Archive for June 16th, 2010
The Divining Wand’s glowing review
This is what The Divining Wand has to say about “Three Wishes”:
“Although its title and description may sound like a fairy tale, the collaborative memoir, Three Wishes:A True Story of Good Friends, Crushing Heartbreak, and Astonishing Luck on Our Way to Love and Motherhood by Carey Goldberg, Beth Jones, and Pamela Ferdinand, is a 21st century non-fiction account of how anything is possible through traditional hope and love.
Once upon a time — ten years ago — these three successful, connected, savvy journalists began to realize a personal deadline was looming. Their careers had made headlines while relationships had been “cut” for limited time/space/interest. Although single and approaching forty, they still dreamed of “having it all”….or, at least, one baby.
Three Wishes tells the story of of these three friends who transformed their lives when they decided to take control in making motherhood happen.
The Reviews are glowing and Three Wishes was selected as a “TOME OF THE BRAVE” Pick for the June issue of Oprah’s O! Magazine.
When Pamela Ferdinand contacted me to offer a Q&A interview or the opportunity to review this triple memoir, how could I resist what sounded perfect for The Divining Wand? Yet ARCS were piled high and the site’s posts booked solid with new releases/debuts. So before even reading the book, I was introduced to Carey, Beth, and Pamela (live) during their April 21st interview on TODAY. Please take this opportunity to meet them, too, by Launching the Video.
With each author having her own compelling and complicated experiences to tell, they take turns in sharing their journeys to motherhood in alternating chapters. Carey leads off by being the first to seek wish fulfillment by purchasing the vials of donor sperm, Beth follows, and then Pamela. Each voice is as unique as their personal circumstances along with their individual timelines. For, remember, Carey has already made her decision to opt for single parenthood via medical technology or has she?
Because when Carey meets the man who will eventually become the father of her children and her husband, that’s when wishing only for a child turns into wanting much more. True, she does use one vial of donor sperm, but the procedure is unsuccessful. Seven vials remain but now there’s a man in her life and, even if he doesn’t want to commit to being a father…perhaps a donor?
Yes all three women meet their match but even the best relationships are messy and oh so vulnerable. In fact it’s the sheer candidness of sharing everything the authors and their mates live through that makes Three Wishes most impressive. How did they manage to reveal such personal and intimate details of their lives? I asked Pamela and she replied: “It wasn’t easy to share all those details, but we felt an obligation to do so — as journalists who asked such personal details of other people; as women who want to encourage other women to be able to share their experiences; and as authors who feel the most interesting stories are the most honest ones.”
Three Wishes is much more than a book about choosing motherhood as a single woman. Instead it relates what can happen when a wish becomes a goal in life as opposed to an unspoken breath blowing out birthday candles. If by definition “a dream is a wish your heart makes,” then — in order to make it real — you need to share it with others. By opening your heart, you’ll be opening that wish to possibilities, suggestions, support, alternatives, and the unexpected. As Pamela wrote in her post, Guest Pamela Ferdinand Makes A Wish?:
“I fell in love only when my heart was open wider than ever because, in accepting the sperm, I had accepted the possibilities of a non-traditional route to motherhood and family. Of a non-linear life, when anything could happen, in any order.”
Three Wishes:A True Story of Good Friends, Crushing Heartbreak, and Astonishing Luck on Our Way to Love and Motherhood is for anyone who believes that, while miracles do happen and wishes are granted, most of what one yearns for requires time, extreme effort, and heartfelt strength. If you want to be reminded, inspired, or simply awed by those truths, please read how Carey Goldberg, Beth Jones, and Pamela Ferdinand created their own magic to produce three wishes.
Mark’s Kumbh Mela work
was just featured on a popular site, The Travel Photographer.
INSPIREme Chicago Interview
Former television journalist Sarah Jindra interviewed me for her Chicago community site:
Time to meet our next local author with an inspiring book! Pamela Ferdinand is an award-winning journalist from the Chicago area who’s written for the Boston Globe, Miami Herald and Washington Post. This month, her first book was published. It’s co-authored with two of her friends from the Boston area, Beth Jones and Carey Goldberg. The book is called Three Wishes: Our Story of Good Friends, Crushing Heartbreak, and Astonishing Luck on Our Way to Love and Motherhood.
