Archive for July 26th, 2010
What does your office look like?
An interview with Terri Myers of Strata:
As a journalist, Pamela Ferdinand has written for The Boston Globe Magazine, National Geographic News and The Washington Post. She recently co-authored a memoir, Three Wishes: A True Story of Good Friends, Crushing Heartbreak, and Astonishing Luck on Our Way to Love and Motherhood, with two other journalists, Carey Goldberg and Beth Jones. Her office is remarkably clean.
What does your desk—the bare desk itself—look like, and how did you acquire it?
My desk is a light birch veneer IKEA tabletop with brushed silver trestle legs. It’s about the farthest thing from my ideal, which would be an antique natural wood farm table with a wide top and lots of character. In fact, it’s pretty much anti-character. But my family and I moved last year to a rental home, and this desk was cheerful and cheap.
What’s on your desk?
My trustworthy Mac—a 13” MacBook Pro hooked up to a monitor that sits on a stand above it. I can easily unplug everything and grab it on the go. The monitor is 21” and has enough real estate to let me put two pages up simultaneously (one to write, one to read) but not too much because big screens make me dizzy. I also have a small SAD lamp to combat any winter morning blues and a regular white lamp with a green silk round shade. I keep the rest of the desk clear of clutter. A rolling file cabinet to my left contains papers, desk supplies, printer, and phone. So everything is almost with arm’s reach, but I don’t have to look at it—which helps clear and focus my increasingly addled mind.
What do you wish wasn’t on your desk?
Everything. I wish I could do it all by pen and paper! But I can’t. My handwriting has gotten progressively worse the longer I’ve typed.
Are there artifacts in your office that relate to your current project?
Yes. In the closet, there are boxes of diaries, letters, and photographs from the time period I wrote about. I keep stacks of old manuscripts in the closet. A collection of book galleys and a Polish edition of our memoir sit in a white IKEA bookcase to my left, which is titled horizontally. I also keep out some love notes and recent Valentine’s Day cards from Mark, my significant other, and our daughter Emma, without whom the memoir wouldn’t exist.
Are there living things in your office (besides yourself)?
Two plants. And, more importantly, a 19-year-old, one-eyed cat, Clementine. Mark has terrible allergies so she is confined to my home office where she has a litter box, food, and water fountain in the closet. She also has a cozy bed with a blanket and heating pad. A Miami Herald colleague found her as a kitten in the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant. In the years since, Clementine lost her right eye to cancer, and she has kidney failure, but she’s hanging in there. And I’m hanging right in there with her.
What else surrounds you?
Until several months ago, not much. My office is on the second floor, and I have a set of wide, tall windows that face a quiet street, an empty lot, and a series of pastel-colored wooden frame houses. An elevated train track runs behind and above them; I heard the trains a lot the first day we moved in, but my brain adjusted, and I never notice them any more. The horizontal bookcase to my left contains boxes for letters, DVDs, books, as well as an iPod and speakers. To my right and behind me are a side table that I refinished, a space heater, a brown leather loveseat, and a small book cabinet with a television on top. I wanted to keep the room empty while I wrote the first drafts, and I didn’t know how long we’d be here, so it was a pretty spartan environment for a long time. Then Danielle Dale, a local interior designer who was building her portfolio, offered online to help several people fix up one room in their house. That was a no-brainer. I had a feeling I’d be spending a lot more time at my desk this year so I called her, and she quickly transformed the space into a warm, feminine office with little touches: pillows, a rug, picture ledge, window valance. She moved some furniture around and stole things like a mirror and lamp from other parts of the house. Now it feels like a completely different room.
What’s on the walls?
A black-and-white fabric board with photos of family and friends stuck between elastic ribbons. Mark’s Harvard University diploma from 2004; he took classes for 12 years for credit, intending to do a graduate degree. He would never hang it himself, but I’m incredibly proud of him, and it dates from around the time we met. (Sorry, hopeless romantic.) I also have several photos—two by Mark of landscapes in New Zealand and India; one of an elephant by photographer Jean-Claude Louis; and a black-and-white photo of a girl below a bird’s nest by a poet friend Trish Crapo. I also framed and hung a piece of notebook paper signed by the biologist E.O. Wilson, whom I admire for his genius and humility.
What have you lost in your office that you really wish you could find?
My reading glasses. No idea where they are. I’ve been too lazy to wear them, and by now I probably need a new prescription anyway.
What tools do you write with?
The Mac, reporter’s notepads, a digital recorder, my iPod. Does coffee count as a tool?
Is anyone allowed to come in and clean?
Yes. Especially with the cat here, I really appreciate a good vacuum, occasional steam clean, and dusting. I like it when the desk loses that dust grit and the air smells fresh.
T. Myers is a writer who likes the idea of cleaning, if not the reality.
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.
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”!
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.
