More folks I know have sleep disorders than any other type of maladjustment problem. They simply don't get enough rest. This article raises awareness on that matter. Enjoy !
The New York Times
April 2, 2006
Can't Sleep? Read This
By WILLIAM L. HAMILTON
TRY this sometime.
Plaster about two dozen electrodes to your face and head and tape some more to your chest and legs. Give yourself two to three feet of wire on each, and attach the other ends to the wall next to a bed, so they tug tightly when you move. Make sure the bed is in a room that you've never seen before, something that looks like a hospital room disguised as a hotel room. A kind of Soviet-era bugged spy box for information gathering, with a video camera, pointed at the bed, blinking silently from the ceiling.
Then turn out the lights and go to sleep.
I'm not a very cooperative lab rat, but this would describe a typical night at a sleep clinic, where data is gathered on how you sleep. This describes my night at the Center for Sleep Medicine at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan. I woke up the next morning at 7 with someone misting my head. That softens the glue on the electrodes. On the subway ride home I looked like an escapee, discs of plaster crusted on my skull. Just another alien abduction.
I have joined the national discussion on sleep, a statistic in what is being called an epidemic of sleeplessness, or the growing perception that in bed, extracurriculars aside, we're not being our personal best.
It is a discussion being conducted in doctors' offices, at dinner tables, on Web sites like talkaboutsleep.com and sandiegodreamcatchers.org, and in chat rooms, where people call themselves "midnightclyde" and "sleepymoon."
"Nutrition, physical fitness, now sleep," said Dr. William C. Dement, director of the Sleep Disorders Clinic and Research Center at Stanford University, of the modern history of the American obsession with wellness.
Dr. Dement, who basically founded the idea of sleep medicine, is, at 77, the Sandman. He said the only periods during which he ever recalling losing sleep were when applying for grant money. "Twenty-five years ago everyone started jogging, worried about fitness," he said. "Now sleep is having its moment. Ninety percent of your waking health is dependent on your sleep."
Since 1970, when Dr. Dement founded his clinic, the nation's first, sleep has spawned university departments, associations, journals, conventions, academies and foundations like the National Sleep Foundation, which declared last week National Sleep Awareness week, ending today with daylight saving time, when we lose an hour of sleep by the clock whether we normally snooze with the gods or not.
Like many others, I complained to my doctor of poor sleep, and of tiredness during the day. He prescribed a sleep evaluation, to be conducted at a sleep clinic.
With baby boomers again leading the charge (I'm 54; you lose your natural gift for sleep as you age), sleep has become a commercial industry. In addition to pills (more popular than ever), breathing masks, nose pillows, hypnotic podcasts, aromatherapies and specialty bedding, there are sleep clinics like Mount Sinai's, which are proliferating.
With a tantalizing promise of self-improvement, like a day spa crossed with a night class, accredited facilities in the United States have tripled in number, to 963, in the last 10 years. (There are roughly 900 more unaccredited centers.) Sleep doctors warn that a shortage of trained, certified personnel like the technicians who administer the overnight testing could be sleep's next crisis.
"Think you have a sleep disorder?" asks the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, which accredits sleep centers, at its Web site, www.aasmnet.org. "Find a sleep center near you!"
Dr. Stasia J. Wieber, director of the Comprehensive Center for Sleep Medicine at Mount Sinai, said of evaluations: "A lot of people do it because their friends did it. But we only do an overnight sleep study when it's indicated. Everyone leaves with a diagnosis, but not everyone gets thrown into the lab. A physician has to order the study."
The overnight evaluation at Mount Sinai costs $1,500; most insurance companies cover it.
I arrived at 8 in the evening with an overnight bag, filled out a form on my sleep habits to determine my overall sleep "hygiene," then changed into my nightwear (tattered workout clothes) and sat in a chair watching "Armageddon" without sound on a corner television while a technician worked behind me, wiring my head.
Mount Sinai also evaluates pediatric sleep disorders. Down the hall, someone sang a lullaby, with the soft disembodiment that foreshadows horrible events in movies. On the television Bruce Willis said goodbye to Earth, his finger on the bomb.
Lights out. During the night, as I traveled between wakefulness and sleep, sending back streams of data like a space probe, the technician appeared and disappeared, adjusting my wires, and exiting my consciousness in a ring of light — the door to the corridor — like a spectral visitor, a goblin that only the sixth-sensed see. He monitored my voyage from a desk somewhere in the clinic, taking notes as I sped through the blackness.
The next morning, miles from a cup of coffee, my head damp with mist and dotted with what looked like old toothpaste, I filled out another form, asking, among other things, what I had dreamed about.