In the book, the three women detail their quest for motherhood. In their late 30′s, they each had successful careers but knew they wanted families too. One problem, the didn’t have men. They each decided separately to try and become mothers on their own. Carey bought sperm and was prepared to be a single mother. But shortly after making that decision, she met a man and had a child with him instead. Beth then took the sperm from Carey with the same intentions of becoming a Mom. But then Beth met a man and he became the father of her child. Next, Pamela decided to take the sperm so she could become a mother. But as luck would have it, she met a man– and yes, had a child with him! Lucky sperm, huh;)
Three Wishes is the true story of all the hardships and surprises these three women encountered while trying to become mothers. It’s a fabulous read, especially for women in their late 30′s or early 40′s who want to have children but are worried about the risks. The authors give truthful accounts of all the ups and downs.
I spoke with our local author, Pamela Ferdinand, on the phone this week about the book. Here are excerpts from our conversation:
INSPIREme: You, Beth and Carey have a very strong bond and an inspiring story. What made you want to write a book and share that story?
FERDINAD: A couple things. I think part of it was that every time we told someone the story, they said, ‘You have to write about that’! So that kind of got the wheels spinning. I think one of the other reasons is that there’s so much doom and gloom news out there for single women and older women that want to be mothers. We felt a lot of the bad news is myth and we could offer a counter myth.
Lastly, we felt like we represented women coming from different experiences, but kind of shared the universal experience of realizing your life plan may not have played out the way you intended. It can be important to think about what you truly want and commit to making that happen. You might not get precisely what you want, but just taking time to figure things out and take action, rather than just wishing for something, can be really powerful.
INSPIREme: As far as writing the book, you each wrote your own chapters. How did you all work together to ensure the book made sense?
FERDINAND: It was pretty easy because we’re all writers and we set deadlines for ourselves. We knew it would be too confusing to write a single story and we also wanted the opportunity to tell our stories the way we wanted to tell them. So it was pretty straight forward– we’d email and edit each other back and forth. We went away together a couple times to have blocks of time to write and talk about things, especially scenes where we were together and had to remember the conversations we had.
INSPIREme: You talk about some very personal topics in the book, including a miscarriage and dating a married man. Was it hard to go inside and write about those times in your life? Or did you find in somewhat therapeutic?
FERDINAND: It was really hard. I wouldn’t say it was therapeutic because I really didn’t want to have to relive it all again. We each cried and had a hard time when we were writing about certain periods. But we’re all journalists and we feel like the truth is fundamentally important. I think people have good radar when they feel something isn’t truthful or is superficial, so for us to tell the full stories in the way we wanted to, we had to be very honest and dig deep.
INSPIREme: Personally, you went through many changes during the process of wanting a baby. It started by considering a sperm donor, then considering your friend’s sperm, then meeting the man you wanted to spend your life with and having a baby with him. How did the final outcome compare to what you originally expected?
FERDINAND: Falling in love and having a child naturally with the man I think is my soul mate (as yucky as some people think that term may be) is definitely more than I had bargained for. I was fully prepared to be a single mother. I thought maybe there would be love down the line, but didn’t expect it to be around the corner. I now know how difficult and joyful motherhood is and how much easier it is having a loving partner to do it with.
INSPIREme: Having someone else to wake up in the middle of the night once in awhile!
FERDINAND: Exactly! To have that happen was definitely more than I expected! But it’s not a totally saccharin story. Because they were all men who weren’t sure they were ready to have children. So it wasn’t like the prince came riding in on the horse and said here we go. We had a lot of romantic ups and downs before we got to the place where everything was more settled.
INSPIREme: So how is motherhood? And being a mother later in life?
FERDINAND: It’s great! It’s exhausting. But I feel like I lived a pretty full life, so I’m getting this whole other adventure at a point in life when I didn’t expect it. So the downside is kind of the energy and wondering how long I’m going to be around for her. The upside is that it came at a time I was ready for it. It’s just this kind of unexpected joy and it really keeps me on my toes.
