The solution seemed obvious: I had to lie. I took his hand in both of mine and gazed deeply into his aggrieved eyes. “Okay, it’s a deal. I’ll try to stop caring.”
“ Trying isn’t good enough. You’ve said that before.”
I nodded. “I’ll stop caring. I will. And I won’t bug you about going to Dr. Chang anymore.
“But if I bring it down here,” I added, “will you please keep drinking the dirt?”
Some people believe adopting will get them pregnant. They begin the process secretly thinking they won’t have to go through with it, that filling out the forms will jump-start their bodies. I knew that was absurd. Adopting won’t get you pregnant, buying a dog will. My brother and sister-in-law conceived their first daughter shortly after bringing home a rambunctious golden Lab (whom they eventually sent to a farm—honestly).
I didn’t want a dog solely for its thermaturgic properties, though. I was also lonely, deeply lonely. Steven was immersed in his film, away much of the time. My friends were busy with their children. I worked alone in my house, in a hilly neighborhood with no sidewalks. There were days when the only other mammal I saw was the squirrel who buried nuts in the potted plants on our back deck. A dog would keep me company, I reasoned. It would be something to take care of, to nurture. Steven was agreeable, too, relieved that I was interested in something besides baby making.
I did know that a dog wasn’t a child, though that, apparently, is not a commonly shared observation in Berkeley. In a town of people who have a tendency to be a mite zealous, the dog people are extreme. They successfully lobbied for an ordinance forbidding citizens to own pets—we can’t even call them pets. We must refer to ourselves as the “guardians” of our “animal companions." What’s more, purebreds are as anathema as SUVs: the only correct choice is a rescue dog, to discourage overpopulation. In theory, we agreed, but four visits to a local no-kill shelter—which housed a collection of pit bull and Doberman mixes in cement and chain-link cages—changed our minds. We quickly learned that “exuberant” was code for “aggressive,” and “energy to spare” meant “kiss your shoes good-bye.”
We also tried a local animal sanctuary that places its dogs with “foster parents” until a “forever family” can be found. At their weekly event on an upscale shopping street, we fell in love with a sweet-eyed, silk-furred border collie mix. A sign nearby said he’d been “adopted” once, but was quickly returned.
“Could I get some information about the dog?” I asked a volunteer.
She looked irritated. “What kind of information?”
“Like the reason he was returned?” She sighed as if I were trying her patience.
“He bit the vet, okay? But it was only because the vet grabbed him under his ribs.”
“He bit someone?”
“Only because he grabbed him under his ribs,” she repeated, as if I were slow-witted. “You normally wouldn’t do that.”
“I think we’ll pass,” I said. She glared at us until we walked away.
Around that time a baby panic spread among educated, urban young women, the kind who typically prized Manolo pumps over Madelas. Two things, so to speak, egged it on: the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) launched a “public service campaign,” plastering buses in major cities with pictures of an hourglass-shaped baby bottle, the milk of time running out. In block capital letters, the tagline screamed, ADVANCING AGE DECREASES YOUR ABILITY TO HAVE CHILDREN. Take that with your morning coffee, Carrie Bradshaw. Simultaneously, economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children was published to a media blitz that would be the envy of J. K. Rowling. Hewlett reported that “ultra-achieving” women in their forties and fifties were suffering a “crisis of childlessness” brought on not only by the brutal demands of the workplace, but also by the willful ignorance of their own biological clocks. As a result, they were crippled by regret. The book made 60 Minutes and the covers of Time and New York Magazine. (The ASRM campaign, meanwhile, made the cover of Newsweek.) It was promoted on Today, Good Morning America, The View, and even the NBC Nightly News. It was debated on the editorial pages of both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. For months, wherever young women turned, they encountered Hewlett’s Chicken Little natalism, her exhortations to blunt their ambitions, hook a husband, and get pregnant pronto, or risk being as bereft as their older sisters.
