It's amazing how the right topics come to me ... as if delivered by the Holy Spirit (or a really networked friend, i.e. Priscilla Warner) because I have been wanting to discuss the subject of fertility and depression for some time. I know from reading the comments of many Beyond Blue readers that depression is so often a result of infertility ... because of our culture's expectations, because of people's ignorance.
Writer Christina Gombar is willing to share her story with us, and in so doing will no doubt speak to the silent sufferers among us. She is also an accomplished writer whose commentary on women's issues appeared in The London Review of Books, The New York Times, Working Woman, Scholastic, and the Providence Journal. She is the author of "Great Women Writers," and has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow.
Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed, Christina!
1. In your piece for "Exhale," a literary magazine for "intelligent people who have lost a baby, or can't figure out how to make one in the first place," you lay out some creation myths:
* People can go from desperately wanting a child, to "choosing" to be child free. * Anyone can adopt. * Women wind up childless because they put off marriage to establish careers; or were looking for Mr. Right instead of Mr. Good Enough. * Anyone who wants a baby can get one, because this is America, where there is a solution to every problem. * Pets, gardening, or spending time with other people's children fills in for not having biological children of one's own. * People without children are not real adults, and don't know what real love is. * Infertility is a women's issue.
I'm so glad you listed all of those, because I admit to having believed some of them. It certainly made me think. Of the seven, which do you think is most harmful to women who can't have children?
Christina: Each is the most important to whomever the myth is misapplied. Probably the most common is women put off children for their careers. This isn't the fifties, very few women have the option of graduating high school or college and having a man at the ready to marry, willing and able to take on her and a child. Women who go to college generally come out in debt with huge loans, so do their husbands. They can't afford day care.
My situation isn't reflected in any of these myths. I got married young but soon got very sick. I spent my twenties paying off my education, working too many jobs in very tough environments. I got fired from my Wall Street for being sick, yet had to have a good income and health benefits to have a child. Many people who benefit from a supportive extended family at the time they have children don't understand that many of us don't have those advantages.
Also, the very assumption that childlessness in a married couple equals infertility in the woman. My friend Elsa wasn't infertile -- her husband was, by vasectomy. By the time they divorced, she was 43. I think there needs to be drawn a distinction between a woman who has gynological problems that stop her from getting pregnant at 25, and situational infertility like childlessness by marriage, and then women who start families at 50. That's not true infertility, that's past the natural biological childbearing age.
As I blogged on the New York Times, when celebrities are showcased having babies in their forties, then fifties, society gradually sees this as normal. Mainstream consumer magazines run articles about freezing your eggs in your twenties, so you can have a baby at 45, instead of talking about retuning society and the economic system to make it easier for young women to have children at biologically natural ages.
The solution really, is not to come up with newer and more advanced fertility treatments or yet more third-world adoption options. But to make the world safe and welcoming for people who wind up without children, often for very good reasons.
Many many childless people feel bereaved -- it is a situation that deserves respect, not pity or gloating.
2. In that same article you mention your friend Elsa, whose older husband didn't want more kids. She was often pitied, her husband demonized. People said to her, daily:
• "You're selfish." • "You don't know what real love is." • "Your husband will leave you."
And then you go one to say that he did leave her "because with so few counterparts in her workplace and community, her sense of private loss and public alienation corroded her marriage beyond repair." Man, that is such a crucial message there ... the absolute requirement of support. If an infertile woman wants to make her marriage work--wants to become immune, if at all possible to the toxic messages around her concerning this issue--what should she do?
Christina: I think the real question is -- what can society do to normalize Elsa's situation? An urban area is more accepting of non-nuclear families, as well as singles. I think it's her friends, neighbors, pastor, yoga instructors (who might, for example, address the class as if everyone were a Mom -- i.e. -- "Moms are tired" ... as if no one else had challenging life situations!) Her co-workers who preface every meeting with ceaseless chatter about their children. The women at the gym who turn their back in the middle of a conversation when one of their "Mom" friends comes in. It is truly a social status of second-class citizen.
Elsa tried to become very involved in her nieces and nephew, but sometimes the parents, her siblings, resented this.
There is no push button answer. Most books on childlessness are written NOT by people who are childless, but by psychotherapists who are mothers. We need to be able to speak for ourselves, to be heard. The Internet is a great resource lately, but these blogs weren't around four years ago, when my friend was going through this.