"I dreamed I was wired to a bunch of wires, in a threatening tangle, that pulled me back to a wall every time I tried to escape," I wrote, truthfully.
"Perhaps it was not a dream," the technician said, reviewing my responses, with a graveyard humor that was also chilly and serious. Working nights will do it to you.
During an office visit with Dr. Wieber two weeks later, I was told I have sleep apnea. I stop breathing 16 times an hour as I sleep, which she explained is considered moderate.
When you stop breathing, because of an inadequate passage for air between your tongue and the back of your throat, your body sends a message to your brain that something is going wrong, and your brain, in an emergency response, wakes you up. You lose sleep. And you are at increased risk for heart attack and stroke, studies have shown.
Medically, the first line of defense is a machine with a mask called a CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) device. Then there is a Clockwork Orange-like dental device, which is not effective in every case, explained Dr. Wieber. And there was a surgical procedure, for select cases.
Rock, hard place.
The CPAP (pronounced SEE-pap) mask was simpler and showed great success, she said. But it meant snorkeling your way down into the deep of sleep, more scuba diving than sheep counting. Every single night. And you look like Dennis Hopper in "Blue Velvet," to yourself and anyone else. I freaked out.
In a subsequent telephone conversation, Dr. Wieber assured me I was not alone.
"It's hard to wear a mask every night," she said, adding that for patients who are hearing of apnea and its treatments for the first time, the mask "might come as a shock." But she added that 70 to 75 percent adopt it, and compliance is good.
"For people walking around tired all day, it's a no-brainer," said David Schneiderman, 44, chief operating officer for a commodities clearing corporation in New York, with assurance. Mr. Schneiderman, who was diagnosed with apnea in 2002 and who wears a CPAP mask every night, recalled his wife and daughter telling him that before he was evaluated, he slept like a man in a cartoon.
"The dresser drawers would pull out and push in, from my snoring," he said. Now, with his snorkel-like CPAP in place as he prepares for bed, "my daughter comes in to kiss me goodnight: 'Goodnight Darth,' she says." Mr. Schneiderman added that he slept so well that he could no longer nap during the day.
Apnea, a recognized threat, is the tip of the iceberg, say sleep doctors. There are more than 80 identifiable sleep disorders, including restless leg syndrome and classics like insomnia.
"People think if you have apnea you die," said Dr. Thomas Roth, director of the Sleep Disorder and Research Center at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, who is cynical about the nation's discussion on sleep and the fashionable interest in the subject, and recited the rest of the wives' tales that have garnered the greatest media attention. "If you have insomnia, you're neurotic. If you don't sleep a lot, you're macho."
Dr. Roth, like many sleep specialists spoken to, believes the awareness of inadequate sleep, or the importance of good sleep hygiene, is still developing.
"Go to every school in the state and see how many have taught one word about sleep," he said. "My daughter's high school hygiene and health textbook? One page. That will be hard to justify to kids, because they don't sleep well either."
In a study released on Tuesday the National Sleep Foundation reported that more than half of the teenagers polled, ages 11 to 17, said they got less sleep than they thought they should, and a third suspected they had a sleep disorder. Only 7 percent of the parents polled thought their children had problems sleeping, though 28 percent of the teenagers said they fell asleep in class and were too tired to exercise.
More than half said they had driven while drowsy during the last year. Caffeine and electronic games, computers, personal telephones and televisions in the bedroom were culprits called out in the study: familiar to teenagers, but absent in their parents' suppositions about how much, or how well, their children sleep.
"Changing human behavior is a very difficult challenge," said Dr. Roth, who expressed pessimism about people's ability to embrace better sleep habits when, like eating or exercise, changing them went to the core of how people liked to live. He compared the epidemic of sleeplessness to the national epidemic of obesity, which is worsening.
And then there is blissful denial. If only that could help you sleep. "Ninety percent of the time, people with sleep problems think they're champion sleepers, and that they're just somehow too sleepy," said Dr. Meir Kryger, director of the sleep disorder clinic at St. Boniface General Hospital in Winnipeg, Manitoba, of his adult patients.
"It's a strange business," he said of sleep.
Tell me about it. Just not before I turn out the light.
###
Friday, March 31, 2006
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Brainiacs are different (yawn)
Yet another confirmation of the obvious - intelligent's children's (and i suspect adults will show similar indications) brains look different than other children's brains. Still fascinating - just not surprising. Enjoy.
The New York Times
March 30, 2006
Scans Show Different Growth for Intelligent Brains
By NICHOLAS WADE
The brains of highly intelligent children develop in a different pattern from those with more average abilities, researchers have found after analyzing a series of imaging scans collected over 17 years.