INSPIREme: I’m sure there will be a lot of women reading this book who are in their late 30′s early 40′s who may also be considering wanting a child. What do you want them to take away from this book?
FERDINAND: A couple things. One is that life isn’t linear and happy endings aren’t necessarily tidy. Also, it’s really important to get together with family and friends if you can. That support can be really powerful. And, that there’s magic in the moment when you figure out what you really want and you commit to go for it. We’re pretty ordinary women who wanted conventional love. We just happened to find it in unconventional ways.
The Jewish Exponent Reviews “Three Wishes”
Here’s a review of our book in The Exponent, which has been published since 1887:
Go Ahead. Make a Wish!
These women did — and their lives changed forever
June 03, 2010
By Nan Myers
Woman plans and God laughs.
You meet someone, fall in love and then … well, despite the above twist on a Jewish proverb, sometimes you actually can get what you hoped for.
Of course, in order to even meet someone, you have to be in the right place physically, emotionally and mentally. The lives of the Jewish women whose stories we learn in Three Wishes didn’t exactly fit the mold.
“In my early 20s,” writes Pamela Ferdinand, “I had imagined myself in the future as a married mother with five children living on a farm in Vermont. Just how I was supposed to achieve that rural reverie was not clear after almost a decade-and-a-half in newspapers, covering blood-splattered double-murder scenes, neighborhoods flattened by hurricanes, and terrorists on trial for bomb plots. I knew I wanted a mate and wouldn’t be able to have children forever, yet I hadn’t made it a top priority.”
“We’d lived full lives, waited and worked hard to have kids,” admits Beth Jones, the most outdoorsy of the three, in describing their lives.
In many ways, these three baby-boomer women — including Carey Goldberg — fit an old Jewish stereotype: “family and community and passing our values to the next generation is so important to us,” explains Ferdinand.
As the book begins, it is Goldberg — The New York Times, and later, Boston Globe reporter — who is settled in bed, reading a novel, when out of nowhere the telephone rings.
When she picks up the phone, she hears something not intended for her ears; an on-and-off boyfriend mistakenly called her and went into a tailspin about how Carey was not for him.
Soon afterward, Carey, again in bed — this time in northern Maine on assignment — debates whether or not to have a baby before it’s too late.
That’s when she decides upon Donor No. 8282 from a California sperm bank. She orders eight of this donor’s vials and stores them at a local Boston fertility clinic. The reader recognizes this as “Wish One.”
In time, Goldberg fell in love, and eventually became pregnant naturally.
The women’s stories span a period of more than 10 years, during which each came to the same realization. Each, who had already achieved success in her chosen field, decided when she reached her late 30s that she wanted to be married and have children. And if there was no man, well, there could still be a child.
“We were the generation who were told we could have it all,” says Ferdinand.
When we meet Jones, she is teaching stress resiliency skills to students in urban classrooms and ending her unhappy eight-year marriage. She wanted a child, he didn’t; though this was only the least of their problems.
It took her a while post-divorce and trying lots of fun things — including rock-climbing, Jewish speed-dating on Christmas Eve and paying a matchmaker to find her the right man — to realize what she wanted.
But she hoped she hadn’t waited too long for a child.
Through her good friend Ferdinand, Jones met Goldberg, who happily transferred ownership of Donor No. 8282′s vials to her: “Wish Two.”
And, in time, Jones, too, met a man, became pregnant, lost the baby, fell in love with the man and had a child.
The vials now belonged to Ferdinand.
Pam was also a newspaper reporter. She’d spent earlier parts of her working life in London, South Florida and New York, where she had an adult Bat Mitzvah.
When her tale begins, she is in Vermont, covering the story of civil unions of gay and lesbian couples for The Washington Post. Goldberg is covering the same story and one evening, they begin talking — about having a baby. Goldberg, who at that time was still considering pregnancy, encouraged the also-single Ferdinand to take the same leap — sooner than later.
In time, like her friends, Ferdinand met and fell in love with an unlikely man. She miscarried, and had pregnancy problems and some heartache before becoming pregnant the old-fashioned way.
The three women attribute both their professional success and their familial desires to their sense of being Jewish.
