Archive for May 28th, 2010
The Divining Wand’s Revealing Q & A
Questions from Larramie at The Divining Wand, a book blog that discovers authors “beyond their pages”!
Q: How would you describe your life in 8 words?
A: Pamela: A beautiful adventure and unpredictable work-in-progress.
Carey: Full, and fascinating — at least to me.
Beth: Simultaneously predictable and spontaneous, which is great.
Q: What is your motto or maxim?
A: Pamela: Do what you love, and everything else follows.
Carey: The currency of love is time.
Beth: Keep your eyes open, there’s a lot to see.
Q: How would you describe perfect happiness?
A: Pamela: Simplicity. Being in my fiance’s arms. Holding my daughter in mine.
Carey: Attainable only in brief moments.
Beth: Being outside with family and friends on a 74 degree day while the rest of the world is at peace, too.
Q: What’s your greatest fear?
A: Pamela: Losing someone I love. Or being lost to them.
Carey: Harm to my children.
Beth: Danger or harm to my child.
Q: If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would you choose to be?
A: Pamela: Hiking in New Zealand.
Carey: In an alpine forest.
Beth: It’s Saturday morning, my son’s in the bathtub, the sun is shining, the sky is blue, I can hear birds and we’re going to go hang signs for a yard sale. Right here is fine. Somewhere in Yosemite would be great, too.
Q: With whom in history do you most identify?
A: Pamela: Explorers and female writers, including Rebecca West for some things: her intellectual curiosity, love of travel, writing, and independence. (But not for other things, including her troubled relationship with her son.)
Carey: Women; refugees; writers.
Beth: My grandmother, who knew that we often need to fight for what we want, but that grace can be a part of our struggles.
Q: Which living person do you most admire?
A: Pamela: Anyone who helps someone in need without being asked.
Carey: My dad.
Beth: An San Su Kyi
Q: What are your most overused words or phrases?
A: Pamela: Lately, “What do you say?” to my toddler as we encourage her to say “Please” and “Thank you”
Carey: “Lovely”
Beth: “Cool.” “What?”
Q: If you could acquire any talent, what would it be?
A: Pamela: To sing. On key.
Carey: Math.
Beth: Singing well.
Q: What is your greatest achievement?
A: Pamela: My daughter, though her achievements will be hers alone.
Carey: My whole written oeuvre and, to the extent it can be called my achievement, my family.
Beth: Optimism.
Q: What’s your greatest flaw?
A: Pamela: Impatience, impatience, impatience.
Carey: Impatience? Laziness? There are so many to choose from!
Beth: Envy.
Q: What’s your best quality?
A: Pamela: Maybe that I wouldn’t say I have a “best” anything.
Carey: Perhaps some kind of emotional fluency?
Beth: Humor.
Q: What do you regret most?
A: Pamela: That I didn’t find Mark earlier.
Carey: Not having more time with my mother.
Beth: Losing my temper.
Q: If you could be any person or thing, who or what would it be?
A: Pamela: Anything in my daughter’s orbit.
Carey: A blossoming tree.
Beth: A superhero who could help save the world and stop big businesses like BP from doing such stupid things.
Q: What trait is most noticeable about you?
A: Pamela: My laugh has been compared to a pig hunting for truffles.
Carey: Frequent smiling?
Beth: Independence.
Q: Who is your favorite fictional hero?
A: Pamela: Curious George, at the moment
Carey: Meg in a “Wrinkle in Time”
Beth: Elizabeth Bennett, “Pride and Prejudice”
Q: Who is your favorite fictional villain?
A: Pamela: The Wicked Witch of the West
Carey: “It” in a “Wrinkle in Time”
Beth: George Hustwood from “Sister Carrie”
Q: If you could meet any athlete, who would it be and what would you say to him or her?
A: Pamela: Olga Korbut. “What is your most treasured memory as a young gymnast?”
Carey: I just don’t speak Sports!
Beth: Billy Jean King. “How did it feel when you knew you’d beaten Bobby Riggs?”
Q: What is your biggest pet peeve?
A: Pamela: In the small picture, people who toss cigarette butts out of car windows. In the big picture, a lack of generosity of spirit.
Carey: Gratuitous meanness in any context.
Beth: Mean people.
Q:What is your favorite occupation, when you’re not writing?
A: Pamela: Being a mom, potter, and traveler.
Carey: Exploring in any form.
Beth: My old job, teaching stress resiliency to kids and teachers.
Q: What’s your fantasy profession?
A: Pamela: Author. This is it.
Carey: I wish I could wave a wand and be great at Information Technology.
Beth: Being a writer who knows that millions of people will read what I write, and while my writing will elicit controversy, it will always be enjoyed.
Q: What 3 personal qualities are most important to you?