It was because of this wrinkle in the Zeitgeist—and because Flux, my second book had been about women’s life choices—that I got the Call: the one that all authors dream of, the one that could lift us from obscurity to riches. Be still my beating heart—it was Oprah. “We’ve been trying to track you down for days,” her producer scolded. “We’re looking for someone who can defend women in their forties who don’t have children. We thought given your work you might be able to do that.”
Of course I could. It wasn’t like I didn’t have a response to Hewlett. I could have pointed out that all the babies in the world wouldn’t compensate for a middling marriage and a second-rate job. I could have questioned why Hewlett didn’t discuss men’s roles (beyond their aversion to marrying professionally successful women). I could have challenged the ASRM to restructure medical training to make it easier for women in their own field to heed their message. I might have attacked the gaping flaws in Hewlett’s research or trotted out the zillions of studies showing that childless women are as happy as mothers. If I were feeling snarky, I might have even gotten personal: Hewlett gave birth to her fifth child at age fifty-one after four years of infertility treatments. Mightn’t that indicate a perspective on motherhood that was, I don’t know, just a wee bit… warped?
But then again, so was my own. I knew the correct, the feminist—hell, the reasonable—response, but I no longer believed it. Not in my heart. I felt like the poster child for Hewlett’s thesis, the midlife professional who’d badly miscalculated, who found out too late that her accomplishments were meaningless compared to motherhood. I no longer knew how to find my way back to my marriage unless I was pregnant. I needed a baby to restore faith in my defective body, heal my wounded sexuality, assuage my grief, relieve my feelings of failure—to make me whole again. At one time, I would have told a woman like me that childlessness was not her problem; it was her inability to recognize the value in all that she had, in all that she’d built for herself. But I had become the woman I once pitied, the one who was too easily swayed by gross oversimplifications that collapsed all of life’s complexities into the convenient box of “waited too long.” My situation, like most women’s, was so much more complicated than that, but who cared? My sense of failure infected every corner of my life, including my former refuge: my work. Even when writing about something unrelated to motherhood, I no longer trusted my instincts, second-guessed my observations. If I couldn’t handle “How are you?” how could I expect, on national TV, to weather "Do you regret not having children?” How could I defend my choices when I was questioning everything I’d ever believed, everything I’d valued? Who was I to act as an expert on contemporary womanhood when my own life was a mess? Infertility had rocked me to my core.
So, even as my publisher’s publicist bombarded the producer with press releases and clippings, I did the one thing I was sure would scotch my shot of being on the show. “I’d love to do it,” I told her. “As long as I don’t have to talk about anything personal.”
I pretended to be disappointed when she e-mailed me a few days later to say they had gone another way, but secretly I was relieved.
In lieu of a dog, I began courting a stray tabby cat who lurked near my office door, coaxing her closer with saucers of milk. Soon she would approach me eagerly in the morning, purring and jumping on my lap while I wrote.
“Do we have a cat?” Steven asked on a weekend home from Santa Cruz.
“Maybe,” I said, as she wound around his legs. “She’s pretty sweet. And she needs a home.”
I christened her Kitkat, a non-n
ame reflecting the tenuousness of my claim. One afternoon as I petted her in my driveway, a little girl walked by with her father. “Rio!” She squealed.
“Oh,” I said, my heart sinking. “Is this your cat?”
“Yes,” she said, firmly. Her father, standing behind her, shook his head. “She likes to say it’s her cat; it’s a stray that hangs around our yard sometimes.”
Hmph, I thought. If that girl thinks she’s wrestling my cat away, she has another thing coming. As soon as they were out of sight, I went inside for a can of tuna. Rio-shmio. This was Kitkat.
I gave Kitkat the run of the house, but within a week she’d turned from a welcome guest into the boor who stays too long. She howled if I didn’t let her in as soon as I woke up each morning. She bit when I tried to remove the burrs from her coat. She scratched up the dining room chairs. Not only that, she made me sneeze. I’m not usually allergic to cats, but I was to this one. “I don’t think I can keep her,” I wheezed to Steven on the phone, during one of a string of asthma attacks.
