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Helane Rosenberg and Yakov Epstein
Facing Your Own Third Party Issues: A Series Of Journal Writing Activities
If you decide to have a baby on your own, no one asks you how you feel about parenting. Possibly, in what now must seem the distant past, you did take a pop quiz or two from a woman’s magazine that on a very simple level helped you and your partner get ready to make a baby. We’re certainly not going to ask you to complete a pop quiz on the topic of third party pregnancies. Unlike some “classic therapists” who may have told you that the reason you are not conceiving is that your subconscious is telling you you’re not ready to have a baby, we aren’t questioning your motives or your readiness. Instead, we ask you to soul search as a way to prepare yourself to grapple with the many decisions you may have to make.
You're probably thinking to yourself, or maybe even saying aloud, "My situation is not nearly so complicated as the ones you just wrote about! What's the big deal? I'll just use an egg donor/sperm donor/surrogate and have a baby?" And, in fact, there are many medical doctors who view these third party procedures merely as that-- procedures. They see donor insemination, egg donation, and even surrogacy as the next step in Getting Pregnant When You Thought You Couldn't. These procedures are the next medical step. But, the implications of the medical procedures are enormous. Unfortunately, people often jump right into these procedures without ever allowing themselves to get in touch with what they are really thinking or to experience their gut feelings about them.
You may have bought this book believing that you would not involve the services of a third party. But, for increasingly clear reasons, you gradually have come to the realization that you must. That's why you are reading this chapter. Or, you may have bought this book because you heard that it had an excellent discussion of third party issues. No matter which, we always recommend that you come to embrace these procedures, not view them as second best. The series of activities that follow will help you uncover feelings and thoughts you didn’t know were there.
When you start to use a third party a part of you is taken out of the equation. What part has been lost and how great is that loss? Can a third party replace any of what will be lost and does it matter if s/he cannot replace it? To answer this question you must think about who you are and what is important to you.
In addition, doing a third party procedure is uncommon behavior. Over and above the fact that a part of you will not be transmitted to your baby, you have to cope with the fact that you are engaging in an unconventional conception. Our discussion of the dimensions that follow will help make sense of what is happening.
How you feel about yourself and your role in the procedure really provides you with clues of potential trouble before the fact. Not condemning, but knowing this about yourself is really helpful. You can work on it.
If you are doing a donor (egg or sperm) procedure ask Yourself:
Is my identity tied up with being pregnant or having my wife be pregnant?
Do I want to be a parent more than I want to be pregnant?
Am I able to engage in a procedure that is viewed by some people as weird?
If you are contemplating a surrogacy procedure ask yourself:
Would it be hard for me to trust someone?
Would I feel that she is the mother?
Would I worry that my child might like her better?
Each person doing a 3rd party procedure is a unique individual. You may meet people in person at your clinic, online in a bulletin board, chatroom, mailing list, or newsgroup who are doing a third party procedure. These individuals may have strong opinions about how they feel, felt, or might feel about doing a third party procedure. Remember! You are a unique individual with your own unique personality, needs, and reactions. Don’t believe that because someone else had a particular emotional response that you will have a similar response. The best way to predict how you will respond is to know yourself. In this section we will give you a series of probes to help you get to know yourself better and then project how you will handle these situations.
Some of the third party situations require giving up some degree of control. For example, some clinics that do anonymous egg donor procedures do not allow you to meet the donor or see a picture of her. Recipients working with such a clinic must trust the Egg Donor Coordinator to know what you want and to find someone who satisfies those needs. Some recipients can live comfortably with giving over this control to the donor coordinator. Others feel uncomfortable not being in control of this situation. These people might prefer to do a known donor procedure.
For persons thinking about doing a gestational carrier procedure. The carrier will have your baby in her womb for 9 months. She will need to have proper nourishment, live a healthy lifestyle, go in for regular medical checkups and so on. Unless you move in to her house and be with her 24 hours every day you will not have control over what she does for those 9 months. Can you cede this control to her and trust her to behave the way you expect her to?
Think about yourself. Can you identify any situations in your life when you were required to give up control of a situation that was very important to you? Were you able to do that? Discuss this question with your significant other. What insights can he provide to help you have a realistic assessment of yourself?
Third party procedures are instances of unconventional conception. You will be party to unconventional behavior. Do you view yourself as unconventional? Are there other areas in your life where you behave unconventionally? Are you in a profession where you are surrounded by conventionality (you meet few outwardly unconventional bankers, for example). The implications of your answers are that you may either feel comfortable informing others that you are doing a third party procedure or that if you choose not to tell others but they somehow learn what you did, you will not feel ashamed. If you feel uncomfortable with the notion that others would be aware of your unconventional choice, then you will need to hide this information. How comfortable would you feel having to conceal the information and perhaps be constantly vigilant that others not find out?