3. You say that 44 percent of women in their childbearing years don't have children, and some never will. And "while the world is rightly concerned with family issues, the constant focus on motherhood can make it easy for a childless woman to feel that she is less than a woman, that in failing to reproduce, she as failed at life." Poignant and powerful words. I agree with you. So what can the infertile woman do to feed and nurture herself in a family-oriented world? And especially the infertile woman who suffers from depression? What have you done to sustain your sense of self?
Christina: I'd like to point out -- that 44% figure -- is women from 15 to 44. As we all know, those numbers can be exceeded in both directions! This figure includes women who may have a step-child, but no biological child of their own -- often by their husband's choice. Step-mothers often parent, but they don't get the societal credit for it. I have several friends in this situation.
I can speak for what works for me, which might not necessarily work for someone else. First, I write, which is not a replacement for having a child of one's own, but a distraction, pleasure, obsession, assertion, as well as a way to vent. I am lucky that many of my depressions have been cured by travel, a change of scene, whether a day in New York or a yoga retreat. I get out in nature, I pray and meditate.
The tough thing is, sometimes you pray and you get the answer you don't want. You can have faith, and the thing you want can still be denied you. Once someone said to me, God has another plan for you. I've always had to be very flexible, so I'm O.K. with that. I went to a faith healer once, and she warned, The outcome may not be what you want.
Going to places of religious worship can be very difficult -- the Catholic church has respect for the celibate childless (of course!) nuns and priests, and for families, but the message is never good for childless married adults. The message is always, if you believe, God will give you this. But it's not always possible. I always have to explain to people that I'm not even eligible to adopt, due to health and financial circumstances. Clearly, it is God's will for some of us to remain childless.
Some years ago, I remember being at the Catholic church at Easter, and while in previous years it had been hard not to feel left out and maligned, both by the sermon and the other congregants, I had a still moment, looking at the decorated ceiling, and I got this message from God, at first this faint tingling glimmer, then a feeling of certainty, that it was O.K. for me to be exactly as I am.
But I constantly have to remind myself of this, because the outer world isn't telling me that. I remind myself that I have two aunts who didn't have children, and have had full and happy lives and very enduring marriages, like my own marriage. They were always good role models growing up. I had two uncles who were priests -- one, still teaching at 75, took my older sister and me off my mother's hands to all the Disney films. The other, who sadly passed away a few years back, used to take us on swimming outings to Sherwood Island, a large state park in Connecticut. It was too much of a trip for my mother, who had younger children, work, and her own parents to take care of.
I remind myself how valued these and other childless people were and are in my life. My best teachers, bosses, colleagues, doctors, lawyers, friends -- have often been childless. They have a lot more to give, and they give it freely.
I'd like to tell infertile and/or childless people to just tune out the crazyiness! A few years ago I read a story about then-57 year old, former Good Morning America host Joan Lunden, whose husband had twins by a surrogate, using the eggs from a third woman -- and then another set when Lunden was 57. Lunden declared, "I want readers to know this is absolutely O.K. If they're not her eggs, they're not her baby."
Well, I'm not a celebrity, I don't have a platform like Joan Lunden, but I'd like to float the message that It's Absolutely O.K. not to do a third world adoption, Foster Care, or a fertility treatment that seems wrong for you on a gut level. But society, and the media especially, needs to start getting the message across that adults without children are O.K. just as they are. I appreciate you giving me this platform.
4. You mention that you have read dozens of blogs as you search online for kinship regarding this issue. Could you share with my readers some of your favorites? Where are the childless hubs online?
Christina: The first I came across last spring was Nymphe: Living Childless and Child Free. The woman who authors the blog is actually childless by marriage, but feels the lack terribly. It's a very intelligent, deep-thinking forum. Click here for a recent post that addresses some of the complicated spiritual issues of coping with grief.
Another, Coming2Terms.com, is hosted by a woman who confronted fertility issues in her twenties and spent about 15 years going through the IVF mill. She had spent a lot of time on the many fertility blogs during treatments -- and found that she needed to create a safe place for people who experienced "the flip side of IVF" that the media seldom talks about.
Finally, Childless By Marriage is pretty self-explanatory! Blogs are probably starting up every day.
In the future I plan to write more for people who live without parenting due to health issues. The media just shows us the woman paralyzed from the neck down who managed to have a baby -- with a huge support system, money, etc. Most chronically ill people I know are unmarried and trying to keep a roof over their heads. To become obsessed with having a baby in such a marginal life situation is just madness, but we live in a baby-mad culture right now.
