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."
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Even after Bialosky's tragedy, she, like many others, continued to yearn for a biological child. "What is this burning desire? This need for a child? I remember wishing they could extract it out of me, the way they extracted my child," Bialosky writes. While wishing the feeling away, she still completely entrusted herself to fertility specialists: "Medicine is seductive. It gives me the hope I need to get up in the morning." And after repeated failures, hope itself can become the enemy. "It was hope, more than anything else, that my wife most feared these days," Bob Schocochis writes in his devastating essay about his wife's repeated miscarriages.
When we first decided to try to have a child, my wife and I glanced at the literature of failure, about what could go wrong with egg and sperm, and the myriad of misfortunes that can befall pregnancies. But only a quick glance. We had an almost superstitious fear of looking, as if by letting words and phrases like "ectopic" or "Down's syndrome" into our brains they would somehow manifest themselves in my wife's womb. What would we do if we were faced, like L.N. Wakefield and Michael Berube, with an amniocentesis test showing Down's syndrome? In "Wanting a Child" the emotional weight of deciding whether to abort is heartbreakingly rendered. "Every aspect of daily life, from what I ate to how I slept, to my thoughts and emotions, had been focused on protecting my unborn child," Wakefield writes. "How was it possible that I would consciously with free will participate in its death? How could my husband and I have wanted a child so desperately and yet have known relatively quickly that we would not keep it?"
Philip Lopate, in his account of raising a daughter with severe gastric problems, writes: "That she made me enter the Kingdom of Anxiety, which is the lot of all parents, seems a small price to pay for the plentitude of her being." And this is at the heart of "Wanting a Child," this fierce, unquenchable desire to give life, to give of ourselves. Jenifer Levin, a single gay woman, contributes an account of her quest to adopt a Cambodian child in the war-torn country that does not allow foreign adoptions. She persists, fights and passionately demonstrates "the multiple ways we find to love."
My daughter recently told me, in all seriousness, "Daddy, we're not friends." Luckily she amended the statement by adding, after a dramatic pause, "We're mammals." Because of her constant creativity, willfulness and unrestrained love, I have never experienced so much joy, exasperation and connection to life as in the last two and a half years. Reading "Wanting a Child" affirmed all of these feelings and took me further, opening me up to the complete realm of possible parenting experiences. To acknowledge the risks, the possible pains, the possible failures only heightens my appreciation for the miracle that is having a child. For any parent and for anyone who has contemplated being a parent, "Wanting a Child" is an invaluable affirmation.
