Another generation of women might have just sighed and moved on.
But today, women in their late 30s and 40s are often stunned when they run up against the prospect of not having it all. When their lives are finally in order and they are ready to start a family but learn they cannot give birth, it is a shock, some say, they will never get over.
Some think the women’s movement encouraged them to postpone motherhood for careers or personal exploration without pointing out that they could wait too long. Others blame modern science for sucking them into a whirlpool of exorbitant but unsuccessful fertility treatments.
“We have this unique thing: By the time we’re ready to have a kid, we’re ready to enter menopause. We’re getting sandwiched,” says Marilyn Shenker, 44, who experienced baby lust in her early 30s but never found the “right relationship.”
Shenker had to choose between a “wonderful man” who didn’t want any more children and continuing the search for someone who did. She chose the man in hand. Now a therapist, she runs support groups in Los Angeles for midlife, childless women.
For those who have waited too long, even adoption may not resolve the anger, hurt and frustration, Shenker said. Some childless women, she said, grieve years later over an earlier abortion or miscarriage.
Likewise, Anne Taylor Fleming, 44, a magazine writer and commentator from Los Angeles, deferred pregnancy with her husband, journalist Karl Fleming, a man 20 years her senior, until she was in her mid-30s. She spent seven years and their savings account to treat her infertility, which she calls “the most emotional and painful experience of my life.”
To understand why she and others of her generation ignored for so long what she calls an “animal-like” biological urge, she wrote a 256-page book, Motherhood Deferred (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994), tracing her attraction to the women’s movement and the “mixed and complicated messages we’ve been given.”
“One reason so many women like me were not ready to make that commitment, we were adamant about redressing the lives of our mothers, the desire to be somebody, have work that mattered, to have our own money. To make good on that rhetoric, as incendiary as it was, was huge,” Fleming said in an interview.
She says she still grieves: “When I’m 60 or 70, I will always feel lonesome for the child I didn’t have,” she says.
When women today find the door to motherhood locked and bolted, they feel panic most of all, says Linda Hammer Burns, the chairman of the American Fertility Society’s psychological interest group. “Other generations said there’s nothing that could be done and that was the end of it,” Burns says. But women today, she says, have grown up thinking, “‘I can choose parenthood when I want it.’ But no one said, ‘Choose it when you’re most fertile because it’s a time-limited thing.”‘
