Don't Call Me Princess

by Peggy Orenstein

  The Pollacks have strong views about child-rearing, and they’ve made significant personal sacrifices to accommodate them. Brian’s government job is both less interesting and lower-paying than one in the private sector or academia, but the hours are regular, and twice a month he works a four-day week. With just one income, they take no out-of-town vacations, forgo nights out as a couple, and have passed on the kinds of luxury items most Americans take for granted, such as a CD player and a VCR. Brian’s parents chip in by helping with the mortgage on their modest home, and Carrie’s mom provides child care when they need it. They are both adamantly against day care. Carrie says that because of the nature of her work, she is fearful of abuse, and both she and Brian mentioned observing what they called “benign neglect” by nannies and day-care workers. “The bottom line,” says Brian, “was that one of us was going to stay home.”

  Which one of them that would be, however, was an open question. Brian would have seemed the more likely candidate for full-time parenthood. Carrie liked her job far more than he did and was more dedicated to it. Here is how Brian describes his job with a government agency: “It’s pretty easy. I can goof off for days at a time.”

  When Julia was born, they figured they’d each take a leave, then work out the next step from there. Carrie would go first, taking the four-and-a-half paid months that her job allowed, then Brian would put in for the six months’ unpaid parental leave his office provided. He was the first man to avail himself of the policy. “I got mostly stroked,” Brian tells me after dinner. “Other guys said, ‘That’s really cool.’”

  “‘Really cool,’” I counter, “but none of them did it themselves?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “And there was some ‘No way I would have done it.’”

  Brian says he was fully prepared to make fatherhood his vocation, yet even before he left work, subtle cues from friends and family let him know he was expected to return to his job. Carrie’s girlfriends told her how lucky she was that Brian was “trying to understand your experience.” Brian’s parents proclaimed the leave “wonderful for the baby,” as long as it didn’t hurt his long-term earning potential. All around, Brian was hailed as “a progressive and New Age-y dad”—provided he went back to work when it was over.

  Women may have been integrated into the male enclave of the workforce, but men have neither entered nor been accepted into the parallel universe of mothers. Brian enjoyed the attention of being the token dad at Gymboree, but it’s hard to imagine most men feeling as comfortable. Some of the women I met confessed that they think of full-time fathers as “losers.” Few young, single women imagined marrying a man who would want to be a stay-at-home dad. “I don’t need to be the test case for that,” one told me. “I mean, Mr. Mom was a great movie, but the reality seems more unsavory.”

  Meanwhile, the men who were trying to do their part complained that day-care providers and teachers always instructed them to tell their wives when a child needed Popsicle sticks for a project or a packed lunch for a field trip. The assumption persists, as sociologist Pepper Schwartz has pointed out, that a child’s primary parent is her mother and the father is a temporary substitute.

  Looking back on it, Brian believes he could have withstood such social pressures if he had enjoyed his early caretaking time with Julia. But when he discusses those six months, a tone of defeat creeps into his voice. “Staying home with her was really tedious,” he says. “I was surprised by the constantness of it, the lack of breaks that we so much take for granted in life. By mid-afternoon, my entire mental focus would be on how long it would be until Carrie returned.”

  I ask Brian if there was anything he loved about staying home with Julia. He grins. “Oh, absolutely,” he says. “Little things, like when she’d fall asleep with her tiny arms around my neck. And also there was the sort of general psychic feeling of being a father. The feeling of parental love was absolutely tangible. On the other hand, it was tinged with a lot of guilt at not being a better one. Not spending more time, not having more energy.”

  What struck me, listening to Brian, was that the experience he described mirrored that of so many new mothers. Studies have shown that professional women in their thirties are particularly likely to feel isolated after a child is born. Not only do they feel numbed by the monotony, they worry that their feelings make them bad parents. But women have two things Brian didn’t: a support network—other mothers and family members to help them cope with the boredom—and a social expectation that they would simply endure it. After all, there is no shame in a father admitting that he finds infants exasperating and retreating to the workplace. But when a mother does the same, her devotion is called into question—by others and by herself.

  As it turned out, that is what happened to Carrie. At first, she reveled in being the working parent. “It was great,” she told me. “I took care of Julia in the mornings, then I disappeared to work. Then I came home and took care of her some more. And I knew that during the day she was with Brian. But on the other hand, I started to feel like I was missing it, like he was home and I was missing all of this stuff.”

  As Brian’s paternity leave wore on, Carrie and Brian each began to articulate reasons why she would be the better full-time parent: Brian watched C-Span all day, and Carrie didn’t want Julia exposed to that much TV. Carrie was “more disciplined, more able to get the job done through the tedium.” Carrie was ambivalent, but less ambivalent about leaving work.

