Waiting for Daisy

After hearing an interview with her on NPR last week (click here to hear it), I immediately ordered Peggy Orenstein's latest book "Waiting for Daisy" from the local library. I got it yesterday and only stopped reading to go to Shakespeare on the Square, the bathroom or the fridge. The book's subtitle is "A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night, and One Woman's Quest to Become a Mother" and it is a fabulous (read: heart-wrenching, honest, dumbfounding, inspiring) piece on a booming (in)fertility industry driven by a culture that she says "fetishizes motherhood" and induces a sense of guilt and shame in women who choose career over family or who start the process of founding a family late(r) in life. She herself was 35 when she started, still torn if she really wanted children and soon falling prey to absolutely every (!!!) known and humanly possible way of increasing her chances to conceive, while seeking to decrease the ever-growing guilt over having started "too late". Robitussin, temperature, egg-white, Clomid, shots (derived from nun pee and hamster ovaries), IVF, IUI (intrauterine insemination), ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection), donor egg transplants, acupuncture, herbal remedies...you name it. Through all the miscarriages and disappointments, she still questions her ability to be a mother and acknowledges that her ordeal increasingly becomes about getting (and staying) pregnant rather than about actual motherhood.
All the issues of career vs. family aside, this is fantastic and often shocking account of the incredible business doctors (among others) make off of thousands of women's hope and grief, how little regulations there are, how arbitrary and humiliating many decisions by adoption agencies and doctors are. ...and how difficult it is for women to NOT let pregnancy and motherhood define them, especially once they have invested insane amounts of time, money and hope into all of the above mentioned promises.

Last but not least, her very personal story of battling breast cancer in addition to all else (and the story of her high school boyfriend, who now has 15 (!!!) kids) gives perspective to anything that often seems unnerving, defeating or trying - may it be trying to conceive for the 6th month in a row, a stressful family life or a long day at work with more chores waiting at home.

Definitely a must-read!!!