pretty sure thing that I will be feeling loving, or of Mercury, that I will be in a creative and communicative mode. If Mercury is retrograde, I may be a little reluctant to sign a contract during that time or make a major business decision, but I would do it if I had to.
At one point, the story broke that Nancy Reagan had her astrologer determine the exact time Air Force One should take off, among other scheduling decisions for the president. She was subjected to an enormous amount of flak and ridicule, and it was a huge embarrassment to the White House.
After the assassination attempt on her husband’s life, Nancy was naturally terribly shaken and never really felt safe afterward, according to friends. She would do anything she could to protect him. Although I would never have done what she did in suggesting when Air Force One should fly, I totally understood why she would turn to her astrologer and even try to control the flights her husband took if she believed that would help. Astrology is like religion in that way. What Nancy was doing was a form of prayer. She did it in a way that was meaningful to her. She was living magically after the attempt on his life.
I understand why people make bargains with God, why they sacrifice, why they get down on their knees, why they beseech, why they perform any kind of ritual. It helps us get through our suffering and doubt and pain. It’s what gets us through the night. And what could possibly be wrong with that as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone? What may be mysterious or even nonsensical to some might make total sense to others.