WAITING FOR DAISY
A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar® ,an Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night, and One Woman’s Quest to Become a Mother
PEGGY ORENSTEIN
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue: The Reckoning
1. To Have or Have Not
2. If at First
3. The One That Got Away
4. Hooked
5. Best Actress
6. Shikataganai
7. Cherry Blossom Hearts
8. Jizo Saves
9. Put the Lime in the Coconut
10. Dear Peggy, Dear Fish
11. Kai-chan Across the Water
Epilogue: Meditations on Luck
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Author
Reading Group Guide
Praise for Waiting for Daisy
Imprint
For SP & D, of course
PROLOGUE: THE RECKONING
I had twenty-four hours to fight for my life; twenty-four hours to right all the wrongs I’d done over the last year, to prove the sincerity of my remorse. If I couldn’t, I’d be dead by the following fall. That’s the theory, anyway, behind Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year for Jews. It’s the day that God supposedly determines our fate, using indelible ink to inscribe us in the book of Life or the book of Death. When I was a child, growing up in a tightly knit Conservative Jewish community in Minneapolis, it terrified me to think that my destiny would be sealed with the setting sun. As the day faded, the prayers of the adults around me would grow more frenzied, more pleading. The cantor would prostrate himself on the pulpit, his voice ululating. The rabbi would teeter on his feet, having stood before us all day without food or drink. During the last hour, we’d all stand, lights out, arc door open, the Torahs glittering in their New Year’s finery. The more devout men lifted their prayer shawls over their heads like shrouds, rocking and moaning, lost in private negotiation for their souls.
I’d long since rejected the rituals as superstition, allowing no room for free will. At best, I’d become an indifferent Jew. But this year, the year I turned forty, I felt desperate for a new beginning. For the first time in over two decades—since leaving my home for Cleveland, New York, and, eventually, Northern California—I fasted, went to the temple dressed in white, a symbol of both death and rebirth. I wore canvas sneakers rather than leather. I didn’t bathe or brush my teeth. And I prayed—not to a bearded dude in the sky who was totting up who’d been naughty and who’d been nice, but in hopes of something else: the strength to forgive myself for the sins against my marriage and my own heart that I’d committed during my six-year, single-minded quest to bear a child, and the courage to close my own book, one way or another, on this anguished chapter of my life.
The congregation turned to the pivotal prayer of the day, an alphabetized compendium of sins that they may have committed over the previous year. For something that’s centuries old, it’s eerily astute. We have been guilty, it begins. We have been hypocritical. We have broken our standards of behavior. We have given bad advice. We have been hardheaded. We have misled others. We have misled ourselves. After each admission we were to pound our chests with closed fists. Forgive us, pardon us, allow us to atone.
As my neighbors in the pews confessed, I silently made my own reckoning—a list of offenses that had begun inconsequentially then snowballed into a betrayal of my deepest self. I’d taken my temperature every morning. I have been obsessive. I’d peed on ovulation predictors five days a month. I’d craned my neck like a yogini to see my nether regions while sluicing my finger around to check for the monthly fluid that would guide sperm to egg. I have been impatient. I’d chugged bottles of cough syrup, whose active ingredient supposedly improves the flow. I’d interrupted lovemaking to squirt egg whites into myself with a turkey baster, also a flow enhancer. I’d stood on my head post-coitally until I thought my neck would snap. I have humiliated myself. I’d rushed to my doctor’s after an afternoon quickie so she could examine my husband’s and my commingled juices under a microscope. I’d transported cups of sperm in my bra. I’d turned lovemaking soulless, insisting my husband watch porn to speed things up, coming in to “do his business” when he was ready. Pardon me, forgive me, allow me to atone.