A: Pamela: Integrity, compassion, and an open heart.
Carey: (no answer)
Beth: Honesty, humor, deep ability to love.
Q: If you could eat only one thing for the rest of your days, what would it be?
A: Pamela: Depends — either fresh fruit or coffee ice cream.
Carey: Salad (really! but with yummy dressings…)
Beth: Fruit and vegetable salad
Q: What are your 5 favorite songs?
A: Pamela: This is nearly impossible for me. I live in the city with the world’s greatest radio station – WXRT – and began in radio myself. I love music as much as books. But forced to answer, my favorite songs would include:
1. Boston: Peace of Mind
2. Rickie Lee Jones: We Belong Together
3. David Bowie: Life on Mars?
4. Billy Joel: Summer Highland Falls
5. New Order: True Faith
(runner-ups: Chaka Khan “Ain’t Nobody”; Dire Straits “Telegraph Road”; Bruce Springsteen “The River”; Rolling Stones “Beast of Burden”; Tom Petty “American Girl”; and Tori Amos “A Sorta Fairytale”; The Who “Baba O’Riley”)
Carey:
1. “You Me and the Bourgeoisie” by the Submarines
2. “Feeling Groovy” by Big Jim’s Ego
3. “Who Knows Where The Times Goes” by Judy Collins
4. “Falling Slowly” from the movie “Once”
Beth:
“Space Oddity” by David Bowie
O-o-h Child by The Five Stairsteps
“Good Day Sunshine” by The Beatles
Q: What are your 5 favorite books of all time?
A: Pamela: I hate to play favorites, but some of the books I keep going back to are:
“Romeo & Juliet” by William Shakespeare
“The Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien
“Mrs. Frisby and The Rats of NIMH” by Robert C. O’Brien
“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” by Michael Chabon
“The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke”
Carey: Too hard!! But I’m in the phase of rereading old favorites to my children, and have recently discovered or rediscovered:
“The Phantom Tollbooth” by Norton Juster
“James and the Giant Peach” by Roald Dahl
“A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle
and the newer “If I Reach You” by Rebecca Stead.
Beth:
“Sister Carrie” by Theodore Dreiser
“Of Men and Fire” by Norman Maclean
“Busy, Busy World” by Richard Scarry
“Love Poems” by Pablo Neruda
“Collected Poems” by James Wright
First O Magazine….now this: The New York Times Style Section
Jane Margolies features us in “The Gift of Sperm Donor 8282” in this Sunday’s Style Section (May 23, 2010).
TEN years ago Carey Goldberg, a Boston reporter who was then single and about to turn 39, reached her self-imposed “biological midnight.” Determined to be a mother and with no man yet on the horizon, she did some research on sperm banks and then ordered eight vials of sperm from an anonymous donor.
Then, almost unimaginably, on the very day the vials reached her clinic, Ms. Goldberg met the man she would eventually have children with and marry (in that order). And since she didn’t need the donor sperm anymore, she passed on the vials to another Bostonian, Beth Greenberg, age 38. It seemed logical: why should this perfectly fine genetic material go to waste?
As for Ms. Greenberg, she had always thought she’d be married with a child by the time she was 35. Instead, her first husband had left her for his 20-something personal trainer that year, then dragged her through a nasty divorce (though she emerged with a $10 million settlement). Suddenly single, Ms. Greenberg traveled, meditated, became a journalist — and then, somewhere between getting her navel pierced and having a fling with a sexy parking valet, she started thinking that if she didn’t meet someone soon she might have a baby on her own.
She had begun to search sperm bank Web sites for a possible donor when a friend, Pamela Ferdinand, introduced her to Ms. Goldberg. And soon after Ms. Greenberg took possession of the vials of unused sperm — arranging for them to be transported in a cryogenic truck from Ms. Goldberg’s clinic to her own — she met a mate while ice climbing; they had a child together, and eventually they wed (at which point she became Beth Jones).
That meant the vials were available to Ms. Ferdinand herself, another Boston journalist, then 36. A self-described “hopeless romantic,” Ms. Ferdinand had been searching for love for years. She thought she had found her soul mate during a rooftop astronomy class, but there was a hitch: he was married. She had set herself a deadline of becoming pregnant by the time she was 38, so she, too, began to consider making use of the sperm. But — yet again — she didn’t need to. The married man extricated himself; he and Ms. Ferdinand moved in together, became engaged, and had a baby.
Three would-be mothers, some “lucky” sperm and — voilà! — three happy families, with all of the pregnancies happening the old-fashioned way.
And now the writers have given birth yet again, this time to a 14-ounce joint memoir entitled “Three Wishes: A True Story of Good Friends, Crushing Heartbreak, and Astonishing Luck on Our Way to Love and Motherhood” (Little, Brown).
