Daughters

I have been thinking a lot about the women I know and their fertility “journeys” (for lack of a better term). I posted some of those thoughts in the Moms post. This post (and maybe one or two more to follow) are more stories about the women I have been thinking about.

Growing up, there was little fanfare for birthdays and wedding anniversaries in my family. Chinese culture explains part of it. Birthdays are usually not a big deal (until a person turns 60). In fact, everybody “celebrates” being one year older on Chinese New Year’s instead of on the day of their birth. As my brother and I got older and the time in which my parents have lived in the US got longer, we began celebrating our individual birthdays. We would go out for birthday dinners and our family eventually developed a tradition of having ice-cream cake on each of our birthdays. I’m not sure if the lack of celebrating wedding anniversaries is also a Chinese thing. But, I have never heard my parents talk about their anniversary. Every February 14^th, my dad would buy my mom a dozen red roses and a card, but I have never seen my dad buy my mom an anniversary gift or my parents mark any of their “big” (10^th, 25^th) anniversaries. Whenever my brother or I would ask my parents how long they had been married, their standard reply was to tell us to add one year to my age as I am the oldest. If we ever asked when they were married, they would tell us they married on the Christmas Eve prior to when I was born. Since I was born in September, that makes it an almost perfect nine months from wedding to baby. Though it always seemed a little awkward the manner they answered our questions, we didn’t think much about it.*

One day when I was about 15 or 16, my mom brought out a picture album I had never seen before. It was very exciting because I thought I had seen all our family pictures at least 10 times. My dad is a huge fan of taking pictures, both stills and movies, and at least once a year we would break out the pictures and the movie projector. But here was a whole album of never-before-seen pictures of their engagement. On the last page of their album was a copy of their wedding invitation. It was in Chinese, of course, and even though my parents forced me to attend Saturday Chinese school for two years, I never became literate. Chinese numerals, though, I could recognize. I was surprised to see my parents wedding date was sometime in mid-February of the same year in which I was born. Which means I was born 7 months after their wedding. (My guess is that whole Christmas Eve story was based on the fact that it was the day I was conceived.) When I expressed my confusion (! because I can be just that stupid) to my mom, she just giggled self-consciously, closed the album and put it away, never to be seen again.

A couple of years after the unplanned pregnancy, shotgun wedding and my birth, my mom got pregnant again. My father’s parents were all hoping for a boy because, well, when you’re Chinese that’s what you wish for. In Taiwan, at the time, there was a pill for pregnant women that was purported to ensure the sex of the child they were carrying would be a boy. (I’m sure it probably worked, say, 50% of the time?) My mom was talked into taking these boy-making pills during her pregnancy. When the baby was born, the doctors saw that the baby would not survive for long. My mom was not allowed to see the baby but was told that the baby had no brain because the baby’s head was sunken in. My mom believes that my dad was allowed to see the baby and knew the sex but he always denied it. Because of his denials, she believes that he didn’t want her knowing it was another daughter and then blaming herself for the baby’s death because of the pills she took.

My parents tried to get pregnant again soon after the death of their second child. In the aftermath of my miscarriage, my mom told me how she spent every day for over a year obsessing about getting pregnant. But, it never happened. At some point she stopped hoping and obsessing. My mom did get pregnant again. My brother was born three months shy of my 5^th birthday, the first boy born of my generation and my grandmother’s sole favorite out of 13 grandchildren.**

So, like her Ma, my mom experienced what it was like to desperately want to be pregnant, but not get pregnant. Like her Ma and her own daughter, she knows the pain of losing a child. And though the pain of infertility never completely goes away and any children that come later never replace the ones lost, there is a coming to terms and acceptance of the hand life has dealt you. And, ultimately, you make the best of what you do have in life.

At least, that’s what I hope is in store for me.

*Later after my brother and I had both moved out of my parents’ house, I brought this up with my brother. When I told him I thought our parents had to get married because mom had gotten pregnant, it was clear from his response that it never occurred to him until that moment.

**I remember once when she lived with us for awhile, she went out and bought a new bowl and chopsticks for my brother. Then, she gave my brother’s old bowl and chopsticks to me. When I expressed my anger and indignity at being given my younger brother’s used dinnerware, my grandmother retorted that I was a girl and should be grateful she treated me with such kindness and generosity! I can laugh about it now, but this was one of many reasons why I loved my mother’s Mama so much more. I can also forgive her now for her ways because I understand that many of the things she did was the result of the traditional mindset she grew up with. Even for her generation, she was the last of a rare group of women who had their foot bound (warning, the link has some graphic descriptions and pictures). One time when she was in the hospital after a stroke, I saw the doctors bring all their interns to her room so they could parade through and examine a living example of bound feet.