I’d taken ovulation-stimulating pills that triggered fits of rage. I have been wicked. I’d given myself multiple daily injections of fertility drugs despite my breast cancer diagnosis a few years earlier. I have made mistakes. I’d asked my parents for twenty-five thousand dollars for long-shot in vitro fertilization treatments. I’d let someone stick pins into my body every two weeks for a year and downed unidentifiable herbal potions that tasted like dirt. I have been disappointed. I’d believed in the next new thing. I have allowed myself to be led astray. I’d waited too long to start trying to conceive. Had I waited too long to start trying to conceive? Pardon me, forgive me, allow me to atone.
I’d had no idea how easy it would be to lose all sense of reason, to do things I swore I never would to become a mother, then go further beyond that. And here’s the irony: if you’d asked me ten years earlier, I would’ve said I didn’t even want to have children.
1
TO HAVE OR HAVE NOT
My first birthday, Thanksgiving 1962. My aunts, uncles, and cousins are all in attendance. I am wearing a blue velvet dress, my chubby legs stuffed into white tights; my feet, which have yet to master walking, strapped into patent leather Mary Janes. A few pale, wispy curls are beginning to sprout on my head, though I don’t have any hair worth mentioning. My mother has compensated by taping a blue bow to my pate, which I periodically rip off and stuff into my mouth.
As a Bell & Howell whirs, I tear into my birthday gifts, more focused on shredding the brightly colored paper than on the toys that lay within. My father steps into the frame, his hair still black, his face hopeful. He is seven years younger than I am now. Clearly excited, he presents me with my first baby doll, placing it in my arms. I am his only daughter. I glance at the doll, frown, and fling it out of sight. He fetches it and once again, patiently, sets it in my arms. This time I begin to cry and hold the doll by its foot, dropping it on the floor. My father tries one more time with similar results; the camera jerks and the image sputters.
What happened then, during those undocumented moments? Someone must’ve continued to cajole. Someone must’ve expressed disappointment. Someone must’ve demonstrated what was expected of me. Someone must’ve said, “Don’t you want to be a mommy, like Mommy?” Because when the film rolls again, I gingerly cradle the baby doll, still sniffling a little, seeming anxious. I look up eagerly for approval from my parents, who are squatting next to me. This is my first foray into motherhood.
At eleven, I befriended Tibetha Shaw, who had untamed orange hair and was the only girl in the sixth grade of John Burroughs Elementary School to wear black all the time. Her mother, unlike those of the rest of my friends, worked outside the home and had an apron that read HOUSEWORK IS BULLSHIT in three-inch capital letters. At the Shaws’ there was dust on the furniture. There was no adult supervision after school. Tibetha and I gorged on store-bought cookies and pored over Ms. magazine, which had recently resurrected the comic book icon Wonder Woman. Inspired by her, we fastened towels around our necks with clothespins and—in every working mom’s nightmare of what the kids are up to in her absence—climbed a ladder onto the roof of the garage. The distance to the next building was slightly longer than a leggy eleven-year-old’s stride, yet we took deep breaths and leapt—screaming, “WONDER WOMAN! WONDER WOMAN!”—flying from roof to roof and back again, towel capes streaming
behind us. It was my first foray into feminism.
My understanding of the women’s movement may have grown more nuanced over the years, but that sense of exhilaration remained. Feminism provided me with an escape route, an out from my parents’ limited expectations, a chance to define for myself the person I wanted to be. Yet, even while soaring through space—whether the rooftops were real or metaphoric—I was conscious of the drop, never quite sure how far my towel cape would carry me. As an editorial assistant at Esquire magazine, I was peanut gallery to 1980s literary New York, an extra at cocktail parties for the likes of Jay Mclnerney, Tom Wolfe, and Tama Janowitz. Occasionally, while stuffing myself with free hors d’oeuvres (popping a few in my purse to supplement my $250 a week paycheck), I’d notice that there weren’t many mothers in the room. There were few among the editors I worked with either, and virtually none among the writers. The same was true several years later, when I moved on to San Francisco. Their absence left me vaguely uneasy; was this evidence of progress—women no longer needed children for fulfillment—or its opposite? Could it be that things hadn’t changed as much as I’d thought? And if they hadn’t, in which world did I belong? “I’m not sure I want to have kids,” I told my friends. “I’m not sure I want to have kids,” I told my gynecologist. “I’m not sure I want to have kids,” I told my editor. (She fixed my manuscripts, why not my life?) They all gave the same reply: “Don’t worry about it, Peggy, you have plenty of time.”
