A sad yet beautiful column today by Wendy Paris.  It is sad because it chronicles her two miscarriages.  She had waited to try to have children, waited for her career to take shape, for her relationships to sort out, for her life to take the form that she wanted.  It is a classic tale of believing in our ability to control the course of our lives, the course of nature, only to learn the hard way that we cannot: 

I don’t know how I got to be so old without having children. When I
was 28 and my cousin had her first child, at 31, I thought, “I
certainly won’t wait that long.” But then my freewheeling,
career-centric life lasted another decade.
 

Sure, fertility starts to
decline naturally at about 27. But who’s bound by nature now? We have
scopes and drugs and petri-dish unions that seem to stretch fertility
to menopause. I wanted kids eventually, but I was determined not to be
one of those anxious clock-watching mothers-to-be.

    "Who’s bound by nature now?" – this seems the perfect summary of our modern conceits.  It was certainly something that suffused my subconscious before Aidan was born.  I felt like I was in control.  We were well situated for a child.  All would be well.  But then life happens and reminds you just how much you are not in control.

    There is still a great deal we do not control.  I would even venture to say that we cannot ultimately regulate the major forces that shape our lives: our health, the health of our loved ones, the possibility of unforeseen disaster.  I don’t want to sound paranoid here; in fact, I am far from paranoid (I think).  Rather, I just want to recognize the unpredictable turns of Way that can change our experiences so profoundly.  Best just to give ourselves over to the contingencies and uncertainties, rather than trying to push against them and control them.

     And that is the beauty of Paris’s piece: in the end she sees herself in a different light:

A few months ago, I was at a party in Manhattan, listening to a
smart, attractive younger friend detailing a steamy relationship going
nowhere. She has a good career, which she puts above family, as I did
at her age.

<“You know, just as an alternate route, you could
focus on finding a real partner and creating a family life sooner
rather than later,” I offered. “I’m just throwing this out there. You
don’t have to do what everyone else is doing. It’s much harder,
actually, to start a family when you’re older.”

Another friend
interrupted: “I know so many women who have gotten pregnant at 38, or
40. I just got an e-mail about someone who had a baby at 42.”

Of
course she did. I received that e-mail message, too. But I think we
overplay the success stories of older women, wanting to believe the
exceptions are the norm. We don’t want there to be limits to what we
can do. It’s not impossible to have a child later, but often it’s very
hard, and “very hard” is much more difficult than I understood.

I still believe I’ll have a child, but this belief doesn’t lessen the
cataract of discouragement that washes over me nearly every month I
don’t conceive.

The problem, I now believe, is not that
childbirth has become too scientific. The problem, particularly for
those of us who have waited so long, is that even with all our science
and technology, conceiving and bearing a child is still too natural an
act.

    She is right.  We do not want to believe there are natural limits on our lives and we can dazzle ourselves with technology and money into thinking that we can always overcome such limits.  But we can’t.  Sometimes you just have to find a way within the limitations that surround you. 

    I would differ with her on one point, however.  I don’t think childbirth is "too natural an act."  It is what it has always been.  It is we who have come to create unnatural expectations that make nature into something it has never been.   Maybe it is her use of "too" which makes it sound, to me at least, that nature is the problem, and not us.  But, as Paris has shown us in her story, we have to change to suit nature, nature does not have to change to suit us.