Pamela Tsigdinos's Open Salon Blog

Non-Moms: The New "It Girls"

Wed, 2 May 2012 22:05:00 -0400

I hereby declare the "All Things Mommy Era" to be post-peak. While the diefication of mothers has had an extended run, it's time, ladies, to make some room on the stage.

Who are the new "It Girls"? That's right: Non-Moms! We've got books, virtual lunches, blogs, video chats. Our star is rising. Who knows where it will take us?

And today, we are shining the spotlight on ground-breaking research, Recovery From Traumatic Loss: A Study of Women Living Without Children After Infertility, published by the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Marni Rosner is a New York City-based licensed psychotherapist. Her specialties include working with anxiety, relationship issues, trauma, loss, and infertility.

What led you to this topic?
I had been ambivalent about having children, yet found myself surprisingly overwhelmed when I discovered I wasn’t able to. And, despite all my education, and years of clinical experience working with clients with varying degrees of anxiety, depression, and trauma, I had no knowledge of the psychological trauma of infertility! I didn’t understand my reaction, nor did anyone else in my support system, including colleagues.

And you, Pamela, unfortunately, were not yet on-line. The isolation was incredible. So I began reading, which has always been a safe harbor for me – you know, knowledge is power and all that. Yet, I was unable to find research that addressed infertility for those who were not interested in adopting or third-party reproduction. There was Sweet Grapes, of course, now a classic, but no real research. I also attended numerous conferences and workshops on infertility; all focused on increasing one’s fertility, IVF, donor eggs, and adopting. It seemed, and felt, that deciding to not have children after infertility was as isolating as living on Mars!

How did it go over with your advisors?
They were all wonderfully supportive. The primary concern, always, is, “is this research necessary? Has it been done before? If not, why? Will it really enrich our knowledge base?” One professor said, early on, “It must be interesting to more than just your own mother!” So this certainly passed the “sniff” test. There was really no other research that focused solely on this population in this era (with numerous reproductive options available, and so many life choices available for women).

What about your peers in the program? How did they respond to your topic?
Everyone seemed receptive and interested. I sometimes wondered if I was making some of the 30-somethings in the room, who didn’t have kids, anxious, although no one ever said so. An interesting moment occurred during my proposal defense – which is when I formally presented why this research is necessary. There were probably about 10 people in the room – my three advisors, some classmates, and a few others. During the q. and a., someone began a question, “for women who decide not to have a family…”. Three people in the room, at the same time, immediately jumped all over this, responding, “They have families, they just don’t have children!” That was interesting for me, especially since I hadn’t caught the “slip”. So to immediately have that effect - that I was able to communicate the significance of this topic to the point where language immediately became sensitive - was rewarding.

What were some of your biggest takeaways or surprises in researching previous studies associated with infertility?
It was shocking to me how little attention was given to the aftermath of infertility. As of 2007, only 2% of the research explored the post-treatment phase of the infertility experience. Infertility is traumatizing! Even if you eventually have a child, through biology, adoption, or third-party reproduction, it changes you. A few years ago, I went to a talk, for clinicians, given by a woman who was interviewing (and filming) women who had adopted after infertility, and encouraging them to reflect on their infertility experience.

The filmmaker showed a clip of a woman who just cried and cried remembering that time. The interviewee had clearly buried these emotions for so long, and had never worked through the trauma and loss of her own experience from many years before. It may not all go away just because you have a child – a lot also depends on your history, what came prior to the infertility. Anyway, after the clip, we clinicians began talking, and the discussion immediately focused on adoption! I observed what was happening and redirected, but it was tough to stay on topic. I think it can be frightening to sit with intense emotions.

Many people view infertility as a deeply private, personal experience, however, you make clear that recovering from infertility is actually more of a team sport – meaning we can be seriously helped or hurt depending on the actions/behavior of those around us. Can you elaborate further?
I think much of the reason infertility is viewed as deeply private and personal is because it is often experienced as extremely shaming, and it’s instinctive to keep our shame close. This is compounded for those who were raised in an environment of shame, secrets, and/or unresolved childhood trauma. When we do reach out for help, we are often rebuffed – often not intentionally - and it’s hard to not be sensitive. So we wind up with unacknowledged and disenfranchised grief, feeling stigmatized, our relationships with friends and family suffer, and basically experience an assault to our identity. It becomes self-protective to not talk about it. But this doesn’t really work; it simply lessens us. We need to give voice to what has happened in order to move the trauma through our bodies and minds and make sense of what has happened.

This isn’t new – Shakespeare talked about the power of giving voice to sorrow, Freud addressed the “talking cure”, and the Catholic Church embraces this concept in the form of confession. 12-step programs, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, adopt this method as well. Give voice to your struggle, and something shifts internally. Having a witness to your process is quite powerful, and more witnesses are even better. What I found, in the study, was that this process was circular, reinforcing, and progressive –shame began to decrease as the women found a safe place, or places, to talk about what had happened.

