Oh, how distressing I found this book, and oh, how I wished that Peggy Orenstein had kept this whole distressing story to herself.
I got annoyed with Ms. Orenstein straight away when she said that in her pre-baby-mania days, she used to say that women who made pre-Betty Friedan choices shouldn’t be surprised when they end up with pre-Betty Friedan results. Which is to say, women shouldn’t choose to be stay-at-home mums, as that is a choice that could never be feminist, and if they do make that atavistic choice, they just deserve all they get. Nasty.
I found this book really, really creepy. She didn’t want a baby until it was suggested to her that she couldn’t have one, and then she didn’t want anything else but that. Superfastreader, on whose blog I read about this, says that Ms. Orenstein views having a pregnancy as an accomplishment she can’t live without, and that is exactly it. It’s as if the baby she envisions isn’t a baby, but some magic solution to all her problems. Like she needs the baby to fix her, instead of for its own sake; like her identity can’t be true without this baby. This passage made me queasy:
I no longer knew how to find my way back to my marriage unless I was pregnant. I needed a baby to restore faith in my defective body, heal my wounded sexuality, assuage my grief, relieve my feelings of failure – to make me whole again.
Ick.
But probably the most creepy thing of all to me was this: There’s a twenty-one-year-old girl that Ms. Orenstein has been in contact with since the girl was sixteen, a relationship that developed based on a book Ms. Orenstein wrote previously that meant a lot to the girl. And the girl, Jess, offers to donate eggs, and the author lets her and Jess’s parents support this, and Ms. Orenstein hopes that one day she’ll be that kind of parent to her own child.
Dude. Boundaries. I’m sorry, but there’s an extreme balance of power issue here with Ms. Orenstein and this girl, and I cannot imagine how it would be possible to be so self-absorbed as to subject a young woman, a young woman who trusts you and looks to you as a mentor, to this upsetting, painful (and, as it goes, unsuccessful in this case) process, so that you could have a baby to fulfill all your own needs. To be honest, it’s not unlike these creepy math teachers at my high school who used to make friends with all the high school girls and then have sex with them when they hit eighteen.
I’ve seen dozens of reviews that say this is so searingly honest and funny and tragic – and yes, it’s honest, so snaps to her for that, I guess, but funny? Not so much. In any spot. Ever. Too much instability in sense of self. Too much using of other people for her own ends.