Waiting for Daisy
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from Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Fertility Doctors, An Oscar, An Atomic Bomb, A Romantic Night, and One Woman’s Quest to Become a Mother

Prologue: The Reckoning

I had twenty-four hours to fight for my life; twenty-four hours to right all the wrongs I’d done over the last year, to prove the sincerity of my remorse. If I couldn’t, I’d be dead by the following fall. That’s the theory, anyway, behind Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year for Jews. It’s the day that God supposedly determines our fate, using indelible ink to inscribe us in the book of Life or of the book of Death. When I was a child, growing up in a tightly-knit Conservative Jewish community in Minneapolis, it terrified me to think that my destiny would be sealed with the setting sun. As the day faded, the prayers of the adults would grow more frenzied, more pleading. The Cantor would prostrate himself on the pulpit, his voice ululating. The rabbi would teeter on his feet, having stood before us all day without food or drink. During the last hour, we’d all stand, lights out, arc door open, the Torahs glittering in their New Year’s finery. The more devout men lifted their prayer shawls over their heads like shrouds, rocked and moaned, lost in private negotiation for their souls.

I’d long ago rejected the rituals as superstition, allowing no room for free will. But this year, the year I turned forty, I felt desperate for a new beginning. For the first time in over two decades–since leaving my home for Cleveland, New York and, eventually, Northern California–I fasted, went to the temple dressed in white, a symbol of both death and rebirth. I wore canvas sneakers rather than leather. I didn’t bathe or brush my teeth. And I prayed–not to a bearded dude in the sky who was totting up who’d been naughty and who’d been nice, but in hopes of something else: the strength to forgive myself for the sins against my marriage and my own heart that I’d committed during my six-year, single-minded quest to bear a child; for the courage to close my own book, one way or another, on this anguished chapter of my life.

The congregation turned to the pivotal prayer of the day, an alphabetized compendium of sins that they may have committed over the previous year. For something that’s centuries old, it’s eerily astute. We have been guilty, it begins. We have been hypocritical. We have broken our standards of behavior. We have given bad advice. We have been hard-headed. We have misled others. We have misled ourselves. After each admission we were to pound our chests with closed fists. Forgive us, pardon us, allow us to atone.

As my neighbors in the pews confessed, I silently made my own reckoning–a list of offenses that had begun inconsequentially then snowballed into a betrayal of my deepest self. I’d taken my temperature every morning. I have been obsessive. I’d peed on ovulation predictors five days a month. I’d craned my neck like a yogini to see my nether regions while sluicing my finger around to check for the monthly fluid that would guide sperm to egg. I have been impatient. I’d chugged bottles of cough syrup, whose active ingredient supposedly improves the flow. I’d interrupted love-making to squirt egg whites into myself with a turkey baster, also a flow-enhancer. I’d stood on my head post-coitally until I thought my neck would snap. I have humiliated myself. I’d rushed to my doctor’s after an afternoon quickie so she could examine my husband’s and my co-mingled juices under a microscope. I’d transported cups of sperm in my bra. I’d turned love-making soulless, insisting my husband watch porn to speed things up, coming in to “do his business” when he was ready. Pardon me, forgive me, allow me to atone.

I’d taken ovulation-stimulating pills that triggered fits of rage. I have been wicked. I’d given myself multiple daily injections of fertility drugs despite my breast cancer diagnosis a few years earlier. I have made mistakes. I’d asked my parents for $25,000 for long shot in vitro fertilization treatments. I’d let someone stick pins in my body every two weeks for a year and chugged unidentifiable herbal potions that tasted like dirt. I have been disappointed. I’d believed in the next new thing. I have allowed myself be led astray. I’d waited too long to start trying to conceive. I’d waited to long to start trying to conceive. Had I waited too long to start trying to conceive? Pardon me, forgive me, allow me to atone.

I’d had no idea how easy it would be to lose all sense of reason, to do things I swore I never would to become a mother, then go further beyond that. And here’s the irony: if you’d asked me ten years earlier, I would’ve said I didn’t even want to have children.

© Peggy Orenstein. All rights reserved.

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