“Every time we told someone our story, they said you have to write it down,” Ms. Goldberg said in a phone interview earlier this month from her home in Brookline, Mass., on a day she was cooped up with her second child, home from school with a fever.
The book has surfaced at a time when donor sperm is having a cultural moment. In the film “The Back-Up Plan,” in movie theaters now, the Jennifer Lopez character is artificially inseminated right before she meets the man of her dreams. Another film, “The Switch,” starring Jennifer Aniston and involving behind-the-scenes sperm-vial swapping, is to be released this summer, followed by “The Kids Are All Right” with Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as a lesbian couple whose teenage children track down their sperm-donor father. There has also been a spate of documentaries on the squiggly subject, including “Sperm Donor X” by Deidre Fishel and “Single Choice: Many Lives” by Anne Catherine Hundhausen.
“People don’t have to search six degrees of separation to find someone doing it in their family or circle of friends,” said Ms. Hundhausen, a freelance producer and independent filmmaker in New York. “It’s become more mainstream now.”
That wasn’t the case a decade ago when Ms. Goldberg, at the time the Boston bureau chief of The New York Times, sat at her computer poring over the possibilities from California Cryobank, one of the nation’s largest sperm banks. The company, today a $20-million business that estimates that 25 to 28 percent of its clients are single women, recently introduced a celebrity “Look-A-Like” feature on its Web site, enabling customers to select a sperm donor who resembles, say, Hugh Jackman or Johnny Depp.
But back when Ms. Goldberg was searching, she zeroed in on Donor 8282, described as a 6-foot-5 Southerner with blond hair and blue eyes. “His SAT scores were better than mine,” she writes in “Three Wishes.”
Ms. Goldberg used only a single vial of 8282’s sperm — her attempt at insemination at her clinic didn’t take — but by the time she underwent the procedure she was already hoping to have a child by her husband-to-be, a software developer named Sprax Lines, whom she met through Matchmaker.com.
After a first pregnancy ended in miscarriage, the couple’s daughter, Liliana, was born in 2002, and for nearly two years Ms. Goldberg raised her on her own, though Mr. Lines came by two or three times a week to pitch in with changing diapers, feeding and playing with their daughter. Eventually Ms. Goldberg and Mr. Lines decided to move in together; had a son, Tulliver; bought a Victorian house, and, finally, married — in a columned, open-air rotunda in a park near their home, with Ms. Goldberg wearing a maroon velour dress purchased at a thrift store and both children in attendance.
It was after Ms. Jones, too, was settled into love and motherhood — now 46, she and her husband, Phil Jones, a forensic auditor, live in a shingled early 1900s house not far from Ms. Goldberg’s with their 5-year-old son, Gareth — that the book idea came up. The writers didn’t seriously discuss it, however, until Ms. Ferdinand was well on her way to a healthy pregnancy. “Beth and I had our kids, and we were waiting for Pam to have her happy ending,” Ms. Goldberg said.
Ms. Ferdinand, now 44, a former reporter for The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, lives in the Chicago area with her fiancé, Mark Thomas, a photographer and information technology professional, and their 2 1/2-year-old daughter, Emma. But much of the writing of the book took place while she was still living in Boston. The authors first worked on their individual stories independently. Then together they chopped up their accounts into alternating chapters, with Ms. Goldberg, who set in motion the chain of events with her purchase of the donor sperm, kicking things off in Chapter 1.
After the first literary agent the writers approached with the manuscript they were calling “The Lucky Sperm” turned them down, they contacted another agent, Denise Shannon. “When I first heard about it, what popped into my head was the sisterhood of the traveling sperm,” Ms. Shannon said in a phone interview. After the authors streamlined their manuscript and came up with a title that didn’t have the word “sperm” in it, Ms. Shannon submitted “Inconceivable Happiness” to publishers, and within a week she had a pre-emptive deal with Little, Brown & Company “in the mid six figures,” according to the writers. Little, Brown renamed the book yet again and released it last month, with an announced initial print run of 30,000 copies.
“It isn’t just a fairy tale,” said Judy Clain, executive editor at Little, Brown. The company would not release sales figures, but Ms. Clain acknowledged in a phone interview that the book “wasn’t flying off the shelves” — even after the three women appeared on the “Today” show to promote “Three Wishes.” At one point last week it was ranked No. 27,519 on the Amazon best-seller list.
IN the early chapters, the authors recount their experiences as single women, which involved nice-but-no-spark relationships as well as creepy blind dates arranged through matchmaking sites. At one point Ms. Jones paid a matchmaker named Zelda $2,000 to find her a man — and then demanded a refund. “One guy was a right-wing banker who rarely stepped foot outside his office except to drive his Miata around Wellesley,” she writes, “the other a divorced back surgeon who was so tired on our three dates that I had to resist snapping my fingers in his face.”