All the discussions of parenthood in the CI (chronic illness) community tend to center on how to get a baby, and get those around you to take care of the baby as well as you. In one discussion blog, a woman wondered if it was wrong to have a child with all her disabilities. Another who'd done so quoted scripture to justify spanking, and spoke of monitoring her children from her bed. I was a voice crying out in the wilderness, when I suggested accepting a childless life as God's will.
I wrote: "You can develop tunnel vision when you're in the midst of an infertility struggle." I want to let other people in my situation know that there's a light at the end of that tunnel.
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In love, I still have to ask, on the subject of adoption....do you want to be a breeder, or a parent? - one is a desire for self-gratification, the other is a promise of self-sacrifice. Sorry, but if you don't think adopting a baby, or a child of any age is good enough, maybe personal fulfillment is a little too high on your scale of importance. That is NOT what parenting is.
My background is where contact with women who had difficulty conceiving was routine. I was surprised, frankly, that I didn't, but after watching these women abuse themselves through self-doubt and the racquet of fertility "counseling", my husband and I vowed that if it didn't happen the old fashioned way, we would know that God had given us the signal that we were meant to parent by different means. To this day, we consider adoption as a way we wish to complete our family. I suffered a mid-term miscarriage of baby 3 and grieve for that child to this day. It is hard to imagine not knowing her. Someday. But I choose not to "suffer" endlessly - the suffering I knew had it's purpose, and now it's time has passed. That is a choice we all make.
Do I have deep abiding empathy with women who for whatever reason cannot or choose not to have biological children? - absolutely. Do I think women who have other, accessible options and instead choose to indulge themselves in whining and "why me" are immature and silly? - unapologetically yes. If you want a baby, get one. If you want to whine, it's your right. But please don't act as if your need for pregnancy supercedes the needs of a child who knows no parents.
And as a final, judgemental thought....for those women who think that their experience of infertility with spouse 2/3/4 who is their "Creators choice" - who are your living children? Satan's spawn? - shame on you! If you harp on having married the "wrong person" you've just told your kids that they're wrong for living. Don't ever let those beautiful children know their mother is so selfish that her sex drive is more important than their very existence. Emotional abuse, plain and simple! Gross.
This article gave me a special insight on this issue,I felt really different after reading it,as if its showing me a clear way that there is more to life than to brood over ones infertility.Adoptation is one of the best ways of gratitude to God that we are thankfull however we are.attitude is all that counts in the long run!
I definitly was taken back by this article, a few opinions, random comments and scattered thoughts...."Childless Woman" I feel you very much.And girlfriend, woman to woman I hope you get a chance to read my blog so you know your not alone. You took my breathe away and tears of comfort that another woman feels similar to what I feel on this subject.
If the other options toward parenthood don't feel right on a gut level, I agree, don't pursue them. But, we still have a strong bias in our country against adoption. You didn't give birth to your husband or best friend and you love them . . . I wish people could be more open minded to the many paths toward parenthood . . . giving birth is just one option.
To those singing the praises of adoption. Guess what, adoption is not available for everyone either. I'm so tired of people telling me to go adopt instead of feeling sad about not having children. Not everyone CAN adopt. So few people understand the realities!
1.) It is expensive. The average cost is between $20-30,000. Double that if you don't want an only child. It can be more if there are problems, you have to take special time off work, fly to a country more than once etc. For those who have spent their life savings, home equity etc. trying to get pregnant, there is often little money left.
2.) Then there are the emotional costs. I've watched friends fall apart after the birth mother makes a last minute decision to keep a child they were adopting. Nearly half of all adopters have had these kinds of "false starts" and the average cost $5,000. These add up. See number 1.
2.) If you are waiting until "your fertility runs out" it can be very difficult to adopt if you are older. Many agencies and countries will not adopt to someone over 40.
3.) It can be competitive. You have almost no chance of adopting domestically if you are over 40 and competing with younger couples. And if you are blue collar workers, middle-class, rural etc., you will be up against doctors, lawyers and other with more money and opportunities to offer a baby.
4.) There can be other factors that impact your ability to adopt. Like medical issues. If you are single or married. If you are in a same sex relationship. Some agencies even want you to be a particular religion.
For the record, I am adopted myself. The only adopted girl in a family of 6 children. My family is wonderful and I love them very much. People call it win-win-win. Well, it's not that simple. It's a situation borne out of the pain of an unwed mother. It's a child who is taken out of it's place in the world, in their culture, in their biological family line. It's taken me years to unravel my identity and place in the world.
Adoption - just one more way to make infertile women feel like failures. Please, go back and reread the article.
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