Post 331: Waiting for Daisy

Waiting for Daisy by Peggy Orenstein. ISBN: 9781596910171.

I've always thought that the whole infertility industry is a bit shady. It is so incredibly expensive, there are so many different methods, and when it comes down to it there are probably very good biological reasons why certain people can't conceive. It is unfortunate and sad, and I am in no way saying that these people have inferior genes or shouldn't be parents, but I find it troubling when people put their own futures and health (marital, financial, mental, and physical) at risk in any one pursuit. I have similar feelings towards professional athletes who build up their bodies only to break them in horrendous ways, or people who invest all of their money in the next big thing that doesn't pan out. Sure, the payoff could have been big, but they didn't leave room for disaster, for the big misfortunes life might throw at them. And yes, I'm aware that my own life is kind of a big misfortune.

Part of me wonders if the infertility industry, the things that people do to get pregnant, are only prolonging the pain. Of course someone could end up with exactly what they want, a healthy child, but what about the people who ruined or nearly ruined their lives and still didn't get a baby in the bargain? Maybe if they had been told, "No way in hell are you having a child," they could have accepted their situation and made the best of it. How many people have been given false hope and spent years being crushed over and over again?

Personally, I don't know if I could handle the trauma. I think being told I was infertile would be enough. Sure, I don't have as much investment in having a child because I don't want one and don't foresee myself wanting one anytime in the future... but I'd like to know I have the option. Then again if I found a doctor who would tie my tubes, I'd be in his office by tomorrow and paying the credit card bill for the next 10 years. I am a bit conflicted like that. I guess when it comes to biology I kind of feel like the best thing to do would be to listen to my body. If my body tells me I shouldn't have biological kids, then that's probably a good idea and even if I want them really badly, no amount of injecting myself with hormones and fertilized eggs is going to make me happy if I don't actually get pregnant. Even then, there's a chance I'll have lost everything I wanted to share with that child (my house, my partner, my sanity).

So if I'm still blogging in 10 years and find out that I can't get pregnant, someone please remind me to reread Orenstein's book. She is a much stronger person than I am, also I'm pretty sure she was slightly insane for at least three of the years she was trying to get pregnant. Really, this is a good book for anyone to read, regardless of fertility issues.

Great review over at Kirkus.
LibsNote: Copy checked out from the library.

Post 330: Waiting for Daisy

Waiting for Daisy by Peggy Orenstein. ISBN: 9781596910171.

Warning: I'm going to get fairly personal and graphic about a possible early term miscarriage.

There is a moment during Orenstein's third pregnancy where she says she feels a filament of life connecting to her child. When she loses the child she has to come to grips with the loss. One of the ways she does this is through the ritual of Mizuko kuyo, which is designed to offer comfort and repentance to those who have lost children under the age of seven or who have had miscarriages or abortions. She also talks about the disconnect between how women are supposed to react to their miscarriages versus general feeling of whether or not the fetus obtained personhood. I'll use her own words as they are more striking than my summary,

"All of this [attention and preparation for a child at such an early stage in pregnancy] encourages a mother-to-be to see the fetus as a person, at least in the psychological sense, at an ever-earlier stage. You tell friends, Names are bandied about. The baby feels real. Yet, if the pregnancy goes amiss, that personhood is abruptly revoked and you're supposed to act like nothing ever happened."  Page 132.

Before about May 2009, I might not have understood these words. I would have understood that of course a miscarriage is a very unfortunate and heart-wrenching thing, especially when the child is wanted, but at five weeks? At five weeks it has barely even reached the size of a sesame seed. How can someone possibly feel emotional attachment to something that small and insignificant, something that is likely to miscarry on its own at this stage if there are any cellular issues? But I get it now, and I'm ready to talk about it.

Two years ago I was busy finishing up my second to last semester in graduate school. I was signing up for my last round of classes and working two part-time jobs in the university library. A month earlier I had skipped a period, which is highly unusual for me, and a month before that my boyfriend (soon to be fiance) and I had a condom failure. I did take the Plan B pill for the condom failure, and it is likely that it affected my cycle, but there is also the slight chance that I was pregnant. I remember finally getting my period after starting my first round of birth control pills (which were prescribed after two home pregnancy tests and bloodwork at the doctor's office just to be extra sure). The bleeding was much heavier than it had ever been since I was 14. During one of my work shifts I went to the restroom, felt some very painful cramping, and passed a ball of tissue that was about the size of a newborn kitten.

It was distressing. It was so distressing I did not allow myself to think that it might have been, could have been, a potential child. I couldn't do it, not for at least a year. And I had been frequently nauseous the previous week or so, but chalked it up to introducing new hormones into my body...along with one too many margaritas the one time I actually threw up. It still makes me sad to think that it might have been a child, even though two years later I am in no position to even take care of myself. I mourn the potential of that being, regardless of whether it even was a fetus or just something in my head. I did and do still have a psychological connection to that moment and that unknown being.

