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!!!

Two quotes and a movie

Two things I read this weekend that I thought were really quite beautiful/true:

"Be glad of life, because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars; to be satisfied with your possessions, but not contented with yourself until you have made the best of them; to despise nothing in the world except falsehood and meanness, and to fear nothing except cowardice; to be governed by your admirations rather than your disgusts; to covet nothing that is your neighbor's except his kindness of heart and gentleness of manners; to think seldom of your enemies, often of your friends, ...and to spend as much time as you can, with body and with spirit. These are little guideposts on the footpath to peace."

~ Henry van Dyke

"[...] all the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people. [...] The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people."
~ Elizabeth Gilbert in "Eat, Pray, Love"

(Yes, I am, indeed, still reading that same one book. Not only is it due to having/wanting to read textbooks and journal articles for class prep, but it's also due to not wanting to finish the book yet. It has grown on me a lot, I must say. I thought Italy (the very first part) was the weakest of the three chapters. I feel with every page her transformation into the individual she sought to be becomes more noticeable and it's been a real pleasure partaking in someone else's life-changing experience like that. Plus, it tickles the travel-bug in me and reading about all these exotic, beautiful places pleases me greatly before I snooze off every night...)

On a different note, I can highly recommend seeing "The Painted Veil" in theaters. I saw it last night and was really pleasently surprised by it (not that I expected it to be awful and wanted to ruin my Saturday night with an overpriced 2-hr movie, but based on what I had read and seen it could have easily been one of those borderline kitsch movies). I thought it was a great story of growing as an individual and a couple and I remember it as very tender in its music and (most of) its images. Really not bad. At all.

Time for bed... Have a good week everyone!

eat, pray, love

A friend (you know who you are:)) loaned this book ("Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert...gleichnamiger Titel in der deutschen Fassung, uebrigens) to me just recently to read over the holidays. Let the bookcover or amazon tell you more details..for my purposes it suffices to say that it's about a woman in her early thirties coming out of a bad, long divorce, who decides to get away from it all to follow her love for traveling and to search for herself in Italy, India and Indonesia. I have just started the book, but came across two parts last night that I wanted to share, because they struck me as interesting, because they encourage self-acceptance, self-forgiveness and just being in the present with whatever feeling or thought arises. She reports these thoughts at a time when she is trying to recover from depression - she just got off her meds (because, as I think for good reasons that she also states, she has issues with taking antidepressants) and for the first time feels the onset of depression again. She reports about hearing this inner voice of kindness and reason that speaks "to her" in her darkest hours and at this time it says:

"I'm here. I love you. I don't care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it - I will love you through that, as well. If you don't take the medication, I will love you, too. There is nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than depression and I am braver than loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me." (p.54)

Again, this is the author speaking to herself.

A little later on, struck by loneliness yet again and looking for a way to come out of it, she reports that "voice" again:

"So be lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings." (p.65)

I'll leave you with that. I just wanted to share it, as I think it's an interesting and strong approach to take for someone who is currently going through a difficult time. From a psychological and human point of view...