San Jose Mercury News
February 19, 2007

In Quest to be a Mom, She Lost, Then Found, Her Values

By Sue Hutchison

Berkeley author Peggy Orenstein is getting a lot of media attention for the riveting personal account of her battle with infertility, but there is something she wants to make very clear. Her book, "Waiting for Daisy," is not another grim cautionary tale for women who dare to wait until later in life to have a child.

It is a book about betrayal, how she felt betrayed by her body and how she betrayed her own feminist ideals by buying into a culture that says women are failures if they can't reproduce.

But it's also a book of redemption. By being brutally honest about what she put herself and her husband through, she was able to find her way back to a wonderful life that she had undervalued.

I first met Peggy in the fall of 2000 when, unbeknown to me, she was in the middle of her grueling odyssey. The story has a happy ending, which is telegraphed in the book's title and hinted at in the subtitle: "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."

Daisy isn't the point

Still, when we sat down to talk about it this month, she said that even though she loves being a mother to her darling Daisy, she doesn't want to fool herself or her readers into thinking the end justified the means.

"What I inflicted on myself, my marriage and my life did not make the process any easier or better," she told me. "And it really undermined what I already had."

What she had was a terrific marriage to filmmaker Steven Okazaki, a thriving career as a writer and a life full of creative friends, international travel and adventure. But when she was 36 and she and Steven decided that they wanted a child, her life began to unravel.

She began a six-year journey into the hell of failed fertility treatments, miscarriages and the growing conviction that her body was a "lemon" and she was inferior as a woman.

During that time, she became a "desperate person that I didn't even recognize," she told me. And it didn't help that she was drawn in by the sales pitch of fertility clinics, peddling the message that parenthood is the Holy Grail.

Losing sight of values

The irony is that for a long time Peggy wasn't sure she wanted to have children. When I first met her, we talked about the satisfactions of life and marriage without children. But the harder she tried to have a child with no success, the more she became convinced that she could never be happy unless she was a mother.

If she had it to do all over again, she said she would have been more sensitive to her husband's feelings and not defined herself through the prism of her infertility.

"It's easy to spin this as 'feminism done us wrong,' " she told me. "But it's just the opposite. It's the things that feminism has given me, a marriage of equals and the ability to have a rich, fulfilling life independent of marriage, that would have made me happy even if I couldn't have a child."

She just forgot that for six years.

Her book is a startling portrait of how the quest to deliver a baby in this brave new world of "endless" fertility can derail even the most confident, accomplished woman. The real cautionary tale: Be sure that in your zeal for motherhood, you don't lose sight of yourself and the blessings you already have.

There's some good motherly advice for Daisy.