I left a dish of cat food outside—I didn’t want to cut her off completely—but kept my door closed. She wasn’t having it. She began stalking me, circling the perimeter of the house trying to figure out which door I was nearest. Then she’d stand on her hind legs and scratch frantically. I closed the blinds, put in earplugs. Nothing helped. My worst fear was being realized: I was trapped by the very being I’d tried to nurture, a prisoner in my own home. That’s when she began to mewl, sounding exactly like a crying baby. I fled the premises and began working in a cafe.
I went back to looking for a dog, if only to chase that infernal cat away. Instead of infertility sites, I swapped one obsession for another, combing the Web for information on specific breeds. I dragged Steven to dog shows to meet sellers. After a flirtation with miniature Australian shepards, I homed in on Portuguese water dogs, which don’t shed and look like cuter standard poodles. One hitch: a Porty puppy cost eight hundred bucks—for that amount, the “animal companion” better be a good conversationalist. What’s more, the breeders I met had some serious boundary issues. One reserved the right to repossess a dog if I couldn’t prove I’d taken it to obedience classes. Another expected to be able to inspect my house unannounced at any time for the life of the dog to make sure it was being properly treated. A third would forbid me to give the dog away and wanted notification whenever I moved or changed my e-mail address. Getting a dog began to seem as difficult as having a baby. I gave up the search.
Late in October I heard a voice on my office message machine. “Hello, this is Koko Tanimoto Kondo. I am calling from Japan.” I reached for it, then stopped, my hand poised midair. There could only be one reason for Koko to phone me, and I didn’t want to hear it. “Could you please call me as soon as possible?” I waited until she hung up, then I hit the delete button.
It had been over six months since Koko and I had met. In that time I’d made only one follow-up phone call, to an agency in San Francisco that facilitated international adoption. They’d sent me a manila envelope bulging with information, including an astonishingly intrusive list of forty-three questions required for the social worker’s clearance. “Briefly comment on the relationship of your parents (a) to each other, (b) with you, and (c) with your partner." Briefly? “Describe your adolescence.” “Comment on your relationship and on any previous significant relationships or marriages.” I could write entire books on each of those topics. I wanted to respond with my own inquiry: Why are potential adoptive parents—most of whom have already struggled for years to conceive—subject to such intense scrutiny when most people become parents because the condom breaks?
I lay the form on a corner of my desk, where it was quickly buried under the detritus of procrastination. Steven nudged me about it periodically. He’d gone from being less keen on adoption than I to being, if not more so, at least more willing to discuss it. “I don’t know if we’d actually do it,” he would say, “but if we ever want to consider adoption, I think we should start talking about it.”
When Koko called again, a few days later, her voice was more insistent. “A baby is going to be born that needs parents,” she said. “I’d like to know if you’re interested.” Again, I erased the message. I told myself that it was too soon—two months—after my last miscarriage, that I hadn’t given the acupuncture a chance. And surely that was part of it. As demoralizing as that pregnancy had been, it had also occurred surprisingly close to the previous one. Maybe I was on a roll.
“You can get pregnant,” Risa had told me at my last checkup. “No one can tell you whether you’ll ever have a successful pregnancy, but no one can tell you that you won’t.” That surprised me; it was so much less dire than what I’d heard from the specialists. Although she made no promises, she held out possibility. “The question is really how much you can stand,” she added. “It’s about how long you want to keep trying to get pregnant versus how much you want to get on with your life, start being a parent.”
And that was the rub. In the swirl of drugs, surgeries, and miscarriages, I’d somehow lost sight of parenthood as the goal. In fact, I’d harbored moments of panic with each pregnancy, wondering whether, now that I’d proven I could conceive, I actually wanted the obvious end point. (Then I’d immediately berate myself for my negative thoughts, which were doubtless causing my qi to stagnate, killing my baby.) My compulsion to succeed, to “win” at pregnancy may have rolled over my uncertainty about motherhood—replacing it with a fear that illness and infertility made me less of a woman—but the ambivalence was never resolved. Now, given the opportunity to parent rather than be pregnant, I clutched. Certainly, despite my reaction to little Kenji, I still had concerns about adoption. Sure, this was rather sudden. Yes, I still wanted to try for a biological baby, but that wasn’t the whole story: faced with an actual, flesh-and-blood child that I could parent right now, I wasn’t ready to make the commitment.