The discovery, some experts expect, will help scientists understand intelligence in terms of the genes that foster it and the childhood experiences that can promote it.
"This is the first time that anyone has shown that the brain grows differently in extremely intelligent children," said Paul M. Thompson, a brain-imaging expert at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The finding is based on 307 children in Bethesda, Md., an affluent suburb of Washington. Starting in 1989, they were given regular brain scans using magnetic resonance imaging, a project initiated by Dr. Judith Rapoport of the National Institute of Mental Health.
This set of scans has been analyzed by Philip Shaw, Dr. Jay Giedd and others at the institute and at McGill University in Montreal. They looked at changes in the thickness of the cerebral cortex, the thin sheet of neurons that clads the outer surface of the brain and is the seat of many higher mental processes.
The general pattern of maturation, they report in Nature today, is that the cortex grows thicker as the child ages and then thins out. The cause of the changes is unknown, because the imaging process cannot see down to the level of individual neurons.
But basically the brain seems to be rewiring itself as it matures, with the thinning of the cortex reflecting a pruning of redundant connections.
The analysis was started to check out a finding by Dr. Thompson: that parts of the frontal lobe of the cortex are larger in people with high I.Q.'s. Looking at highly intelligent 7-year-olds, the researchers said they were surprised to find that the cortex was thinner than in a comparison group of children of average intelligence.
It was only in following the scans as the children grew older that the dynamism of the developing brain became evident. The researchers found that average children (I.Q. scores 83 to 108) reached a peak of cortical thickness at age 7 or 8. Highly intelligent children (121 to 149 in I.Q.) reached a peak thickness much later, at 13, followed by a more dynamic pruning process.
One interpretation, Dr. Rapoport said, is that the brains of highly intelligent children are more plastic or changeable, swinging through a higher trajectory of cortical thickening and thinning than occurs in average children. The scans show the "sculpturing or fine tuning of parts of the cortex which support higher level thought, and maybe this is happening more efficiently in the most intelligent children," Dr. Shaw said.
The I.Q. was tested when the children entered the program. Further tests were not needed because I.Q.'s are so stable, Dr. Rapoport said.
Dr. Thompson said the new study opened huge possibilities because researchers should be able to identify the factors that influence the brain by looking at the scan patterns identified by the researchers.
The Bethesda children have had genetic samples taken from their cells, so genes that have even the mildest influence on the brain should be detectable, Dr. Thompson said. The pattern of development may also be affected by factors like diet, hours spent in school or the number of siblings, and these may come to light by asking parents how they raised their children.
"There are many enigmas of intelligence that they can now solve," he said.
I.Q. scores and measuring intelligence have long been controversial. Brain-imaging studies by Dr. Thompson and the study group have advanced the field by identifying physical features of the brain that correlate with I.Q.
In 2001, Dr. Thompson reported that based on imaging twins' brains the volume of gray matter in the frontal lobes and other areas correlated with I.Q. and was heavily influenced by genetics. Despite the great importance of genes in brain function, Dr. Thompson said experience could also change the brain.
"Unless you have strong natural potential, you won't become a world-class marathon runner," he said. "But that disillusionment is rapidly replaced by the notion that you can improve your own performance."
The institute's team has many genetic studies in progress. The analysis reported today was not intended to look at the relationship between genes and intelligence.
"A lot of research in intelligence has not been that great," Dr. Shaw said. "I would hope by this modest descriptive study to put things on an empirical footing."
One goal of the study was to establish normal development patterns, to diagnose what goes awry in children with schizophrenia or attention deficits. Dr. Shaw said his team did not have the full answers as to how the brain differed in those cases.
###
The New York Times
March 30, 2006
Scans Show Different Growth for Intelligent Brains
By NICHOLAS WADE
The brains of highly intelligent children develop in a different pattern from those with more average abilities, researchers have found after analyzing a series of imaging scans collected over 17 years.
The discovery, some experts expect, will help scientists understand intelligence in terms of the genes that foster it and the childhood experiences that can promote it.
"This is the first time that anyone has shown that the brain grows differently in extremely intelligent children," said Paul M. Thompson, a brain-imaging expert at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The finding is based on 307 children in Bethesda, Md., an affluent suburb of Washington. Starting in 1989, they were given regular brain scans using magnetic resonance imaging, a project initiated by Dr. Judith Rapoport of the National Institute of Mental Health.
This set of scans has been analyzed by Philip Shaw, Dr. Jay Giedd and others at the institute and at McGill University in Montreal. They looked at changes in the thickness of the cerebral cortex, the thin sheet of neurons that clads the outer surface of the brain and is the seat of many higher mental processes.