The ride to motherhood was bumpy. All three women describe miscarriages. Ms. Goldberg writes about her son’s premature birth. The other two authors tell of the horrifying and tragic ordeals of terminating hoped-for pregnancies because of chromosomal abnormalities. There is a reason the words “crushing heartbreak” are in the book’s subtitle.
Writing “Three Wishes,” Ms. Ferdinand said by phone, was “cathartic.”
Indeed, the authors let it all hang out — and then some. In their drive to be mothers, they invest in ovulation monitors, and Ms. Jones buys a home Doppler. They burn through pregnancy-test kits. Readers learn of hemorrhoids, polyps and fibroids. (During the period the book covers, Ms. Goldberg and Ms. Ferdinand shifted from covering breaking general news to science reporting, which perhaps explains a slight tendency toward such terms as “cervical mucus.”)
There’s a goopy chick-lit vibe that creeps into the prose from time to time. Ms. Goldberg swears she and her husband experienced a “Vulcan mind-meld” on the day of their wedding. “I felt some science-fiction energy phenomenon, some shazzam!, coursing between us,” she writes, which will no doubt prompt incredulity among some readers — and outright envy among others.
As for the “lucky” sperm, it wasn’t a miraculous fertility and romance charm after all: the fourth woman it was passed to used all seven remaining vials and neither got pregnant nor found a mate. But the authors write that there is “magic in the moment” when a woman takes charge of her life, and decides to bear a child on her own.
On a recent Thursday evening, the authors participated in a panel discussion entitled “Seeking Happily Ever After” at the 1909 brick-and-limestone Brookline Public Library. A documentary filmmaker and the editor of a new e-zine were also on the panel, and about 55 people, mostly women and many of them friends or relatives of the panelists, took seats in the second-floor auditorium, whose walls were draped with quilts stitched by a local needlework club. Two mothers jiggled babies. Three women who were reading “Three Wishes” for their book club sat together. One of them, Aimee Tallarico, a mother of two, said she liked the book because “it was a fast read.”
An illustration of a Prince Charming presenting a heeled slipper to a seated damsel holding out a foot eagerly was projected onto the screen at the front of the room. Seated under it, the panelists discussed whether women today are reappraising the classic scenario of marriage with 2.2 children.
The discussion centered on the vise-like grip that marriage, children and the house with the white picket fence still have on women, even those who consider themselves liberated from convention. Ms. Goldberg, Ms. Jones and Ms. Ferdinand — who bristle at the suggestion that theirs is a Cinderella story times three, with men coming to their rescue — fidgeted.
“I never dreamed of a white dress,” Ms. Goldberg said. She had been looking for love, yes. “But,” she said, “my happy ending began when I became a mother.”
The authors say they are somewhat surprised to find themselves ensconced in their current, traditional lives revolving around family. Ms. Goldberg, who was a part-time health and science reporter at The Boston Globe until being laid off amid cutbacks last year, now works out of her home as an editor of a neuroscience blog called “Mind Matters” for Scientific American magazine when she’s not shuttling her children to and from school. Her husband is the family’s full-time breadwinner at the moment. Ms. Jones was just elected a Brookline Town Meeting Member. Ms. Ferdinand and Mr. Thomas, who recently started a photography business together, hope to try for a second child later this year.
In the end, the writers didn’t join the ranks of single mothers who conceive through donor sperm, whose numbers are unknown (those who buy donor sperm are not required to report back to sperm banks, so there are no accurate records of how many customers become pregnant with the sperm and have children, or pass on vials to other mothers-in-waiting, which is legal), though Ms. Goldberg, at least, gave artificial insemination an initial try. Nor did they ever join groups like Single Mothers by Choice, which estimates that 75 percent of its members conceive through donor sperm.
But the authors say they do not necessarily consider that a lesser outcome. “It wasn’t like, ‘Whew! We didn’t have to use it,’ ” Ms. Jones said. “That’s just how it turned out for us.”
O: The Oprah Magazine * June 2010
SO thrilled to be in the June issue of O Magazine (page 147), especially under the heading “Tomes of the Brave”!
Taking the Lead: A medical reporter doesn’t let a cancer diagnosis stand in her way
By Pamela Ferdinand | Spring-Summer 2010 for CR Magazine
It’s time to tango and the competition is hot at the 2008 “Dancing With Chicago Celebrities”—an annual charity ball to benefit breast cancer research. As the beat begins, a professional dance instructor, his black shirt unbuttoned, emerges from the wings. With a dramatic flourish, he pulls a scarlet cloth up and away from a mysterious figure crouched on the dance floor, revealing a woman in a shiny silver halter top, strappy high heels, and a thigh-baring, flouncy red skirt. Dina Bair—an award-winning broadcast journalist at WGN-TV News in Chicago, who is familiar to viewers more for her health care reporting than her boleo—stands up and clasps her partner’s hand. She twirls into his arms. Together they dance with swiveling hips and high kicks, taking the championship.