I still do not want a child in my life. I don't see myself as being a biological mother, although the idea has become less scary over the years. But I do still feel pain and conflict over what might have been. I don't regret the decision not to bring a child into the world, if a child it was, because I could not have provided the life it deserves no matter how much love I could give it. I do mourn that potential child in the way that I mourn the loss of any potential life, whether at the age of 99 or barely born. Death of any sort is a sad and troubling thing, and the death of an unborn child is always sad, even if it is sometimes necessary.

I am pro-choice. I don't know if I would ever take the steps to have an abortion, because I have not been in that situation myself. I do know that I want to have the option to make that choice. I might need to someday. There is no birth control method that is 100% effective, short of sterilization (which they won't do to most women who don't have children), so I need to know that I have the right to terminate a pregnancy should all attempts to prevent one fail. This does not mean that it will be an easy decision for me if it happens and I make that choice. But I know, no matter what I choose, I will always wonder if it was the right thing to do.

Great review over at Kirkus.
LibsNote: Copy checked out from the library.

Post 303: Cinderella Ate My Daughter

Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein. ISBN: 9780061711527 (eBook).

I suppose most of you have probably guessed this by now, but I have never really identified much with the "girlie girl" stereotype. In fact, most people peg me as being masculine, and I've even been labeled dyke, queer, whatever. This is less true. I am most certainly a female; I even enjoy being a female and have no desire to be a male, I just have no desire to be shoved into dresses and to wear makeup even when I'm working out, or to only take certain jobs because those other jobs are "too manly" or "gross."

When I was a young girl I played with Barbies and wore a certain amount of pink and even played house. That last one sometimes made me uncomfortable because the way that little girls played house was very structured. I could pretty much be a mommy, or I could be the "weird" kid who played the daddy. Since my mother was the breadwinner and a more fully functioning human being than my father, I identified more with her, so I always wanted to be the one to go to work. My friends thought this was strange since it was typically the reverse in their household. I may have been more comfortable playing homemaker if my father's stints at home didn't mostly involve him sitting in his underwear, watching TV, and smoking. Had he added value to our home life, it would have been easier to accept a role in which I was not as active outside the pretend home, but still contributed to it.

As I grew older I was more falsely assigned the "tom boy" label and soon became stuck with that image. In some ways this was even less accurate than the girlie girl label. But I was more comfortable wearing that label than I was the girlie girl label and so I stopped playing house and I stopped wearing pink (I even hate wearing pink underwear and it angers me that the 10-packs often have 3 or 4 pairs) and I stopped playing Barbie, at least in public. Even though I did all these girlie things, they were never the focus of my play. I always gravitated more towards play that involved exploring my world or taking on some kind of power. I remember that fairies were big at the time because of FernGully. Even though Crysta was kind of a flake, she did end up as the most powerful fairy and the most influential member of her society once she took up Magi's mantle. I frequently played witch by mixing up various bits of leaves and dirt and bugs and chunks of hair into a metal bucket.

I think perhaps the reason I was misunderstood and mislabeled as a tom boy was because most of my play was solitary. This is especially true after we moved from California to Oklahoma sometime during 2nd grade. Perhaps if I hadn't started in the middle of a school year it would have been easier for the other children to accept and get to know me. Instead I had to make friends with children who already knew each other and had different ways of playing with each other than I was used to. So instead of diving headfirst into that play, I did what made me feel comfortable: I read during recess, sometimes I even did homework until the teachers took that away from me.

I don't believe that being smart was seen as a particularly boyish trait, but for some reason my reading material leaned more towards boyish. Maybe I was more entertained by the survival stories of Gary Paulsen or the wacky ghoulishness of Goosebumps (which were insanely popular during that time). I also really, really loved X-Men and began collecting cards and reading comic books. I loved it more for the stories than anything else, but there were certainly more strong female characters in comics than any other media at that time. I especially loved Storm, who was considered both a witch and a goddess and seemed to need no man. It was just more exciting than the "girl" fare offered by The Secret Garden and Heidi and Jane Eyre. I certainly read these books as well, but there was no particular danger involved and they were all so old. It was almost as if literature was saying, "girls have done things and had stories, but only a really long time ago, and even then they involved things like gardening, taking care of elderly people, and being a teacher." It wasn't so much that I looked down on those things, but all of them were covered in Little House on the Prairie and at that time I was using reading as a way of exploring different ways of living.

This trend did isolate me and though I loved "boy" things, it did not matter that I loved them for "girl" reasons. So all of my female friends turned out to be big readers like me, we didn't often play traditional "girl" games, and I also had at least one male friend who I spent more or less equal amounts of time with. It's not that I didn't want to be a girl, although it was interpreted that way by my peers, it's that I didn't want to be the kind of girl that was being modeled for me at that time. There wasn't quite an option I was comfortable identifying with and so I blended and tried on a variety of roles. I find it incredibly disappointing that not only is our definition of female still very narrow in this country, but that it appears to be shrinking as quickly as the waistlines on supermodels.