I believed them; I was in my mid-twenties. I thought I had all the time in the world.
I fell in love with Steven Okazaki on a postcard. We’d gone on one date, an after-work drink that deepened into dinner, but it hadn’t gone well. I was newly out of a bruising relationship and knocked back a couple of Stolis to calm my nerves. Here’s something to know about me: I can’t hold my liquor. As my rational self watched from a helpless, anesthetized distance, my soused evil twin ran her mouth, spewing bile about former beaux and announcing, “If you’re looking for anything serious, I’m not interested.”
Luckily, he didn’t believe me. “Women always say that kind of stuff when they like you,” he’d joke later. We hugged goodbye awkwardly in the parking lot. A documentary filmmaker, Steven was leaving the next day for a shoot on the Big Island of Hawaii. "Call me!” I chirped, though after my performance that evening I figured I’d never hear from him again.
Then the card arrived, a photo of the lava flow on Mt. Kilauea. On the back, a note, jotted as if we were mid-conversation.
Last night on the Big Island there was a bad storm. Several boats were beached and sections of highway were temporarily washed out. I was having dinner with a pig breeder and his family near a town called Honaunau. The sound of the wind and rain on their tin roof was nearly deafening. The farmer noted that the roads would get dangerous and maybe I should spend the night. He said, “You can wear my pajamas and sleep in the kitchen.” I thought, “No way, man. I want my hotel room.” As I took the perilous journey home, I felt ashamed but frankly relieved. One doesn’t have to experience everything, does one?
Forget roses; I’m a sucker for a man who has a way with words.
We shared our first breakfast shortly after he returned, gazing starry-eyed at each other across our eggs in a Berkeley diner. Steven was tall and stocky with a shock of black hair that was just beginning to gray, diamond-cut cheekbones, and eyes as warm as anything I’d ever seen. I loved the scratch in his voice, the touch of his skin, his dedication to a life of purpose and creativity. I admired the confidence he had in his own vision; I was still a magazine editor then, unable to work up the nerve to quit and write full-time. Steven was not the man I imagined I’d be with—nearly ten years older, Japanese American, a gentile—but soul mates don’t always come in predictable packages.
He mentioned he’d grown up with four sisters. “I always thought I’d have a big family,” he said.
I cut him off. “Well, I don’t know if I want to have children at all.”
“Really? Why not?”
“Why do you want them?”
This was when I first discovered my future husband’s habit of speaking in set pieces. “I guess I think of life as kind of like an amusement park," he said. “If you’re going to go, you should ride every ride at least once. And having kids is like the big, scary roller coaster. You can have a good time without riding it, but you would’ve missed a significant part of the experience.”
“I get sick on roller coasters,” I deadpanned, then added, “Besides, ‘One doesn’t have to experience everything, does one?’”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Look,” I said. “I don’t want anyone to make any assumptions about me or how I’ll live my life. I don’t want to do something just because it’s expected, because everyone else does it. Maybe I’ll change my mind, but there are a lot of other things I want to do besides have children.”
“There’s no way I can have a baby now.” It had been two years since Steven and I had married, since I’d moved across the Great Waters from my overpriced apartment in San Francisco to his rent-controlled one in Berkeley. I’d simultaneously taken the leap into writing; my first book, Schoolgirls, about the challenges young women face in their teens, had just come out to flattering reviews. Suddenly I was fielding calls from Good Morning America, Nightline, and Fresh Air lecturing at universities; giving keynote addresses at national conferences. My agent—a forceful, older woman who’d opted against motherhood—warned me, “You have to sell another book idea right now. If you wait a year, forget it. No one will remember you.” I’d dreamed of this kind of success since publishing my first story in my high school newspaper at age fifteen. But I wasn’t fifteen anymore. I was thirty-two.
