- - - - - - - - - - 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
Sex and the 7-year-old boy The
foundling Confessions of a teenage
mom The worst mother
who ever lived, and other light reading - - - - - - - - - - Mamafesto
- - - - - - - - - -
|
MISSING CHILDREN | PAGE 2 OF 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 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.
Rob Spillman writes the books column for Details and is a frequent contributor to Salon. Join the discussion on dealing with the death of a child in the Mothers area of Table Talk.
Related article:
Unspeakable losses By Dayna Macy
|
Arts & Entertainment | Books | Comics | Life | News | People
Politics | Sex | Tech & Business | Audio
The Free Software Project | The Movie Page
Letters | Columnists | Salon Plus
Copyright © 2000 Salon.com All rights reserved.