In his book, Not Yet Pregnant, Greil refers to infertility as “an experience of biographical disruption.”[i] People experiencing such disruption engage in a search for meaning. For many people, the search for an answer to the question “Why me?” leads to an immersion in spirituality, faith, religion. But religion is a hard road to hoe for infertile people. Seeking solace in religion often results in being hit with a “triple whammy.” First, if you are religious you may believe that the world is governed by a Higher Power who rewards goodness and punishes wrongdoing. If this is the case then you may wonder “what did I do wrong?” You may feel guilty and seek atonement. But that search may be fruitless. Many religious leaders will counsel that God’s ways are mysterious and we cannot know why He has meted out the portions we have been given. If you can accept this perspective, you can maintain your religious involvement. But now you face a second obstacle. So much of the activities of religious institutions revolve around family activities. It is difficult to attend a religious service and hear about Church family picnics or pancake breakfasts or communions, or Bar Mitzvahs and be able to participate in this aspect of organized religion. But if you somehow manage to steel yourself against the anguish of feeling that you do not belong when you attend these events, you still have to deal with the third obstacle: violation of religious prescriptions.
Each religion has rules and regulations related to activities involved in Assisted Reproductive Technology. We will briefly digress into a discussion of some of these rules and regulations. Our discussion will be brief. It is intended to help you understand how this aspect of your identity may influence how you deal with a third party procedure. Since we cannot possibly cover all of the questions you may have, we will refer you to sources that may provide you with additional answers.
The percentage of people successfully having babies from third party procedures has increased, sometimes dramatically, over the past few years. But success is till not a certainty. A sizeable number of people do not have a baby. How comfortable are you with taking risks? And what if you take this risk, gamble and lose. How will you react? Certainly you will be upset. But will you be a blamer? When other risky situations have not worked out have you felt the need to blame someone for the failure? What about your spouse? Perhaps you are not a blamer but is he? Will he blame you for taking this risk and losing money that you may have needed for other purposes? Will either of you blame the medical staff for the unsuccessful outcome? And what about self-blame for failure. Will you be down on yourself for allowing yourself to get into a situation where you needed to use a third party? For working on your career and delaying a pregnancy attempt? For marrying a man with a male factor problem? For being unable to get your wife pregnant? For being less of a woman because you cannot use your own eggs?
When you began your pregnancy quest, probably you were happy in your ruminations about your baby: your ideal image of what you and your partner could produce and raise. But as you begin to contemplate using a third party, something changes. We hear about that something daily and have ourselves experienced it. In order to try to understand what that something is, we will give you an opportunity to participate in an activity which we call Our Son Will. To prepare you for this activity we will share what our client Sylvia wrote . As you read what she considered important, you too may reflect upon some aspects of identity that play an important role in influencing how you think about the baby you will be adding to your family.
Directions: Sit down in a quiet space. Bring a paper and pencil. You may even decide to include this list in your Pregnancy Quest Journal, that you began in Chapter 2. Close your eyes and try to form a mental image of the child you are longing to have. Start with a visual image. Your image can be of a child at any age. It could be an infant, a toddler, or even a teenager or a grown individual. Perhaps the image is blurry at first or you have no image at all. Stay with the process. Try to bring that image into closer focus. What do you see? Is the face coming into focus? Are you seeing any special parts of this child's body? Hands? Feet? Fingers? Ankles? Eyes? Your image need not only be visual. It can also be kinesthetic. Can you feel the sensation of this child? Is it soft, muscular, squeezable? Can you smell this child? Do you smell a baby smell? What about an auditory image? Can you hear this child? Do you hear cooing, or speech or singing? Once you form this image, hold on to it and use it to help with the remainder of this activity. Keeping this image in mind write ten adjectives or phrases to answer the question, "Who is my child?" Your answer may be a trait; it may be a feeling. Each person will answer this question differently. In fact, you and your spouse may have very different answers to this question.
To get you started we will share what our client, Sylvia Franklin-Stone, wrote.
My child: ·
is thin ·
has a beautiful singing voice ·
looks just like his daddy ·
loves me very much ·
is stubborn just like me ·
is athletic ·
is not good at math ·
has a wonderful sense of humor ·
is popular with his classmates ·
is a poor eater
Sylvia surprised herself when she considered what she had written. Even though the image in her mind was of a baby, the phrases she wrote were of a child at different stages of development. The thin lad in her first response was a teenager. She heard his beautiful singing voice (phrase 2) as it rang out during hymns in her church. She also saw him arguing with her and her husband Dave about the curfew they imposed on him (adjective 5) and recalled how she had argued the same way with her own parents. Imagining him surrounded by a flock of admiring classmates (phrase 9) brought back memories of her years in school as a girl who was never popular with classmates and her powerful wish for things to be different. In short, Sylvia realized, as she thought about this as yet unformed child, that it had an extremely complex relationship with her experiences, memories, wishes, and fantasies
IDENTITY REVIEW: MUSING ABOUT YOU
The next step for you in figuring out the something that drives you crazy and almost everyone else contemplating a third party pregnancy is an identity review. Probably you've not had much chance to think about yourself, but it's important for you to understand what you think are both your good qualities and your bad ones. Interestingly, as many women or men embark on this exercise, they begin to feel overwhelming sadness. Particularly if you are the one whose genes or body may not be part of this pregnancy, you may wonder if your partner will reject you. Didn't he marry you because you were so pretty/smart/athletic, so his kids will be too. Before you allow yourself to "go there," try to complete the following activity called Who Am
I?Directions: Just as you did in the previous activity, make a list of the ten most important characteristics that describe you. Use as many sense modalities as you can. Focus on yourself. Get an image of all those characteristics--both good and bad--that make you you. Think about what your partner, your parents, your friends, your colleagues know about you. When you have a clear composite picture, write down your list.