  “Carrie missed Julia,” Brian says. “Either she missed her genuinely emotionally or felt that she should be here for her.” He shrugs. “It probably was a combination. I think the truth is, Carrie didn’t want to be seen as ‘that kind of mom’—the mom who was working and not staying home with her kids.” Bad Mother: the phrase affects women like kryptonite, and it’s one of the most effective checks against those who want fuller lives or more help on the domestic front. The Bad Mother—“that kind of mother”—is thought to risk damaging her children through her independent needs and outside interests. It’s why so many working mothers protest that they “have” to work, while no father feels compelled to make such a justification. The Bad Mother is the evil twin of the Perfect Mother, who lives solely for her children, whose needs are completely in sync with theirs. In her book When Mothers Work, journalist Joan Peters found that working mothers in particular respond to the threat of being tagged a bad mother by unconsciously clinging to control. Micromanaging their children’s lives—retaining a sense of authority over packing lunches, choosing clothes, and coordinating their kids’ schedules—makes them feel that they are good mothers, even as the responsibility for “doing it all” overwhelms them.

  “I’m scared my husband wouldn’t do things right,” admits a thirty-six-year-old insurance executive in Minneapolis. “Like, one day he dropped our oldest daughter off at a Brownie event where I thought lunch would be provided. It wasn’t. Luckily, the troop leader worked something out for her, but I cried that night. I kept thinking, What a failure I am as a mother to not even think of what my daughter is going to eat for lunch.” She looks at me to make sure I understood what she is saying. “I didn’t think, He’s a bad father,” she emphasizes. “I didn’t blame him. I feel like if my house is messy or my kids don’t have clean clothes, people are going to judge me.”

  The stay-at-home mom is just as vulnerable as the working mom to Perfect Mother pressure. In addition to basic nurturing, Peters points out, she’s now expected to be a creative playmate, a developmental psychologist, and an educational expert, not to mention a ready volunteer. Carrie strives to imbue every activity that her kids engage in with a “purpose” and talks wistfully about her lost connections with old friends. “It’s not about who you want to be friends with,” she says about spending an afternoon with a mom she clearly didn’t connect with. “It’s based on who the kids are friends with, what’s good for them.” Although she spends a lot of time with her children, Carrie feels guilty because she sometimes drifts off wh
en Julia chatters at her or feels exhausted by Sam’s perpetual motion. Other women told me they felt they’d “failed as mothers” when they couldn’t breast-feed. (“I tried for six-and-a-half weeks. I really bonded with that pump,” one joked.) The impossible standards they set for themselves, shared by so many women, reminded me of teenage girls who, no matter what their weight, see themselves as fat. I don’t know whether there’s a Perfect Mother equivalent to an eating disorder, but I wondered: How good does a mother have to be before she feels good enough?

  I ask Carrie—since she’s given up her job, her financial independence, and time with friends for her children’s well-being—if there is anything that would make her feel she’s gone too far, that she has become too subsumed in her role as a mother. “If I suddenly felt totally satisfied with motherhood alone,” she says slowly, “that would be a warning sign. There’s got to be ambivalence. Because I can’t imagine ever being totally satisfied with this role.”

  That evening, when I left to travel on to Philadelphia, I felt disturbed. In many ways, I admired Carrie. Like other mothers I met, she raised important questions about our culture’s definition of success, about the lure of materialism, and about the value of home and regeneration in our overly busy lives. But instead of being part of a larger discussion involving both men and women, these questions had fallen into the cracks of women’s choices and were getting lost in the defensiveness and anger of the Mommy Wars.

  The next morning I interviewed a group of female medical students from a variety of racial and economic backgrounds. As it happened, these young women had just attended a forum of women physicians discussing how they’d met the challenge of mixing work and family. “How many men came to the session?” I asked, remembering Carrie and the other mothers I’d met. They looked blank. “Did they have their own panel in which male doctors advised them on how to be good fathers and good physicians,” I continued, “or don’t they expect to have to be both?”

  Their male classmates, they informed me dryly, would never show up for such an event. Maybe they’re right. But it sounded to me like a younger version of “Well, you can’t expect that.” Suddenly I felt I could see these young women’s futures as clearly as any psychic.

  The truth is, women will grapple with these contradictions and compromises until work-family balance transcends the ghetto of women’s issues. No matter what we do, our “choices” will remain both real and illusory until we reach the point where men feel obliged to struggle as deeply as we do with the trade-offs at work and the rewards of home. That requires not just economic and cultural change, but changes in our own psyches: we need to have greater expectations of men and more realistic ones of ourselves. It requires loosening our grip as micromanagers of our children’s lives, even a little bit, and most of all, letting go of the Perfect Mother.

  That, perhaps, is something on which both women who work and those who stay home can agree.

  *Names in this story have been changed.

  Your Gamete, Myself

  Reproductive technology shattered conventional definitions of “parent,” and the legal system still struggles to catch up. Do children have a right to know that they were conceived through third-party reproduction? Should they have the right to meet their genetic or biological parents? What claims might donors or gestational surrogates have on such children? What rights do social/legal parents have to privacy? Whose story is this to tell? The issues in this piece, published in July 2007, were personal to me, as someone who went through multiple rounds of infertility treatment—including a donor egg cycle—before conceiving spontaneously. Since this piece was published, the use of third party reproduction has continued to rise: in 2014, the most recent year for which data is available, there were 20,481 donor egg cycles and between 30,000 and 60,000 children conceived via artificial insemination. Meanwhile, the number of cycles employing gestational surrogates more than quadrupled between 1999 and 2013 (as the first edition of this book went to press, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West announced they had hired a surrogate to carry their third child). The ethical questions, however, remain unresolved.