As shame decreased, voices became clearer, and the women were more able to integrate, rather than disavow, the loss into their life story. This made them stronger and more confident. Shame holds us back, diminishes, and slowly destroys us. So – yes – it is a team sport. It takes a village to not have a child! Unfortunately, for women who decide to live without children after infertility, there is no obvious place to go for comfort. You have to work at it by either educating your current supports, or finding new ones. It isn’t easy, and requires energy that has often been depleted due to trauma. That’s why sites such as yours, and Lisa’s, among others, are so critical. They are, literally, life-saving.

You cite numerous theories and studies associated with human development and personal growth (for instance, you describe the concept of “twinship” — seeking to avoid feeling alone in the world — as well as a need for an "accepting, confirming and understanding human echo”) … what’s the impact when these are denied?
The “accepting, confirming and understanding human echo” – isn’t that lovely? That’s Heinz Kohut. Kohut addressed the different relationships we need, throughout our lives, to feel stable and well. One of these is a “twinship” relationship, which provides the feeling that there are others like me in the world, someone who understands me. When this doesn’t exist, or disappears, it can result in feelings of utter aloneness, deficiency, maybe some regression. It can be pretty unsettling and scary.

Many theorists from various schools of thought believe that our relationships have a direct impact both on identity and ongoing development. Certain theorists believe that this is particularly true for women - that disruptions to certain relationships are experienced not only as a loss of a relationship but something closer to a loss of self. Women who experience infertility often face disruptions to their relationships, and for those who decide to not have children after trying, this issue, this assault to identity, may not resolve on its own. There needs to be some active work around it.

It’s reassuring that you’ve gathered evidence to prove what many of us living without children after infertility already sensed keenly – that we’re living in an extended pro-natal period. What implications does this have for those who don’t fit the pro-natal norm?
This is a great question. I really don’t know. I think, at this time, you, Lisa, and all the other bloggers and voices addressing this issue are in the process of forming what this means. We are what I would call "in the process" of developing the narrative for those living outside the pro-natal norm. We have the power to direct this a little, I think. Don’t forget those that have chosen to be childfree, despite all the cultural and societal messages to have children. They are a great crowd – they can be so normalizing! And – just a quick statistic – the number of women, aged 40-44, without children has doubled to 20% since 1976 – this includes the voluntary childfree. That’s an enormous change in a relatively short time. So, again, we are in this moment contributing to and shaping the dialogue.

Based on your research/findings, is anything you’d like to add – words of advice – for the “silent sorority?”
You know, there was such fantastic advice, words of wisdom, and relevant stories told by study participants, that I could not possibly do them justice here. I would encourage those interested to read the paper. It’s long, but I think it’s pretty reader friendly. Maybe focus on chapters IV and V (the less theoretical chapters) to best hear the actual voices and themes. And, of course, I’d love to hear any feedback and questions!

Readers: Get your highlighters out. You can find the full dissertation, RECOVERY FROM TRAUMATIC LOSS: A STUDY OF WOMEN LIVING WITHOUT CHILDREN AFTER INFERTILITY, here at UPenn. The discussion is officially open.

###

Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos is the author of the award-winning memoir, Silent Sorority.

Dispatch from "hell": It's not all bad

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 13:09:59 -0400

I am not living a fate worse than death, although that's certainly the implication from a recent "Heroes Among Us" People magazine feature called, "One Mom's Mission: Help Others Adopt."

The Mom explains that she was motivated in her cause because she "can't live" with the idea of people living a childless life.

The heroine and I share one thing in common: neither of us could successfully conceive and deliver. We both had to come to terms with our grief and loss.

There is no express lane when to comes to reconciling infertility. Tomes have been written about the various options and the related emotional and financial gymnastics that ensue. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.

The heroine and her husband moved on to adoption while my husband and I came to the conclusion that fate had other plans for us -- what exactly we weren't sure but after nearly a decade of trying to create a family we were ready to find out.

Hmm. If ennobling adoption makes her a hero, then, conversely, does helping women move forward without children make me a goat?

Perhaps Kermit the Frog said it best: It's not easy being green -- or being someone who doesn't go on to parent after infertility. That's because the path is deemed unpalatable, deficient somehow.

How can I support such a claim? It's because I get emails -- lots of them from women who follow my various blogs and tweets -- who write about their turmoil, of feeling judged harshly, as one did last week, "Thank you for providing a forum and safe platform for all of us 'in hiding' on this issue."

"Safe?" "In hiding?" Yes, even I was surprised at these turns of phrase.

