Waiting For Baby

Author talks about her six-year search for motherhood.

October 17, 2008

Stacey Palevsky
j. the Jewish News Weekly of Northern California

Peggy Orenstein was 41, pregnant and on an international flight to Tokyo, hopeful that she and her husband would soon be adopting a newborn boy.

One baby, two babies, no baby? she thought. She had already felt the crushing pain of losing a pregnancy. Nothing was certain.

As the plane approached Osaka, the Berkeley-based author and journalist looked out the window to see Mount Fuji’s snow-tipped cone glowing from a colorful sunset.

“It was then that I thought, ‘Huh, this might be something,’ and I started writing in a notebook,” she recalled.

Thus began the two-year process of crafting Ms. Orenstein’s third book, a memoir titled “Waiting for Daisy: One Woman’s Quest to Become a Mother.”
“This is not a crazy woman’s infertility story,” she said. Neither is it about her daughter, Daisy, who is intentionally mentioned only in the book’s epilogue.
“I’m trying to make the point that she’s not the point of the story. My journey is.”

“Waiting for Daisy” is a deeply personal account of the six years Ms. Orenstein and her husband, documentary filmmaker Steven Okazaki, spent trying to have a baby.

“Steven’s only condition for my writing this book was that I be absolutely honest,” she said recently over breakfast at a Berkeley cafe.

Ms. Orenstein has tight curly hair and disarming blue eyes that narrow when she concentrates. She was 35 when she and her husband decided they were ready for a baby.

They waited in part because Ms. Orenstein wasn’t sure she even wanted children. She had a successful career as a contributor to numerous national magazines. Her first book, “Schoolgirls,” about adolescent girls and self-esteem, was a national bestseller.

But once she and Mr. Okazaki decided to have a baby and Orenstein set her sights on motherhood, the quest became all consuming. She took and tracked her temperature every morning, and “pored over the results like they were rune stones,” she wrote.

She tried fertility drugs, Chinese herbs, in vitro fertilization and donor eggs. She blamed herself for waiting too long.

Her story is not just about pregnancy. It also explores the collision between feminism and fertility, the tough choices women today must make.

“Feminism was a central struggle for me,” she said. Before she decided to have a baby and during her first few years of trying, she researched and wrote a second book, called “Flux,” for which she interviewed 200 women ages 25 to 45 about their life choices.

That input, and her own personal experience, led her to believe “the world has not changed enough to allow ambitious women to become mothers easily.”

She also writes about the despair of miscarriage, noting that even ritual-rich Judaism provides no traditional framework to cope with the pain of such a loss.
Judaism is a strong theme in the book. Ms. Orenstein writes about seeking prayer as a refuge during her dark moments, and asking her rabbi for guidance during her (failed) attempt to use donor eggs.

Would the baby be Jewish? she wondered. She earned from her rabbi that, according to the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, the mother who carries the child determines the religion.

“It was a big surprise to me that Judaism became such a big part of the book,” she said. “But I think that in my deepest self, I’m very Jewish.”

Ms. Orenstein was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minn., and grew up attending a Conservative synagogue. Since moving to the Bay Area in 1991, she has attended Chochmat Halev in Berkeley and Temple Sinai in Oakland, where her daughter is enrolled in preschool.

Daisy was born a few months after Ms. Orenstein and Mr. Okazaki returned from Japan. (They did not adopt because of complications with immigration paperwork.) Daisy is now 4, with plump cheeks and shiny black hair. She knows the simplest version of her parents’ pregnancy mission: That Mom and Dad really wanted a baby, and, after a long time, Daisy came along.

Ms. Orenstein looks forward to Daisy’s understanding of her mother’s story deepening over time. The book “will give her a chance to know me as a younger woman,” she said. “I love that she’ll know me in that way.”