Blog Book Tour: Waiting for Daisy

Waiting for Daisy, a memoir by Peggy Orenstein, has gotten such good press that I was interested in reading it—so I was thrilled to be asked to be a part of the blog book tour. It’s a quick read about one woman’s attempts—over 6 years—to have a baby. I know several people who are using various technologies to try to conceive, and the book gave me a window into some of the struggles they must be facing. It also gave a sense of the troubling medical, political, and moral landscape of reproductive technology in the United States today.

In recounting her story, Orenstein shows how one intervention leads to another—first Clomid, then intrauterine insemination (when, as she puts it, intercourse “was no longer a precondition of conception”), then in vitro fertilization, then the use of donor eggs. She writes, “That’s the insidious thing about infertility treatments: the very fact of their existence, the potential, however slim, that the next round might get you pregnant creates an imperative that may not have otherwise existed.”

During these years, her marriage suffers and so does her mental health. It’s hard to sympathize with a narrator who says, “I’d turned lovemaking soulless, insisting my husband watch porn to speed things up, coming in to ‘do his business’ when he was ready.” Ultimately, though, that kind of naked honesty is as much a strength of the book as it is a weakness. Although it can make for uncomfortable reading, it shows how much infertility treatment can mess with someone’s head and turn a relationship into a means to achieving only one specific end. Orenstein never claims to be a model for all other women undergoing fertility treatments. On the contrary, she shows us how even an educated and articulate woman could go down a slippery slope of choices that leads to a “betrayal of my deepest self.” She asks, “How was it that despite my achievements, my education, my professed feminist politics, my self-worth had been reduced to whether or not I could produce a child?”

The most touching chapter was the one about mizuko—the Japanese term for “water child,” or miscarried or aborted fetuses. During a work trip to Japan, Orenstein suffers a miscarriage and finds local customs comforting. She writes that in Japan, a woman who has aborted or miscarried “may light a candle and say a prayer at a local temple. She may leave a handwritten message of apology on a wooden tablet. She may make an offering of food, drink, flowers, incense, or toys…. It struck me that mizuko kuyo contained elements that would both satisfy and disturb Americans on either side of the abortion debate: there is public recognition and spiritual acknowledgement that a potential life has been lost, remorse is expressed, yet there is no shame over having performed the act.”

In the end, Orenstein conceives her daughter naturally and gives birth just shy of her 42^nd birthday. She asks, “What if the deus ex machina of pregnancy hadn’t descended upon us? That question haunts me.” Indeed, many couples who undergo fertility treatments aren’t so fortunate--and it’s interesting to note that Orenstein’s happy ending comes not from advanced reproductive technology but from old-fashioned sex. She acknowledges that she is lucky, an acknowledgement that brings “reverent, radiant gratitude that’s sweeter for having experienced its opposite.”