Waiting for Daisy

by Peggy Orenstein

  “But how much of a choice is it,” I asked, “if nothing else seemed possible?”

  Nearly all of my girlfriends were having children, and one by one, like Robin, 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?

  My working mom friends weren’t much better, perpetually exhausted and resentful. One commented that Steven and I had the best marriage she knew. “That’s because we don’t have kids,” I said, laughing, but I meant it. Steven and I had a great time together, traveling to Hawaii, Asia, and Europe; going to the movies; spending the weekend in bed. He read the first drafts of my articles; I watched the rough cuts of his films. He was my best friend. Maybe a baby would bring us even closer, but that wasn’t what I saw around me. So many women were smitten with their children while begrudging everything their husbands did or didn’t do: Kids may have been the glue holding couples together, but they were also the wedge driving them apart.

  And yet. There were moments when I could almost feel the weight of a child in my arms, when I sensed that if I looked over my shoulder while driving, I would see an infant seat with a curly-haired bundle looking back at me. I would imagine the songs we’d sing together, the games we’d play, the books we’d read. Pasting photos into an album, I would recall leafing through old pictures of my mother, my father, my grandparents. Who would see these? Who would care?

  One night, when I was thirty-three, I walked into the living room of our rented house in the rustic (read: lots of weeds, aggressive deer, druggie neighbors) Berkeley Hills. Steven was lying on the couch reading Mojo, a British music rag for guys who own everything—on vinyl—that the Kinks ever recorded. The floor beneath him slanted steeply for reasons that in Northern California were best not to consider; he had put shims of varying heights under all the furniture to make it appear level. On the upside, the house was large, with three ample bedrooms, two of which were glaringly empty.

  “What do you think of the name ‘Cleo’ for a baby?” I asked him.

  He put down the magazine and sat up. “Peg, we don’t have a baby.”

  “Well, maybe we should.”

  “Really?” he said, skeptically. “Is that what you want?”

  “I don’t know,” I sighed. “Maybe we shouldn’t.”

  He shook his head, dramatically picking up his magazine. “Let me know when you want to talk about having a baby and then I’ll talk about names.”

  “Okay,” I said, “so what do you think we should do?”

  “I don’t want to do it unless we both want to. I don’t want you ever to say, ‘You talked me into this.’ And if you don’t want to do it, I’ll be fine. I won’t have that many regrets.” It was all very self-actualized, very reasonable, except for this: punting the decision back to me effectively let Steven off the hook. He, too, put a premium on freedom, the time to pursue creative work, to travel, and, in his case, to lie on the couch reading Mojo. This was a guy who had stayed single until he was forty; he wasn’t so eager himself to take on the responsibilities and lifestyle of parenting. My indecision played neatly—maybe too neatly—into his own.

  Another year ticked by and I remained chronically, maddeningly conflicted, no closer than ever to untangling what others expected of me from what I’d learned to want from my genuine desire. I was clear about who I didnt want to be like, but not who I did. So many people I knew—women and men—had tumbled into their lives without much thought, defaulted into marriages, careers, and parenthood because that was what one was supposed to do. I wanted to live my life more consciously. But what did that mean? How could I guess what I might regret in twenty years? How could I say a definite “no” to motherhood while it was still a biological possibility? How could I know who that long-ago girl might’ve been if no one had pressed that doll into her arms?

  “Peg, I want to talk to you about something.”

  Steven and I were cruising thirty-eight thousand feet above the Pacific, flying back from his father’s funeral in Los Angeles. It was late November, the end of a lousy year. A few months earlier one of Steven’s best friends, a woman in her early forties, had also died, of ovarian cancer, leaving behind her husband and three-year-old daughter. There had been other losses, too, friends taken by AIDS or cancer. I had just turned thirty-five. I was beginning to realize what it meant to be a grown-up.

  If my father-in-law hadn’t died, we might have never resolved whether to have a child; we might have drifted on—me avoiding the topic, Steven allowing that—until time made the decision for us. But grief had burned away his doubt.

  “We’re on an airplane,” I said, warily, recognizing the tone in his voice.

  “I know. So there’s nothing to distract us.” He took a deep breath, raked a hand through his hair. “It’s just that I lost one of my best friends and now I’ve lost my dad. And I’m starting to feel like we’re not part of the life cycle, like we’re not participating. When there’s been so much death, it seems like there should be birth. We should to do something life-affirming. I think we should have a child.”

  Maybe my defenses were down, or I, too, had been humbled by loss. Or maybe I had wanted him to make the decision all along. But that simple argument was all it took to tip the scales inside my heart. “Okay," I said. “Let’s do it. Let’s have a baby.”

  “Really?” he said softly, taking my hand. “Do you mean it?”

  I nodded. “Yes,” I said, “I mean it.” We giggled like kids sharing a secret until I added: “How about if I go off the Pill in June? That would give me six months to finish the reporting for my book, then I can write it while I’m pregnant.”

  Steven’s eyes flashed. “I want to do it,” I insisted, “It’s just… I need more time.”

  “You can’t keep putting this off,” he said. “You can’t schedule life to happen only when it’s convenient.” He sank back into his seat, staring out the window until the plane touched down.