As I like to point out to most people, gender shouldn't even become a question of importance unless you plan on having intercourse with someone. Otherwise you have no need to know what kind of genitalia someone has. A man might very well like shopping and baking as much as a woman could like playing sports and carpentry. We do ourselves a disservice by focusing on male and female roles by limiting what is seen as "acceptable" by society.

My review can be found on Goodreads.
LibsNote: Free eGalley provided by NetGalley.

Post 302: Cinderella Ate My Daughter

Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein. ISBN: 9780061711527 (eBook).

I've been watching a lot of 1980's nostalgia recently. Mostly this has consisted of She-Ra, the Rainbow Bright Movie, and classics like The Princess Bride, Labyrinth, The Neverending Story, Time Bandits, and quite a few others.  The desire to watch said movies probably stems from my recent birthday on the 15th, but also from reading this book.  It made me realize how great and progressive these movies/cartoons actually were.

In fact, I would say that in most cases the cartoons marketed towards girls in the 1980's and early 1990's are probably more progressive than the cartoons of today. I will admit that I don't watch a whole lot of the current cartoons, but most of the "girl" cartoons are covered in pink and seem to consist of very few themes (princess, ballerina, etc.), or so it seems anyway. Even though there weren't very many females present in the cartoons of my day, in some ways I think that actually made it easier to identify with a character of my choice, regardless of whether that character was male or female. Rather than choosing a character based on gender I felt more free to choose one based on how well I identified. 

So, even though there was a token female in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series that I sometimes had no choice but to watch (my brother was very good about getting to the remote and keeping it), I had nothing in common with her. She was constantly getting kidnapped because she was being a "nosy" reporter and getting into situations she shouldn't have been in to begin with. At least that's the way the cartoon framed it. Instead I identified more with Donatello, who was the archetypal "smart" guy. 

Another cartoon we spent a lot of time watching was Scooby Doo, which did actually have a fairly even number of male to female characters, although I don't recall there being a whole lot of female villains. Even though Daphne is sort of an airhead, at least it was presented as an option rather than as the only role one could take. Granted it may have sent the message that you can either be "frumpy" and smart or hip and dumb, but I never really saw it that way, and Velma was at least cute in a nerdy sort of way.

Meanwhile the cartoons targeted more or less specifically towards girls tended to have animals rather than humans. We had My Little Pony, Popples, Carebears (in which most of the characters were male animals), and a few others. But at least every member contributed equally in those series and worked together cooperatively. Probably the biggest success in the 1980's girl power realm was She-Ra. She-Ra was badass, and I'm going to tell you why.

First of all, She-Ra started off as a "villain." She was originally a force captain in Horack's army. So already we have her in a leadership position and it allows that women have the option of being good or evil. Although in the She-Ra universe it does indicate that because Adora was brought up by Horack she was merely evil by nurture rather than nature. This and the other decidedly "evil" female characters were a big step for women as it expanded the roles of females outside of the typical scheming stepmother or the angelic heroine. Horack is actually the leader of the Horde on Etheria and Skeletor was his apprentice.  This means that theoretically She-Ra has the more competent villain, and yet she is constantly walking in and out of his dungeons more or less at will. 

Meanwhile, anytime He-Man shows up in She-Ra's world he does so either to ask his sister for help or he gets asked to join on She-Ra's adventures more or less because he just happens to be there. Very rarely does She-Ra actually seek out He-Man's help, mostly because they are in separate worlds and She-Ra has a very important leadership position, whereas He-Man is too busy playing Prince in his alternate identity.

In addition to having the better/"badder" villain, She-Ra also has more diverse powers. Where He-Man can only turn his outfit from a sassy pink and purple number to fuzzy brown underwear and gains super strength, She-Ra seems to gain an almost endless number of powers. Among the powers she gains are super speed, which apparently sometimes works as super strength (she can lift tanker-sized ships out of the water), and talking to animals, and her sword can apparently turn into almost anything, which is more often than not hilarious. I think this speaks well to She-Ra's adaptability, planning, and intelligence, because it requires her to think about the best method of saving the world rather than just punching robots or smashing doors. It even seems that the writers approve of this method, because more often than not it is She-Ra saving He-Man's ass because he's a big dumb hulk of a man and decided to go Leeroy Jenkins on the situation rather than sitting down and figuring out the best way of getting to the top of the tower.

So, uh, what cartoons do girls have now? Is there anything out there like this for them? Or are we stuck with being princesses and ballerinas or at best an explorer who needs every single "danger" pointed out, preferably in Spanish? Seriously, I just looked up an episode online, a weasel is driving, and as they're going down the road every character is looking at the "camera" waiting for you to tell them to watch out. I think I almost prefer the Sesame Street I grew up with, which only had male monsters.

My review can be found on Goodreads.
LibsNote: Free eGalley provided by NetGalley.