It's rare, if not downright impossible, to find an infertility tale with a happy ending that doesn't include a child. If someone had told me years ago that I would have a magical life after infertility, I probably would have decked them. Such was my anger and despair over the loss of a fragile but long-held dream of conceiving a child with the man I adore. I was bitter, broken and inconsolable.

What future "Hell" awaited me, I wondered?

Attempts to locate a hopeful narrative not involving motherhood following infertility -- something, anything that might offer a different fulfillment -- was fruitless.

I tried on different labels. Childless seemed too sad and reinforced a sense of loss.

No one celebrates loss.

Childfree? No. It felt too artificial. I didn’t swear off children. I love my nieces and nephews. I enjoy seeing them grow into charming little people.

Non-mom? It was my cheeky comeback to the smug, sanctimonious moms who reveled in their “momminess,” who acted like halos were handed out in the delivery room.

No. After being made to feel "less than," or defined by a compound adjective involving the word "child," I decided to forego a label.

I am simply me: a woman grateful for the life I have -- one unencumbered by expectations and pre-determined milestones. It's a life that brings a certain agelessness, a magic that comes with embracing the unknown.

Among the many things infertility has taught me is that our lives are what we make of them.

~~~

Pamela Tsigdinos is the author of the award-winning book, Silent Sorority .

What Betty Ford Taught Me

Sat, 9 Jul 2011 13:07:36 -0400

"It was like going to a party you're terrified of, and finding out to your amazement that you're having a good time."

That's how Betty Ford, who passed away today at 93, described her life in the White House during one of the most turbulent times in U.S. history. I was only 10 years old when she became First Lady. I didn't fully appreciate, until I was older, how much she influenced my life. She didn't shy away from her struggles, she talked openly about them.

As I read some of the coverage about her life this morning I realized we shared a few things in common: both of us were born in Michigan; both had dreams of lives that didn't quite turn out the way we hoped; both of us talked openly about taboo topics (breast cancer and infertility, respectively).

She shocked many with her candor, but she also didn't pretend to be something she was not. She championed women's rights and encouraged others to overcome their personal demons. Her life story is teaching me one more thing -- the lesson of authenticity.

As I alluded to in a previous post it's not easy to be different, to not conform to what society expects us to be. My, how things have changed since Betty Ford was my age. Where she once had to stand up for the under-appreciated role of motherhood, we now live in a world where MOM has become the go-to descriptor or modifier.

This now prevalent turn of phrase seemed to take hold with "Soccer mom" and has since become the defacto primary way to describe or even define women (where applicable). Just look the ABC News website: "Atlanta mom," "Tot Mom," "Botox Mom," "Tiger Mom."

It's enough to drive a woman to ... well, fortunately, Betty Ford also taught us how to overcome that tendency, too.

The pendulum continues to swing, so I trust by the time I'm 93 we'll once again celebrate and describe women for the multitude of roles or interests they possess, and not just the one that's in vogue today.

Meanwhile, having been socialized to assume that my life will not be fulfilling or valued in a world where I'm not a mom, like Betty, it's with some amazement that I find I'm having a really good time.

~~~~~~

Pamela Tsigdinos is author of the award-winning book, Silent Sorority
http://www.silentsorority.com

Letting Go of Fear and Guilt

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 11:04:02 -0400

June 10, 2008 was a day unlike any other. There I was, Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos, pictured on the home page of The New York Times with a link to a health feature about my husband and me — Exhibit A: one of the many millions of “involuntarily childless” couples making our way in a child-centric society.

When I first started to blog and then write a book (Silent Sorority) about our infertility experience I don’t know which of us needed the Tums antacid more — me or my husband. Me for disclosing to the world our secret -- our unsuccessful, decade-long battle with trying to conceive, or him for knowing that, by association, our unusual last name would be forever tied to the word “infertility.”

The doctors, after multiple surgeries and junior varisity and varsity treatments, had put us firmly in the unexplained category. There was no amount of “trying” that was going to cure us. Alpha pregnancies never it made it to beta. Infertility became ever-present in our lives -- the elephant in the room. In trying to make sense of it during one of our many conversations, my husband pointed out the difference between “temporal” and “structural” changes in life.

Temporal change can be difficult and painful. Lose a job ... find another. Have to move ... set up house elsewhere. You adjust accordingly and move on.

Structural change is quite different. You lose a loved one. You experience a life-changing disease (e.g. infertility) and it creates a loss in your life, one that can sometimes feel like a black hole. A structural change causes a fundamental shift in your life. You don’t simply “get over” the associated losses — instead you “come to terms” with them. For me that meant writing about and researching the experience. In one study on grieving losses I learned that:

“...reliving memories are normal reactions...Little by little, you should begin to feel better. Eventually, you should begin to focus on resuming relationships and activities. It's not uncommon to initially feel ‘disloyal’ to someone as you start to move on.”