  My friend Connie once told me she got pregnant with her son because, “It started to feel like someone who was supposed to be in the house was missing.” For the rest of the day, I tested that notion, played with it, tried to imagine that absent person, that anticipatory space. I found that while my ambivalence didn’t disappear, I could indeed do it. Maybe I was one of those people who would never know for sure, who just had to take a leap of faith.

  “I mean it,” I whispered to Steven as we snuggled close that night. “Let’s have a baby.”

  Six weeks later, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.

  On January 16, 1997, at 4:45 P.M. my surgeon told me over the phone that the tissue she’d removed from my breast to biopsy was malignant. I was puttering around my office in the house we’d bought a few months earlier, a scandalously priced two-bedroom whose garage, if need be, could be converted into a third. I’d forgotten the doctor was scheduled to call; I was about to head out with Steven to a movie. At the sound of her voice all the colors in the room went flat. The abnormality had been caught two weeks earlier on my first mammogram, the one I’d had as a baseline, as part of clearing the decks before trying to get pregnant. No one, not the surgeon, not the radiologist, expected this. It cant be true, I thought as I listened to her. I’m only thirty-five years old. I dont have a family hi
story of cancer. I did, however, have a history of reproductive tumors; I’d had an ovary removed in my teens when a benign cyst was discovered on it during my first pelvic exam. (In a miracle of compensation, the other one took over, popping out an egg each month.) She assured me that was unrelated. What’s more, she added, this new invader was small, still too small to feel, and slow growing. The chances that I would survive it, with a lumpectomy and six weeks of daily radiation treatments, were upward of 90 percent.

  “But what about kids? Can I still have kids?” We could talk about that later, she said. I’d certainly have to put pregnancy off for a year, maybe two. Right now, though, we had to focus on getting rid of the disease.

  “You’re a very lucky woman,” she added.

  “Lucky?” I wanted to shout. “Fuckyoul" Instead, I thanked her politely and hung up.

  Steven was by now standing in the doorway of my office, listening on the extension. We stared at each other in the waning winter light. “But I eat organic broccoli,” I wailed, and burst into tears.

  That night I woke at 3 A.M. in a sweat, imagining my death and realizing I’d made a terrible mistake. I’d become the woman in that Lichtenstein spoof, an assemblage of dots and halftones who—Oops!—forgot to have children. How could I have been so stupid? Why didn’t I realize how much I wanted a baby until the possibility was threatened? Later I would remember that moment as the first time that I was ready but my body said no. You can’t believe it, not in this age when we control so much of our own destinies. I fumbled for a pen and notebook in the dark: “Am I being punished?” I scrawled. “For what? Being on the Pill? Waiting to have children? My independence?”

  Over the next few months, my life went into a fugue state. Mostly I stared out my office window, watching the light play across the redwood trees, letting the days go by me. My friends and family were impressed by how well I was coping, but my composure was an act. Although my prognosis was good—I didn’t even need chemotherapy—getting cancer at such a young age didn’t bode well for the future. I might die, I thought over and over, I really might die. All I wanted in that heightened, crystalline state was to have a child. I tried to take comfort in the knowledge that the cancer may have been in my body for years and the hormonal changes of pregnancy could’ve accelerated it, made it more deadly, but that didn’t help. Sometimes my grief was so intense it made my lungs ache.

  My oncologist was reassuring. Although, at the time, there was data on only six hundred women in the entire world who’d been pregnant after cancer, he didn’t think it would affect my long-term survival. In other words, if I wasn’t going to die anyway, having a baby probably wouldn’t kill me. He suggested I wait six months to recover from the radiation treatment, but not let cancer hold me back, not let it define me. “You don’t want to feel like you’re sick,” he said. “That’s what cancer is about: realizing how fragile life is, but because you’re aware of that, enjoying life, seizing it with both hands. And for you, that includes having a baby.

  “So go,” he added, “be fruitful and multiply.”

  A friend once said she’d been “visiting her terror” lately, as if it were a geographical place. All that summer and into the fall, I found myself visiting my terror, too, at unexpected moments—during a busy workday, for instance, or over dinner with friends. I’d think, I’m a thirty-five-year-old who just had cancer. It seemed simultaneously unreal and the most real thing there was. But something else happened as the months passed, too. I began to trust that I would indeed survive, and as I did my regret about missing my chance at motherhood receded. Simply being alive and being with Steven seemed enough. The old ambivalence even began to seep back. Which were my true feelings? The anguish I’d felt facing death, or the uncertainty I’d felt all my life?

  My thirty-sixth birthday fell the Saturday before Thanksgiving. It had been a year since Steven’s father had died, a year since we’d first decided to try to have a baby I had gone off the Pill as a safety precaution after my cancer diagnosis. Now I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and threw away my diaphragm as well.

  I still wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do.