What
Sylvia Was Thinking
We'll return to Sylvia again. As Sylvia tried this activity, she was having trouble figuring out what really was at her essence. So many Sylvias came to mind. As she began her internal search, Sylvia was confused and wanted to understand this complex of images and emotions. We helped her sort these out. Here is what we asked her to think about.
We asked Sylvia to think about how she saw her child linked to herself and her ancestors in time. Did she herself feel strongly linked to her ancestors? Did she see herself passing on important traits that her ancestors bestowed upon her? Golden voices had always been a hallmark of the Franklin family. Grandpa Stephen was a soloist in the community chorus and her dad was featured in his Penn barbershop quartet. Sylvia herself was almost always chosen to sing lead roles in her school plays. So imagining this child with a golden voice seemed so natural and reflected an important link in her ancestral chain. But could a donor provide that link? Could anyone assure her of this? What if this child was tone deaf? Could he really be a Franklin? Sylvia realized that excellent singing was an important characteristic of her hoped for child because it would enable him to take his place in the familial lineage. His voice was a link to the past and also to the future.
Here is what Sylvia wrote:Sylvia:
We asked Sylvia to mentally superimpose the description of herself on the description of her child. She did this and was surprised at what she saw. She immediately recognized several qualities that formed her core identity which she had projected onto her child. Her sense of humor, she realized, was such an integral part of her identity. She noted that her image of her child was that he was funny. She wondered, “is a sense of humor transmitted genetically? Dad was funny. Was I born funny or did I model myself after dad?” She had no answers. Indeed, we told her we had no knowledge of whether there was a genetic component to humor. But she did realize that she hoped her child would be similar to her in this core identity feature.
We asked her whether she considered her husband Dave particularly funny. She realized that although he appreciated a good joke, Dave himself did not have much of a sense of humor. “What”, we asked Sylvia, “if your child is like Dave?” Upon reflection Sylvia realized that because of her optimism, history of career success, and self-sufficiency, she always believed that she would make her child funny. So did this mean that she could influence her child by the way she parented him or did she have to depend on genetics as well?
Sylvia thought of how she considered herself a devoted daughter and wondered whether she would be unable to sustain this view if she failed to create a child who continued the Franklin chain of excellent singers? Sylvia realized how much her image of her child was intertwined with her image of herself. She also realized that many of her core identity aspects that she expected her child to possess might be beyond her ability to control or influence.
YOUR MOTIVES FOR HAVING A CHILD
We sometimes hear of a therapist who tells infertile clients that the reason they are not becoming pregnant is that they have all the wrong reasons for wanting to have a baby. Of course, this theory is ridiculous--as if wanting a child because you hope the child will carry on your talents instead of wanting a child because you hope to create a unified whole family will make any difference to your eggs or your sperm or your uterus.
So, as we ask you to analyze your own reasons for wanting a child, it is for the purpose of helping you come to grips with how a third party might affect these motives.
Directions. Find a quiet space. Sit down with a paper and pencil. You can write this list in your Pregnancy Quest Journal. Relax and allow your thoughts and feelings to have full range. Now write down all the reasons you want to have a child.
because
I want to continue the lineage of the Franklin family
The next step in your personal assessment is to look at all three lists side by side and see how they fit together. Clients often tell us that they are surprised at how the lists seem to mesh or not mesh. Although regular people beginning regular pregnancies aren’t asked to think about these inconsistencies, we believe that you really should clarify how you see your potential baby, yourself, and your parenting goals, as you begin to think about using a third party to extend your family.
We asked Sylvia to place her three lists side by side and see how they fit with one another. How did her view of herself, her image of her child, and her motives for having a child fit with one another. Could she satisfy her motives for having a child even if the child she had differed from the one in her mind’s eye? Where was there room for give? She needed to answer these questions before she could go the third-party route to having a child. But before she embarked on this phase of the activity, there was one more issue we needed to address with Sylvia.
This page was last modified 06/02/03