The general pattern of maturation, they report in Nature today, is that the cortex grows thicker as the child ages and then thins out. The cause of the changes is unknown, because the imaging process cannot see down to the level of individual neurons.
But basically the brain seems to be rewiring itself as it matures, with the thinning of the cortex reflecting a pruning of redundant connections.
The analysis was started to check out a finding by Dr. Thompson: that parts of the frontal lobe of the cortex are larger in people with high I.Q.'s. Looking at highly intelligent 7-year-olds, the researchers said they were surprised to find that the cortex was thinner than in a comparison group of children of average intelligence.
It was only in following the scans as the children grew older that the dynamism of the developing brain became evident. The researchers found that average children (I.Q. scores 83 to 108) reached a peak of cortical thickness at age 7 or 8. Highly intelligent children (121 to 149 in I.Q.) reached a peak thickness much later, at 13, followed by a more dynamic pruning process.
One interpretation, Dr. Rapoport said, is that the brains of highly intelligent children are more plastic or changeable, swinging through a higher trajectory of cortical thickening and thinning than occurs in average children. The scans show the "sculpturing or fine tuning of parts of the cortex which support higher level thought, and maybe this is happening more efficiently in the most intelligent children," Dr. Shaw said.
The I.Q. was tested when the children entered the program. Further tests were not needed because I.Q.'s are so stable, Dr. Rapoport said.
Dr. Thompson said the new study opened huge possibilities because researchers should be able to identify the factors that influence the brain by looking at the scan patterns identified by the researchers.
The Bethesda children have had genetic samples taken from their cells, so genes that have even the mildest influence on the brain should be detectable, Dr. Thompson said. The pattern of development may also be affected by factors like diet, hours spent in school or the number of siblings, and these may come to light by asking parents how they raised their children.
"There are many enigmas of intelligence that they can now solve," he said.
I.Q. scores and measuring intelligence have long been controversial. Brain-imaging studies by Dr. Thompson and the study group have advanced the field by identifying physical features of the brain that correlate with I.Q.
In 2001, Dr. Thompson reported that based on imaging twins' brains the volume of gray matter in the frontal lobes and other areas correlated with I.Q. and was heavily influenced by genetics. Despite the great importance of genes in brain function, Dr. Thompson said experience could also change the brain.
"Unless you have strong natural potential, you won't become a world-class marathon runner," he said. "But that disillusionment is rapidly replaced by the notion that you can improve your own performance."
The institute's team has many genetic studies in progress. The analysis reported today was not intended to look at the relationship between genes and intelligence.
"A lot of research in intelligence has not been that great," Dr. Shaw said. "I would hope by this modest descriptive study to put things on an empirical footing."
One goal of the study was to establish normal development patterns, to diagnose what goes awry in children with schizophrenia or attention deficits. Dr. Shaw said his team did not have the full answers as to how the brain differed in those cases.
###
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Dance around these blogs
Lots going on around my blogosphere right now.
Ever notice that there are now 10 (ten) blogs here (see list to the right - PLUS - three of the blogs aren't even listed yet - you have to peek at my profile page at the bottom to see 'em)?
Check some of these others out - they contain entries not found here at the main 3deye blog (although at times i post a particularly good entry in several blogs at once).
And since i believe in the Buddhist saying that "your most beloved teachers are your critics," please feel free to suggest improvements for your reading / viewing pleasure here.
Or you may just complain if you wish. Feels good sometime to simply vent. I have an alligator's hide, so pull no punches.
MEANWHILE
Check out OUR Constant Gardeners blog at
http://constantgarden.blogspot.com/ for the latest stuff there.
Enjoy !
p.s. Want to contribute to any of these blogs on a regular basis? That's doable. Just write to me and tell me. Welcome.
Ever notice that there are now 10 (ten) blogs here (see list to the right - PLUS - three of the blogs aren't even listed yet - you have to peek at my profile page at the bottom to see 'em)?
Check some of these others out - they contain entries not found here at the main 3deye blog (although at times i post a particularly good entry in several blogs at once).
And since i believe in the Buddhist saying that "your most beloved teachers are your critics," please feel free to suggest improvements for your reading / viewing pleasure here.
Or you may just complain if you wish. Feels good sometime to simply vent. I have an alligator's hide, so pull no punches.
MEANWHILE
Check out OUR Constant Gardeners blog at
http://constantgarden.blogspot.com/ for the latest stuff there.
Enjoy !
p.s. Want to contribute to any of these blogs on a regular basis? That's doable. Just write to me and tell me. Welcome.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
To the Ladies I love
This "hot flash" bugaboo has got to stop. Here's how to achieve that.