The third time Koko called, I answered. “Um, I’ve been out of town,” I lied. “I just got your messages.”
“I thought so,” she replied. “There is a girl in Hiroshima who is having a baby and would like it to be adopted by an American couple.”
“Really?” I said, feigning excitement. “That’s great. But we haven’t even started the paperwork …” I trailed off.
“Maybe you could do that now.”
“Okay, sure. How about if I talk to Steven and call you back in a day or two?”
A week later I ignored the sound of her voice on my machine; it was the coward’s way of sending my own message.
And here is the shame of my shame: I didn’t tell Steven about Koko’s calls. My excuse, my twisted rationalization, was that I didn’t need to. By then we had come up with a new plan and I was certain, absolutely positive, that this one would work.
10
DEAR PEGGY, DEAR FISH
Two burly security guards blocked my view of the concourse. It was April 2002, the first time I’d picked someone up from the San Francisco airport since the World Trade Center bombings; I had forgotten there was no longer open access to the gates. The guards eyed me as I craned to see over their heads, bobbing and weaving any way I could for a clear sightline. How would I find Jess? What if I didn’t recognize her? I had seen pictures, of a slim, curvy young woman with expressive eyes, auburn hair, and a twenty-one-year-old’s newly hatched skin. She’d warned me that she was short (which, as a person of height myself, I privately considered a character flaw), but even so, I aimed my gaze too high and would’ve missed her if she hadn’t raised an arm to flag me, her cheeks pink-flushed, her smile glowing. I grinned back, but couldn’t match her wattage. I was too busy looking her over, thinking to myself, Could I really bear this woman’s child?
I can’t believe my luck! I really hope you’re Peggy Orenstein the author!”
That was the first line of an e-mail I’d received five years earlier from a sixteen-year-old who identified herself only as "Fish.” Girls often wrote to
me in those days after reading Schoolgirls. Usually we traded a letter or two and that was it. But Fish kept writing and so I did, too. Eventually I learned her real name was Jess Catapano. She was the only child of an elementary school aide and a construction foreman in West Palm Beach, Florida, where she attended a specialized public arts high school. “I feel so lucky,” she wrote. “I wouldn’t be happy at all in a regular school.” Jess loved writing and did it well; she dreamed of being a journalist someday, maybe focusing on feminist issues as I had.
She peppered me with questions about my career path and the courses I took in college. We traded recommendations for books (me: Autobiography of a Face; her: The Bell Jar) and CDs (me: Kelly Willis, What I Deserve’, her: Death Cab for Cutie, Something About Airplanes). Sometimes she asked for more pressing advice: her friends were smoking weed—should she try it? She loved her boyfriend—was it time to have sex? I treaded carefully, not wanting to lose my credibility but afraid of over-influencing her. I felt more at ease (though also more accountable) when a year or so into our correspondence her mother dropped me a line. “Thank you for writing to Jess,” she said. “It means a lot to her—and to me. It’s good to know she has another trustworthy adult to talk to.”
At first I only responded to Jess’s letters rather than initiating my own, but after a while, especially if we had three or four exchanges a day, I lost track of who was propelling our correspondence forward. Jess was funny and talented; I enjoyed knowing what was going on inside of her head. More than that, as the miscarriages mounted and the IVFs failed, our exchanges made me feel that I had a hand in raising a child. I was thirty-four when we “met”; she was a high school junior. For the first couple of years, I was guarded about the details of my own life; I wasn’t dishonest, but I didn’t want to burden her with cancer and infertility—problems she was too young to understand. Once she was in college, though, I became less protective. In my work I’d said that the best role models don’t try to present themselves as perfect; young women need honesty, not Teflon. I was determined to practice what I preached.
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