How could I possibly cut back to take care of an infant? Sometime later, Joyce Purnick, Metro editor of the New York Times (who did not have kids), would tell graduating seniors at Barnard, “If I had left the Times to have children and then come back to work a four-day week … or left the office at six o’clock instead of eight or nine, I wouldn’t be Metro editor.” She was probably right, but how grim was that? Maybe I wanted children, maybe I didn’t, but I wanted the decision to be a choice, not a mandate. Last time I checked, childlessness was only supposed to be a condition of career advancement for nuns.
My own mother was no help. She had married at twenty, moving directly from her parents’ home to her new life with her twenty-four-year-old husband. Within five years she’d stopped teaching elementary school to raise her children. We shared so little experience that without a child myself, I sometimes felt as if we were, if not a different species, at least different sexes. “Your life is so unlike mine,” she’d say. “I can’t even imagine it.” I longed for a mother who could be a mentor, someone I could turn to for wisdom and guidance. Her limits made me short-tempered. Stop being such a bitch, I’d tell myself, which only turned my anger to guilt. I’d rather not have children, I’d think, than have a daughter who someday felt this way about me.
That’s too easy, though. It wasn’t just hostility I felt around my mother, it was inadequacy. I had loved my early childhood with her. We’d spent long hours playing beauty parlor and tea party, baking holiday cookies. On Saturday nights I would swoon when she left with my dad in a cloud of Rive Gauche perfume, so glamorous in her fox-trimmed coat. I wanted to be just like her—a mommy just like Mommy. Thirty years later, part of me still did. Although I publicly stood up for working mothers and day care, I knew that, for me, motherhood meant one thing: being there for your children like my mom had been there for me. I believed the responsibility for taking care of children would, bottom line, be mine, even if I was the one who had to swap my dreams for drudgery. It didn’t matter that Steven expected to be an equal parent. ("I’ll make a great mom,” he’d brag.) The issue wasn’t whether I wanted to turn into my mother if I had a child or even whether I feared I would; it was that I believed I should.
With Steven, I dodged the subject. “We’ll talk a
bout it later,” I’d promise when he brought it up. “When we have more time.” Or: “When I’m not traveling so much.” Or: “When we’re on vacation.” Or: “At the end of the year.” Or, simply: “Not now.” There was no way he could pin me down. I bobbed, I weaved, I changed the subject, and if none of that worked, I gave him The Stare. “You have no idea how hard it is to get past that look,” he’d complain, though of course I did. The Stare had taken me years to perfect: it was my force field, repelling all comers—my parents, lovers, friends, colleagues—who broached a subject that felt too raw to discuss.
The only time in twenty years that I ever had a fight with my friend Robin was at a girls’ night dinner party on New York’s Upper West Side, when I mouthed off about mothers who dropped their careers rather than demand that their husbands do the laundry. I was in town doing interviews for my next book, Flux, about how women make their personal and professional choices. A group of full-time moms I’d talked to that afternoon had claimed that staying home was a feminist right. I disagreed. “I don’t know why women who make the pre-Betty Freidan choices think they won’t end up with the pre-Betty Freidan results,” I quipped.
“What about me?” asked Robin, sharply. She’d been a television news producer before staying home with her three kids. Her husband managed a hedge fund. “Is that what you think of me?”
I wasn’t sure how to respond; the truth was, yes, I did feel that way about her, though I’d never say so to her face. My hesitation only made her madder. “You have no idea what it means to be married to someone who works twelve hours a day. If I kept working, I’d still have to do everything at home. It’s just not realistic.
“I’m not stupid,” she added. “I know the potential traps here. I knew what I was getting into. And I chose this.”
Waiting for Daisy Page 1