T A B L E++T A L K

Why did you become a parent? Share your reasons in the Mothers area of Table Talk

- - - - - - - - - -

R E C E N T L Y

Drama Queen Candidates
The best of the worst of what you did
(05/04/98)

Sex and the 7-year-old boy
By Mona Gable
How to deal with it when your 7-year-old begins making the moves on you
(05/01/98)

The foundling
By Sallie Tisdale
Adoption -- and giving birth -- taught me that biology has nothing to do with being a parent
(04/30/98)

Confessions of a teenage mom
By Tessa Souter
My son and I grew up together, will grow old together -- and saved each other
(04/29/98)

The worst mother who ever lived, and other light reading
Mythology may be the key to understanding the meaning of your pathetic mortal life
(04/28/98)

ARCHIVES

- - - - - - - - - -

Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

- - - - - - - - - -

"Wanting A Child" collects the stories of writers whose desire to be parents came far easier than the children they longed for
- - - - - - - - - - - -

WANTING A CHILD | EDITED BY JILL BIALOSKY AND HELEN SCHULMAN | FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, 269 PAGES

BY ROB SPILLMAN | My wife became pregnant during her first menstrual cycle after she went off the pill. Through blind luck. There was no basal thermometer, no counting of days, no testing of mucus viscosity. Our attitude was, "If it happens, it happens." Underlying our casual approach was an unspoken, paralyzing fear of failure.

We are conditioned to think about procreation as the easiest, most "natural" event. The societal message about people who do fail -- those unfortunate to suffer miscarriages or stillbirths, those who endure infertility, those who are gay -- is that they have been naturally selected out and are therefore damaged. Silently damaged. It is a great unspoken. This we know from a surprising number of friends who have suffered from not being able to have a child. In this age of supreme faith in science, the loss of a child seems medieval, and those who endure it frequently feel compelled to suffer in silence, too hurt, too ashamed, too angry to talk about it. And we, the unthinking easy breeders (our daughter will soon be 3), generally don't know what to say, how to comfort, how to empathize with such a primal, personal loss. "Wanting a Child," in which prominent writers share their personal stories of infertility, miscarriage, adoption and the challenges of raising disabled children, should help banish the taboo of talking about miscarriage and loss, comfort those struggling to become parents and help those who want to understand the emotional crush weighing down on their friends.

These wrenching yet hopeful essays open a window into a house of pain. It is a place where the biological alarm clock has gone off, dropping the all-consuming procreational bomb on the brain. "The irrevocable moment in becoming a parent is not the moment you conceive a child; it's the moment you conceive of her," Barbara Jones writes of traveling to China to adopt a girl when she was still single. As soon as these desirous shock waves ripple through you, the world assumes a simple duality -- you either have a child or you are childless. "They were in one world, and I was in another," as co-editor Helen Schulman puts it in her harrowing account of trying to conceive, a three-year nightmare that included "three miscarriages, five doctors, two surgical procedures, a blood transfusion, infertility drugs, four months of progesterone shots, endless, endless testing, and a partridge in a pear tree to achieve this pregnancy."

Procreation is frequently perceived as a mystical experience wherein strange cosmic forces seem to play with no regard to the hard and fast rules of science, logic or fairness. And when infertility strikes, most of the contributors turned from intuition and the unknown mysteries of the universe to the comfort of fertility specialists. "Magical thinking gave way to practicality," as Rita Gabis puts it in her poetic essay about her battle with infertility and miscarriage. And when science fails, faith in anything, even mourning, can be obliterated, as with Peter Carey, who writes a heartbreaking remembrance of the stillbirths of three children to his first wife. Thirty years later, remarried and with two healthy children, Carey still regrets not naming his lost children, not properly mourning them, not properly acknowledging his and his wife's pain. As co-editor Jill Bialosky writes in her beautiful and tragic account of the loss of her two prematurely born children, "They existed; they matter."

N E X T+P A G E: "What is this burning desire?"