  2

  IF AT FIRST …

  I married a man who is far better looking than I. It’s not that I’m a candidate for a dogfight, exactly, but no one’s ever going to confuse me with Adriana Lima. Steven, meanwhile, was once plastered on billboards all over America as part of a Gap campaign, the one featuring artsy types who embodied “cool.” At a screening of one of his films at the Smithsonian, a young woman bustled up to say that the ladies of Harvard’s Asian Pacific American Law Students Association had hung his picture in their office for “inspiration.” ("Hi!” I said brightly, cutting in front of him. “I’m his wife.”) He is largely indifferent to such flattery. Having lived with it all his life, he understands the power of beauty, the privilege it confers, and he understands its limits. Still, I’ve often marveled at the idea that he was handsome in junior high, a time when my acne was blessedly obscured by the twin glares off my braces and glasses. On our third date I showed Steven a snapshot of me in college, zaftig in a peasant skirt and my boyfriend’s ill-fitting crewneck sweater, my hair cut to resemble a Semitic cotton ball. It was part of what made him fall in love with me. “I thought it was brave of you to show me something that embarrassing,” he said later. “Brave, and kind of pathetic.”

  There is only one thing about me that anyone has ever considered gorgeous. Three different gynecologists have, upon intimate examination, invoked that word to describe my cervical mucous. I would have no trouble getting pregnant, they always informed me. I didn’t know at the time, nor much care, what cervical mucous was, but I would blush modestly anyway, not that they could see from their vantage point. I had reason, then, to think conception would be a snap—my gorgeous mucous would assure it. Besides, I deserved something to go smoothly with my body—it would be a way to rebalance the scales of fate after cancer treatment. And so we began to try.

  There is the first time you have sex, and then there is the first time you have sex without birth control. On purpose. To make a baby. Both events feel transformative, but this time I didn’t feel the urge to jump up and phone my best friend when it was over. There was something both sacred and carnal about the way Steven and I joined together during those early nights, an erotic thrill in breaking the taboo against unprotected sex, along with a startling intimacy. It was as if a wall between us, sheer as gossamer, had come down. I touched Steven’s cheek as his hands traced circles down my body. “Here we go,” I whispered and he smiled. We were making something more than love: we were making our child. I already felt pregnant with possibility.

  Three months went by—not a long time, but I’ve always trended toward the anxious. I’d also known a number of couples, including my oldest brother and his wife, who’d had difficulty conceiving. A friend suggested the book Taking Charge of Your Fertility. “Taking Charge": she was speaking my language. The book explained that a woman doesn’t necessarily ovulate on the fourteenth day of her cycle—you might ovulate on the twelfth. Or the twentieth. When you do, the egg lives twenty-four hours, max, but sperm can lounge around in your body for up to five days. It’s strategic, then, to have lots of sex before you ovulate so the guys are up there, ready and waiting, when the ball drops. Doing it after ovulation, or even during, may be too late. What’s more, there are signs that a woman’s critical time is nigh. That cervical mucous my doctors swooned over? It miraculously transforms in the days before ovulation to a clear, come-hither liquid—similar to semen—that helps speed sperm to egg. I’d had my period for almost a quarter of a century. During college I’d lay on a dormitory floor with a bunch of other women “empowering” ourselves by looking up our yin-yangs with plastic specula and hand mirrors. I thought I knew the facts of life. (Natalie’s gay and Tootie starred in The Vagina Monologues, right?) Yet I didn’t know any of this.

  So I began to take charge. I popped a thermometer into my m
outh every morning before so much as kissing Steven hello. I plotted my temperature on a graph I’d Xeroxed from the book, carefully connected it to the dots of previous days, and pored over the results like they were rune stones. Had the temperature gone up more than two-tenths of a point since the day before? Had it stayed up for three days, indicating that I’d ovulated and the procreative window had slammed shut? I spent an enormous amount of time in the bathroom poking my fingers up my vagina. Was my cervix open and low? High and closed? Was that even my cervix? Was my “fluid” (as Taking Charge referred to it—so much cozier than mucous) sticky? Creamy? The coveted clear and stretchy? Most of the time it looked to me like gunk. I peed on ovulation predictor sticks but couldn’t tell when the second line was the precise shade of magenta as the first. Sometimes, to be sure, I’d go through several sticks in an afternoon.

  I quit drinking coffee, though I’d never drunk more than two cups a day, and substituted two teaspoons of Robitussin each morning. Its main ingredient, guaifenesin, thins and loosens mucous in the lungs, and although there is no actual evidence, it’s thought to work similar juju farther south. Meanwhile, Taking Charge warned that lubricants—including saliva—could kill sperm, so I tossed out the Astroglide and foreswore oral sex; if the going got rough, I squirted warmed egg whites (another of semen’s cousins) inside me with a turkey baster. To add to the fun, I limited us to the missionary position, which, according to the book, was the most gravitationally correct.

  “You’re turning this into a military maneuver," Steven groused one morning as I studied my charts. He glanced at his wrist like he was synchronizing a watch. “Operation Baby.”

  “There’s no point in trying if we’re doing it at the wrong time," I said without looking up.

  “But you don’t have to be so clinical about it. It’s bad karma to try to create a child this way. It won’t work.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I lectured him. Pregnancy was a scientific equation: sperm and egg. It was a matter of timing. Enjoying the process would be nice, but it wasn’t essential. “I’m thirty-six years old,” I said. “We can be romantic the rest of the month.”