“I think that one of the reasons we were all successful journalists was due to the outsider sensibility of being Jewish,” says Ferdinand.
And Goldberg, who admits to being surprised when people comment on her candidness in the book, says that “part of my honesty in telling my story is being a Jewish woman in my 40s.”
As for Donor No. 8282′s vials of sperm?
There was no “Wish Four,” but the vials did go to a fourth woman who, we are told, used them unsuccessfully.
The Jewish Daily Forward picks “Three Wishes” as a summer read
Three Wishes
By Carey Goldberg, Beth Jones, Pamela Ferdinand
Little Brown, 288 pages, $24.99
Sure, we’re told to “be fruitful and multiply,” but that’s much easier said than done for those who find themselves approaching 40 and unattached. It’s the situation Boston-based writers Carey Goldberg, Beth Jones and Pamela Ferdinand found themselves in a few years back. One by one, each woman made the decision to undergo artificial insemination rather than let her reproductive years pass her by.
Carey purchased vials of sperm only to fall in love and, in short order, go on to make babies the old-fashioned way. She passed the sperm on to Beth. And when Beth found herself in a romantic relationship with suitable father material, she gave the vials to Pamela, who also found love before she could make use of the sperm.
The three women’s circuitous, often-painful journeys to motherhood is the subject of their new memoir “Three Wishes,” for which the authors took turns writing chapters. Each woman is a wordsmith in her own right. Their voices and their very similar stories blend together seamlessly — perhaps too seamlessly, as it is sometimes difficult to keep track of their individual trajectories. But, ultimately, their tightly braided stories are as inspiring as they are absorbing.
— Gabrielle Birkner
To Wish, or Not to Wish
Here’s my guest post on The Divining Wand:
Wish. So often that word conjures the idea of a genie in a bottle instead of taking destiny into one’s own hands. As a single working woman nearing 40 who wanted both love and family, I could have used a genie. I felt like I was running out of time after falling for men who either couldn’t or wouldn’t commit to me. But as much as I hoped one would show up before my biology gave out, I couldn’t count on it. I couldn’t just close my eyes and wish.
Instead, I discovered a different kind of magic in the process of transforming my life by accepting it as it was, figuring out what I truly wanted, and allowing my friends to support me, as I had supported them. It was a moment when wishes became actions, when desires became decisions, and when I stopped waiting for life to happen to me and tried to create what I wanted my life to be.
My path to wish fulfillment began when my friend Carey, alone at age 39, had purchased vials of anonymous donor sperm but never used them. She met her future husband and father of her children the very day those vials arrived at her clinic. She passed them on to our friend Beth, also on the verge of 40. Beth had expected she would have a family with her husband, but they divorced, and she decided to become a single mother. As she prepared to use Donor 8282’s sperm, Beth met her match, and together they had a child.
By the time Beth offered me the vials, I also was fully prepared to be a single mother, one way or another. I had considered the necessary resources, role models, and emotional support I thought my child and I would need. I had seen my gynecologist and spoken to my family. No sooner had I accepted the sperm from my friend than I met my love on an observatory rooftop. Today my fiance and I have a daughter.
I didn’t jump into this romantic relationship like a lifeboat because I was suddenly scared to enter single motherhood. Having a child on my own was not necessarily my first choice, but that does not mean I considered it a lesser choice. As a woman journalist who once assumed I could Have It All, and then didn’t, I took the time to think about what I really, truly desired. What I could not live without. To other women, it could be so many things that are meaningful in life, things too numerous to mention. But for me, it was a child.
I fell in love only when my heart was open wider than ever because, in accepting the sperm, I had accepted the possibilities of a non-traditional route to motherhood and family. Of a non-linear life, when anything could happen, in any order. For me, having the sperm not only severed the ties between romance and reproduction, and all the pressures that entailed, but it also represented taking control of my life. Even if there were no guarantees.
Being offered the sperm also reminded me of the power of friendship in making wishes come true. It’s far easier to create the life you want if the people around you genuinely want you to succeed and provide the emotional and psychological succor — and in this case, the actual means — to pursue it. With Carey’s help, then Beth’s, I did more than make a wish. I granted it.
