May 9, 2007
miscarriage break down
I just read Waiting for Daisy, Peggy Orenstein's new book about her six year struggle to become pregnant. I loved reading it; it's beautifully written and brutally self-aware. Orenstein does not hold back about what an obsessive, one-track minded freak she became, losing site of pretty much everything, including her marriage, in her quest for a child. I did enjoy the crumbling marriage stuff a lot. I know how hard it is when a kid comes into the picture, even just the idea of a kid! But my favorite parts are about miscarriage. Here's Orenstein on the confusing state of being pro-choice and embryo-obsessed:
...I'd already calculated my due date on a Web site, ogled pictures of "my baby's" development and joined an expecting club on iVillage... All of this 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...Voicing my confusion, admitting that the bundle of cells I so adamantly called a zygote had felt to me more like some sort of life, seemed like playing into the hands of the enemy.... What I'd experienced had not been a full life, nor was it a full death, but it was a real loss."
I recommend the book to anyone, but especially to anyone who's gone through miscarriage(s).
in pregnancy