The sense of disloyalty was something I knew all too well. It had actually manifested itself in guilt. In one blog post, A New Chapter (Guilt Not Included), I acknowledged that one of my biggest inhibitors in coming to terms with infertility was a fear:

“that by allowing myself to accept a life without children that it would mean that I didn't work hard enough for my embryos, that I didn’t want or love my children-to-be enough, that I had somehow failed them. That my children didn’t matter as much as someone else’s children.”

While I’ve found peace in my life, I still wrestle with grief. It catches me when I least expect it, which is why I’ve come to accept that the losses infertility inflicted will visit from time to time for the rest of my life. That’s what happens with structural change. A blogging friend summed it up best with these words about her own dance with grief:

“...grief is f*^king sneaky! It gets you when you are watching mourning doves build a nest outside your window and you burst into tears; when you see a child whose face snatches you back in time as surely as any mechanical time machine and your heart aches to the point you can feel the pieces falling off...”

April 24- 30, 2011 is National Infertility Awareness Week, a time to reflect on the many millions, each in their own way, coming to terms.

~~~~~~

Pamela M. Tsigdinos, author, Silent Sorority - 2010 RESOLVE Best Book

What If Oprah Interviewed Allen Ginsberg?

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 10:03:09 -0400

Allen Ginsberg once described "Howl" as “a promotion of frankness, about any subject.” He might have made people uncomfortable with his words, but he also made us think deeply. In Oprah's world, we're supposed to pull up our socks and put a smiley face on any subject that makes people uneasy.

I was riveted last night by James Franco's performance in the film "Howl," and listened intently to the legal arguments that led a judge to declare that Ginsberg's work had a “redeeming social importance” and should not be categorized as obscene.

In his closing argument, attorney Jake Ehrlich famously stated, "Let there be light. Let there be honesty ... Let there be honest understanding."

The call for honest understanding today has been supplanted by a rush to find and highlight saccharin Disney endings, "and then they lived happily ever after," reflecting the dubious pop culture construct of "closure."

Nowhere today is this more apparent than watching television interviews. Reality being a tough pill to swallow, society wants nothing more than to find and dispense a Prozac equivalent; the happy pill. This is most evident when it comes to grief, especially when it concerns "disenfranchised grief" -- losses that don't even make society's list of acceptable grief-worthy subjects. Infertility being tops among them.

I watched the movie "Howl" through the lens of an infertile woman who has wrestled with being an outsider in a "mom-centric" society. Ginsberg's angst -- his rebelling against conformity -- resonated in a familiar way. I've also spent the past few weeks reliving my howl experience. As the featured author of Silent Sorority in an online book club, I've been exchanging thoughts with the participants on the raw visceral emotional toll of infertility.

There is a howl, a deep, primal sound that accompanies the worst of infertility. It wells up and finds release only in the solitude of a woman's restroom or in the privacy of one's home. It's a plaintiff wail that jars even the sensibility of the woman from whom it escapes. It's a haunting, unworldly sound.

As I re-read Silent Sorority, I exchanged ideas with a new set of women facing, for the first time, their own howls. I raised the concept of "disenfranchised grief" and the particular challenges associated with it. In a comment, one book club participant brought to light this astute observation:

“Have you watched a sad episode on Oprah before? The guest will tell a horrendous story--like how he and his wife and children were swept away in a flood and only he survived--and he'll cry while telling the story and Oprah will cry while listening to it and the audience will sob and nod. But then--as if the story had never been told, Oprah will chime in with, 'But tell us what you brought away from all this. Talk about the hope and life you have now.' And suddenly there's this huge shift and all of a sudden the studio turns lighter and the guest does what Oprah wants: that is, to end on something beautiful and happy and light. Viola! Grief is over! The end. We can all go home feeling good about ourselves. It's so strange to me that we can't all simply honor people's feelings and 'sit' with someone and his or her sadness for a little longer, for as long as is needed.

And disenfranchised grief? That doesn't even earn a spotlight. When infertility is on television, it's rarely about the grief part. It usually starts with the positive, brushes on the sadness, and goes right back to the positive: 'Jack and Jill are now the parents of three rambunctious triplets. Life in their household is full of shrieks and crying and Cheerios crunched into the carpet, but Jack and Jill wouldn't have it any other way....when they married 12 years ago, they imagined they'd get pregnant right away, but after a long struggle...and now they're a family of five...' "

Grief or alienation -- and the howls that accompany these experiences -- merit some reflection, exposition and discussion in their rawest form. It is only in knowing deeply and honestly confronting them that we can learn and come to terms with that pain.

Meanwhile, as the film credits rolled last night, I couldn't help but wonder what might have happened if Oprah had had the opportunity to interview Allen Ginsberg.

~~~~~

Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos is the author of the award-winning book Silent Sorority: A (Barren) Woman Gets Busy, Angry, Lost and Found.