Few in the crowd could have guessed that prior to the competition, Bair didn’t even know how to dance. But undoubtedly many did know that she has a reputation for not shying away from a challenge. She learned how to swim so that she could enter a triathlon. She shared with television viewers her thrilling rides in an F-16 fighter jet (for a story on the physical demands of pilots) and in a V-22 Osprey Hybrid military troop transport aircraft (for a story on how Marines get supplies in combat zones). She ran up 94 floors of the John Hancock Center in less than 19 minutes during an event to benefit the Respiratory Health Association of Metropolitan Chicago. And last year for the same charity, she took a skyline plunge off the roof of a city hotel and rappelled down 27 stories.
Added to that, this mom of four—who also gives Sunday communion as a Eucharistic minister—runs, boxes, lifts weights, and kayaks.
“She doesn’t feel like there’s anything that she can’t conquer or be,” says Lou Kleinberg, Bair’s husband of 16 years. “She is one of the strongest and smartest people I know.”
Katharin Czink, a medical producer at WGN-TV News, who has been Bair’s friend and colleague for nearly a decade, agrees.
“There is no doubt Dina is and always has been driven. But when it comes to physical tests of endurance, strength and speed, she is off the charts,” Czink says. “Would I say Dina is fearless? No. Because I think fear is an emotion that motivates her. She’s acutely aware of her own mortality, which is why she doesn’t let much stand in her way.”
Her spirit and determination have made Bair, 42, a success. She is a dogged, compassionate reporter (and principal back-up anchor) known for the thoroughness and accuracy of her “Medical Watch” segments on WGN-TV News. She has won five Emmy Awards, a Peter Lisagor Award from the Society of Professional Journalists and multiple Associated Press awards, among others. And, as she has let her audience know, she is a cancer survivor.
Slender with fine features and straight polished hair, Bair is stylish at work on a weekday in November in shiny patent brown high heels and a brown fitted jacket with a brocade pattern. She is generous with her smile, warmly calling people “honey” and is clearly well-liked. She has more than 2,000 “friends” on her Facebook page and laughs when asked about fans who consider her “hot.”
“It’s hysterical to me. I’m an old mom,” Bair says. “It’s not like I don’t try to look good, but it always cracks me up because if people could see me on the weekends, it’s totally different. I’m not this glam TV lady.”
Growing up outside Philadelphia as one of two children, Bair had an early inkling that she was destined for journalism. At age 10, while shopping for groceries with her mother, Bair would report from the aisles, making up stories about how, for example, the police had just apprehended a robbery suspect, much to the relief of worried shoppers. As a teenager, she aired daily news announcements on her high school TV station’s morning program, “Wake Up O’Hara,” which was also broadcast on a local cable channel.
She went on to attend Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., earning a bachelor’s degree in radio, television and film in 1989 in just three years. In lieu of her senior year, the 21-year-old Bair lined up an internship with Joan Esposito, who was a well-known anchor at the ABC affiliate in Chicago. When Esposito moved to NBC’s WMAQ-TV, she hired Bair as a field producer to assist with interviews, log tapes and write scripts.
It didn’t take long for Bair to establish herself as an on-air talent. After stints as a producer, anchor and reporter at other stations, she joined WGN as a full-time general assignment reporter in September 1994. She anchored the weekend morning news for five years until she became pregnant with twins in 1998 and her doctor cautioned her to take it easy. The station assigned her short medical stories instead of news reporting during the week, and the pieces were a hit. Given her interest in science and health, she became the resident medical reporter and over the past 11 years has transformed “Medical Watch” into a ratings and revenue success.
“Just as she is quick on her feet in a physical sense, Dina is equally so as a reporter and writer,” says Czink. “She is whip smart. She simply does not miss a beat.”
Jennifer Lyons, WGN’s assistant news director and Bair’s close friend, agrees. They became friends in 1998 when they were assigned to cover the elevation of the Roman Catholic archbishop of Chicago to cardinal, and instantly clicked on the flight to Rome.
“We’re both tenacious, we’re both dedicated, we’re both a little bit on the perfectionist side,” Lyons says.
In what she considers the most rewarding project of her career to date, Bair spent a month reporting inside the pediatric intensive care unit at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago. Her four-part series “Intensive Caring” won a regional Emmy award in the 2000-2001 hard news feature series category. In one segment, Bair profiled two sisters, both younger than 2, with the same kind of rare and deadly brain tumor. In another, she showed a physician telling the parents of a young boy, on Christmas Day, that their son was not going to live. She says she would come home at night to her own children, sit on the edge of their beds, watch them sleep and cry in gratitude.