  Two years ago, when Catherine was in sixth grade, she was given a school assignment that would have been unremarkable for most kids: make a timeline for history class in which half the events occurred before she was born and half after. For a while, she worked quietly at the dining room table of her family’s rambling Northern California home. Then she looked up.

  “Mom?” she asked. “What was the year that you and Dad met our donor?”

  Sitting with me in May, Catherine’s mother, Marie, a fifty-nine-year-old therapist, smiled wryly, remembering the incident. The crinkling of Marie’s eyes gave her a passing resemblance to the actress Anne Bancroft—but not to her own daughter. Marie, who asked me to use only her middle name and a family name for her daughter to protect their privacy, is dark where Catherine is blond, olive-skinned where Catherine is fair, brown-eyed where the girl’s are hazel. There is no similarity to their jawlines, their cheekbones, the shapes of their faces. Of course, lots of kids don’t look like their mothers; few people would consider that odd, though they might—often incessantly—comment on it in conversation.

  “So, what’s going to happen with this project?” Marie recalled responding to Catherine at the time, being careful to keep her voice neutral. “Is it going to be put up in the hallway? In the classroom?”

  Catherine shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. And later, “Mom, this is my timeline.”

  “I got the message,” Marie told me. “But in essence, I was outed on the wall of the middle school. It was there in black and white for everyone to see. They’d all know we used an egg donor. We’d been committed to openness from the beginning, but my first reaction was, ‘No!’”

  If Marie and Catherine are unusual, it is only because of Catherine’s age. In 1992, the year she was conceived, there were just 1,802 attempts by women to become pregnant using someone else’s eggs, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Three years later, there were more than 4,738 such cycles; by 2004, the most recent year for which data has been published, there were 15,175 cycles, resulting in 5,449 babies. By comparison, some 22,911 children were adopted from abroad that year, and although there are no official figures, one survey estimated that at least the same number are conceived annually via donor insemination. Donor eggs are now used in 12 percent of all in vitro fertilization (IVF) attempts, making it among the fastest-growing infertility treatments. Despite the portentous hype around women like Frieda Birnbaum, a sixty-year-old New Jersey resident who in May used donor eggs to become the oldest American to give birth to twins, the bulk of intended mothers are in their forties. The birthrate among women ages forty to forty-four has risen 62 percent since 1990, while the rate among those in their late forties has more than doubled. Among those who used IVF in 2004, about a third of the forty-three-year-olds used someone else’s eggs; by forty-seven years old, 91 percent did.

  With egg donation, science has succeeded in, if not extending women’s fertility, at least making an end run around it, allowing older women who, for a variety of reasons (lack of money, lack of partner, lack of interest, lack of partner’s interest) didn’t have children in their biological prime—as well as younger women with dysfunctional ovaries—to carry and bear babies themselves. It has given rise to the mind-bending phrase “biogenetic child,” meaning a child who is both biologically and genetically related to each of its parents by, for the first time in history, separating those components. In that way, it is fundamentally different from sperm donation, though it also levels a certain playing field: mothers can now do what fathers always could—conceal the truth about their blood relationship to their children. And as with any new reproductive technology, it has provoked a torrent of social, legal, and ethical questions about the entitlement to reproduce, what constitutes parenthood, children’s rights to know their origins, and the very nature of family.

  I first became int
erested in the implications of egg donation because I tried it. After five years of repeated miscarriages and invasive, futile infertility treatments, a twenty-one-year-old friend offered to spot me her gametes, the cells containing half the chromosomes necessary for reproduction. It wasn’t something I ever imagined I’d consider—it seemed so Handmaid’s Tale. Then again, with a donor egg, I could feel a baby grow inside me, experience its kicks and flutters. I could control—that sweetest of words—the prenatal environment, guard against the evils of drug and drink. I could give birth to my own child, breast-feed it. After a year of discussion, my husband and I decided to go ahead, only to find that when placed in a petri dish, his sperm and my friend’s eggs refused to tango.

  Although my husband and I went on, improbably, to conceive our daughter spontaneously, I always wondered what it would have been like had that cycle worked. Would I have felt less authentic as a parent than my husband, or would my gestational contribution have seemed equivalent to his genetic one? Would we tell our child? And when? And how? What about strangers on the street who commented on how little the baby resembled me? What if someone said the baby did look like me and I smiled—would I feel dishonest? How would the experience be different from adoption? What kind of relationship would the child have with our friend, the donor? Would my husband feel awkward about pointing out similarities between our child and himself? What if the child someday turned to me and said, “You’re not my real mother?” What if I secretly agreed? What if she wanted to put the date I met our donor on her sixth-grade timeline?

  The world’s first donor-egg-conceived child was born in Long Beach, California, in 1984—just six years after the debut of Louise Brown, the original test-tube baby, in Britain, and three years after Elizabeth Carr, who was America’s first. The early recipients were women in their twenties and thirties who had gone into premature menopause or whose ovaries had been surgically removed. The donors were typically older than today’s, married with children, often the sisters of recipients or unpaid volunteers.