“By far, that series exceeds anything else I’ve done,” she says. “I felt like I had put something on television that made people think and made them talk to one another as a family about life issues.”
Bair knows a thing or two about life issues. Five years ago, her brother died suddenly at age 33 due to a blood clot, devastating their mother and changing the way Bair approached her own life. “Always in control, I began to appreciate and enjoy so much more,” she says.
It wasn’t her first brush with illness. Sixteen years earlier, when she was 21, Bair had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, an unusual occurrence in a woman so young. Away from her parents and alone at college, she was misdiagnosed for about four months by doctors who thought her abdominal pain was due to menstrual cramps.
She had surgery to remove one ovary and radiation therapy. The treatments rendered the cancer undetectable, but her future fertility remained uncertain. “I was told then that my fertility was in question,” Bair recalls. “Because of the radiation, the only way to know would be to try to have kids. I was 21—that wasn’t an option.”
Five years later, she met her husband, who is now a news photographer for the local CBS station, when both worked the nightshift at an ABC television station in Peoria, Ill. When they began discussing marriage, Bair told Kleinberg she might not be able to have children. She reiterated it the day he proposed.
“When my husband asked me to marry him, one of the first things I said to him was, ‘I might not be able to have children with you. Are you sure you want to marry me?’ ” she recalls.
Ultimately, her worries proved groundless, though fertility drugs were necessary for the couple to conceive their first three children: Max, 13, and twins Ben and Cameron, 11. Their youngest, Gianna, 4, however, was a welcome surprise.
But then came another, far-less-welcome discovery. About four years ago, while nursing her baby daughter, Bair noticed for the first time a nearly black spot on her chest that resembled a crawling ant. She called her dermatologist. Learning he was booked solid for the next month, she pressed for an appointment, describing how the spot, which was not a raised mole, still met suspicious criteria: irregular in shape and color, rapidly growing. “I said, ‘I think I might have skin cancer,’ and then I felt foolish even saying it,” she says.
Her instinct was correct. When she finally saw a doctor weeks later, he looked at the spot and said, “You need to come back tomorrow and have that taken out,” Bair recalls. Pathology results showed it was melanoma. Subsequent surgery was required to remove a golf ball–size mass where the melanoma had invaded her breast; she then had radiation. In 2008, Bair learned that the melanoma had metastasized to her liver, and she had surgery to remove the part of the liver that was affected.
These days, Bair says she doesn’t shy away from occasional bouts of self-pity—“You need to let it out and acknowledge the fact that cancer stinks,” she says—but she has channeled her personal experience with cancer into public service through her work and numerous charity appearances, including the American Cancer Society’s Black and White Ball, the March on Melanoma and the LUNGevity Foundation Fundraiser.
A decade ago, Bair spoke for the first time about having ovarian cancer at a local fundraiser for the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition, and the warm reception was a revelation. She went public with her melanoma diagnosis and treatment during a May 2007 “Medical Watch” segment on sun protection and skin cancer.
Lyons, the assistant news director, says the challenges Bair has faced have given her a powerful ability to translate medical news for the average person.
“She can walk with the patients, and she can walk with the doctors, and really tell a good story,” says Lyons.
Bair doesn’t claim to know it all. Nor does she pretend to. Journalism allows her to tell stories, to share her interest in science, and to help other survivors—regardless of their condition—know they are not alone.
“I have enough of a healthy curiosity where I ask the questions people at home would be asking,” she says. “That’s one of the things I love the most—being able to communicate things about health and wellness in a way people understand. They call me all the time, saying, ‘I didn’t know about this or that but because of your story, I went to the doctor.’ I really do have the ability to touch people’s lives in a way that makes me feel really good.”
Psychology Today & The Huffington Post
Irene Levine interviewed us for her blog Friendship by the Book, appearing online at Psychology Today and The Huffington Post!
Becoming an older mother is never easy—physically or emotionally—especially if there’s no logical father-to-be on the horizon. Three Wishes: A True Story of Good Friends, Crushing Heartbreak, and Astonishing Luck on Our Way to Love and Motherhood (Little Brown, 2010) is an incredibly wise, witty and powerful memoir written by three brave and accomplished women who had the desire to be mothers—each one, on her own terms.
On their shared journey to becoming mothers, they forged an incredible sisterhood that speaks to the importance of friendship in women’s lives and shows how empowering friends can be.
May I briefly introduce you to the authors—my new BFFs—Carey Goldberg, Beth Jones and Pam Ferdinand?
How old were you when you gave birth for the first time?—-And what lessons have you learned as an older mother?
PAM
I was 41 when I gave birth to Emma, and I’m still learning the lessons of being an older mother. So far, I have found the downsides are that I definitely don’t have the energy I once had in my 20s and 30s, and that my daughter will not know her great-grandparents, as I did. Nor will she likely have an extended amount of time with her grandparents and Mark and I (though we hope to stick around for a long while.) The upside is that I fully lived and worked, understand myself more now than I did as a young woman, and am having a new wonderful adventure at an unexpected stage of life. I don’t take anything about motherhood or my daughter, or my relationship with Mark, for granted.
CAREY
I was 41 when I had Liliana and 43 when I had Tully. I second all that Pam said: I feel tremendously lucky that I had the chance to fulfill my career dreams, which involved extensive travel and sometimes 24/7 work, before having a child. And I feel tremendously lucky to have my children and husband. My only regret is that, now that I know what being a mother is like, I risked missing it by waiting so long. If I had it to do over again, I would start trying earlier. Also, this is a little strange, but as a mother well into middle age, I’m deeply aware of my own mortality, and that helps keep me focused on how I most want to spend my time: with my children. I still work, but I’m far less likely to worship what one friend calls The Bitch Goddess of Success.
BETH
I was 41when my son was born and all the cliches are true: I’m more tired, I have less time to take care of myself, I fear that I’ll be gone before I could be a grandmother (and my body’s never been the same). But, as with Pam and Carey, I lived a life before I had my son, and I’m comfortable with who I am. I have friends who had children in their 20′s or younger, and they’re trying to figure themselves out now, in their 40′s and 50′s. I feel like I might move slower than twenty years ago (I’m certain), but I’m more patient, and I’m far more settled, literally and figuratively, than I would’ve been if I’d had children during my first marriage or earlier. I’m very okay with how it all turned out, and for me, that’s a lesson, too.
What effect have your friendships had on your desire to become a mother?
CAREY
I like to think that I served as a kind of single-mother mentor for Beth and Pam, and a single-mother friend of mine named Sally had filled that role for me earlier on. It is a huge decision to become a single mother, and it helped enormously to be allowed in to the life of a woman who had already made that decision, a woman whom I deeply admired. She showed me that it was possible, and though demanding, deeply wonderful.
PAM
I always wanted to have a child. But Beth and Carey encouraged me to become a mother before it was too late and showed me it was possible even if our lives had not gone according to plan. I could see their joy as mothers, and we wanted love and happiness for each other as much as we wanted it for ourselves.
BETH
It’s easier to do anything – hang-glide, ice climb, have a child alone – if you’ve seen someone else do it first, and seen them thrive (or merely survive, when necessary). I met Carey when her daughter was a baby, and I have many friends and family who are single mothers. I believed I could be a good mother, even if I had to go it alone. Carey was not only doing it successfully but she had the vials to make it possible for me, and offering them was a huge gift for a new friendship. Pam had introduced me to Carey, and she was on the same road as me. Knowing you’re not alone is extremely powerful. I didn’t end up as a single mother, but having friends who encouraged me in the direction of motherhood, by whatever means necessary, was a greatmotivation.
What effect has marriage and motherhood had on your close friendships?
BETH
Fortunately, second-time-around, I married a man who my friends like. Still, with a family, especially with a young child (my son is five) scheduling my life is harder, and being spontaneous – which I loved – is mostly out the window. No more driving off into the sunset alone or with a girlfriend. But my friends have always been, and will always be, an intrinsic and core part of who I am. Phil understands that, and isn’t jealous of my friends and the time I spend with them (or at least I don’t think he is). Motherhood has made me less available on a moment’s notice, but even my single friends have confirmed that I haven’t been lost to them, that I remain the same person I was for the majority of my life.
PAM
Time, of course, impacts all aspects of my life these days, including my relationships. But I try very hard to sustain close friendships from throughout my life, and not all of my close friends are married and/or mothers. (I am not married!)
With some of my women friends, marriage and/or motherhood are not and never were among the primary bonds we share; for a few, it’s a source of discomfort or pain because they are still hoping to have one or both of those things, and it’s been important for us to communicate openly and honestly about that. Others desire neither marriage or motherhood. And for the close women in my life who are/were married and/or mothers, it’s added a new dimension to our friendships in terms of sharing experiences, understanding each other’s lives, and spending time together as moms and women in committed relationships.
CAREY
I’ve found that marriage mixes just fine with friendships; motherhood, however, is another matter! It is just so incredibly difficult to find the long blocks of time for talking and adventuring that helped build the basis for my close friendships in the before-children years. We can share outings that include the children, but then the children tend to make conversation difficult. My friendships have survived motherhood, and in some cases — as I’ve found with Beth and Pam — our mothering experiences, the anxieties and the joys, have even deepened the friendships. I’ve also found some new friends in the parents of my children’s friends. But overall? I’d have to say motherhood is a challenge that friendship must overcome.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Carey Goldberg has been the Boston bureau chief of the New York Times, Moscow correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, and most recently a health and science reporter at the Boston Globe. She now writes happily at home.
Beth Jones is a freelance writer and educator who has contributed to the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and numerous academic journals. She plans to climb many more frozen waterfalls.
Pamela Ferdinand is an award-winning freelance journalist and former reporter for the Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Miami Herald. She remains an incorrigible romantic.
BOOK GIVEAWAY
If you would like to know more about the authors and their wishes, send your email address to me at Irene@TheFriendshipBlog or post it in the comment section below. Put THREE WISHES in the subject line by COB Mother’s Day, May 9 (that must be midnight on Mother’s Day!) and we’ll randomly pick one person to win a copy of this impossible-to-put-down book!
Friendship by the Book is an occasional series of posts on The Friendship Blog about books that offer friendship lessons.
WGBH with Emily Rooney
We appeared on Emily Rooney’s show Greater Boston today to discuss our book and single motherhood. You can view the broadcast at:
http://www.wgbh.org/programs/programdetail.cfm?programid=11
And thanks to everyone who made it to our Brookline Booksmith reading (and to all previous readings). It was a great crowd and tremendous fun!
What’s Tradition Worth to You?
Author and fellow Chicagoan Robyn Okrant (“Living Oprah”) spoke to me recently about marriage, non-marriage, and community today for her blog ready, set … wife! It’s a wonderful site, co-written with her friend Cathleen Carr, examining what it means to be a wife in 2010. What does it mean to be a wife in 2010? I wouldn’t know!
Here’s her delicious piece on our conversation:
I recently sat down to chat with my friend, Pamela Ferdinand, who is co-author of the book,Three Wishes: Our True Story of Good Friends, Crushing Heartbreak, and Astonishing Luck on Our Way to Love and Motherhood. Pam and I first met in New York at our mutual publisher’s offices last year and we hit it off right away. I was really fascinated to hear her thoughts on marriage as the story of her household could be filed under the “non-traditional” category. She very kindly came to my new place for a cup of tea and she pretended she didn’t see the 1/4″ of construction dust that sits on every surface in my living room.
I don’t want to give away too much of her fabulous book, but I can let this cat out of the bag: Pam decided she wanted to be a mom regardless of her marital status. She was hearing her biological clock ticking away and hadn’t yet met Mr. Right. I know many women in this position these days. Single, but with such a driving desire to be a mother, they are willing to go it alone. In the old days (and by “old days” I mean 20 years ago when I was starting college), single motherhood was a bit scandalous. Now it’s a widely accepted lifestyle choice. Many women in my own social circle are going this route these days. Either adopting or going to fertility clinics (or, in one case, a willing and virile male friend) to have children without the support of a spouse. Pam decided to use donor sperm but didn’t make use out of it, because the moment the little swimmers came into her ownership, she met the man who became the father of her beautiful daughter, and her life partner.
Pam bucked tradition by creating a family in the “wrong” order: first the career, then the kid, then the man. And she didn’t even marry the guy! And this is what fascinates me: her relationship with her significant other, Mark. She calls him her husband, although they aren’t married. She wears a ring, even though they aren’t legal. They share a bank account, a home, and most importantly, a child. She doesn’t see any need to make things legal to solidify her relationship. Pam said, “Traditional insinuates ‘better’ and I don’t buy that.” Pam has proof. Her more traditional parents got divorced after 25 years of marriage.
I was surprised to hear she never felt pressured to marry after she and Mark had their daughter. I kept expecting her to regale me with tales of judgmental relatives or neighbors. But, no. Pam has surrounded herself with a circle of people who are open-minded and supportive. In fact, she said the only reason at all they might have a wedding is to commit her love to Mark in front of her community. She told me, “I like the idea of standing up before your community and having them support your relationship.” Pam used that word a lot: Community. Cathleen and I talk a lot about the ‘village’ that helps a marriage thrive. We don’t have the same insular, private households that past generations of our families had. It seems we’re not alone.
I think what is most important about Pam and her co-authors Carey Goldberg and Beth Jones, is that they didn’t feel constrained by (or depend on) the traditional path designed for women. They found happiness, they built their families, they designed their lives, in a really inspiring way. “We decided what we really wanted and we tried to get it.” Pam said with friendly confidence.
Pam doesn’t judge anyone’s choice when it comes to marriage. What matters is love, not a piece of paper.” She said, “The way people treat each other – our relationships – are the key to make the world a better place. Just by having a nurturing and happy relationship makes the world a better place.”