Enjoy, ladies.
Oh - I like dark beer (Guiness, Abita Springs, Shiner Bock, Fat Tire, etc). Call me to come over for a beer and to discuss how this treatment helped you. We'll both have a good laugh and I'll get to drink some favorite beer as well.
The New York Times
March 28, 2006
Personal Health
A Chance Find, and Voilà! Goodbye, Hot Flashes. Hello, Sleep.
By JANE E. BRODY
A widely used drug that has been mired in controversy for most of its decade-long life may now bring relief to postmenopausal women whose lives have been disrupted by unrelenting hot flashes. The relief may be especially welcome to women who have had breast cancer and cannot take estrogen.
The drug, best known by its trade name, Neurontin, but now prescribed generically as gabapentin, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1994 to treat epileptic seizures. In 2002, it was approved to treat postherpetic neuralgia, horrific pain that sometimes follows shingles.
Aided by the Internet and, the government has said, an illegal marketing campaign by its parent company, Neurontin sales eventually exceeded $2 billion a year before its patent expired and the generic gabapentin entered the market in 2004.
The parent company, Warner-Lambert (since bought by Pfizer), was investigated after a whistle-blower said it had paid doctors to promote Neurontin to their colleagues for a host of additional symptoms not approved by the F.D.A. The whistle-blower also said the company had paid to have research articles prepared claiming benefits of a dubious nature.
Varied Applications
As a result, Neurontin has been used for problems like migraines, social phobia, attention-deficit disorder in children, gastric ulcers, restless leg syndrome, essential tremor, osteoarthritis, backache, insomnia, anxiety, bipolar disorder, panic attacks and withdrawal from cocaine and alcohol — all known as off-label uses.
Its most frequent off-label use is as an adjunct to drugs used to treat pain, especially pain thought to have nerve involvement.
Thus, gabapentin was part of the medication prescribed for my unrelenting pain after a double knee-replacement operation last year. It was prescribed again last fall when I developed debilitating back and leg pain caused by a pinched nerve in my back.
Between the two prescriptions, I made a discovery that changed my life for the better. While taking Neurontin three times a day for the knee pain, I had none of the hot flashes that had plagued me day and night after breast cancer in 1999 made me stop postmenopausal hormones. But when I weaned myself from gabapentin last May, the hot flashes returned, resulting in three sleepless nights in a row. I wondered whether it could be a factor and decided, with my doctor's approval, to try just one 300-milligram capsule before bedtime. Voilà! No hot flashes. No waking up damp and clammy and unable to go back to sleep.
I've stayed on the drug, and this winter I've been able to wear turtlenecks. I'm sleeping much better. On the dose that helps me — 300 milligrams after breakfast and 300 or 600 milligrams at bedtime — I've noticed no unusual effects beyond an ability to sleep comfortably for seven hours a night.
Last September, I found a report in The Lancet, the medical journal, by researchers from four medical centers who conducted a clinic trial using gabapentin to treat hot flashes in women with breast cancer. In the study, 420 women having two or more hot flashes a day were randomly assigned to take 300 or 900 milligrams of gabapentin or a look-alike placebo each day in three divided doses for eight weeks.
About one patient in five on the placebo reported a decline in hot flashes, while a third of those taking 300 milligrams of gabapentin did and nearly half of those on 900 milligrams reported a benefit.
The researchers, led by Dr. Kishan J. Pandya of the James P. Wilmot Cancer Center at the University of Rochester Medical Center, found that "only the higher dose of gabapentin was associated with significant decreases in hot flash frequency and severity." They recommended that the drug "be considered for treatment of hot flashes in women with breast cancer."
Dr. Pandya undertook this study after Dr. Thomas J. Guttuso Jr., a neurologist then at the university's medical center, published findings in February 2003 in Obstetrics & Gynecology. Dr. Guttuso and his colleagues had randomly assigned 59 postmenopausal women who suffered from seven or more hot flashes a day to receive gabapentin or a placebo for 12 weeks.
Reducing the Heat
Those who took 300 milligrams of gabapentin three times a day reported a 54 percent reduction in overall hot flash activity (frequency and severity) compared with a 31 percent drop in the placebo group.
In an interview, Dr. Guttuso, now at the Jacobs Neurological Institute at the University at Buffalo, discussed a soon-to-be-published study by Dr. Sireesha Y. Reddy and colleagues that pitted 2,400 milligrams of gabapentin daily against 0.625 milligram of estrogen, the gold standard for controlling hot flashes.
Participants suffered from moderate to severe hot flashes, defined as seven or more per day, accompanied by sweating. Gabapentin relieved hot flashes as effectively as estrogen, Dr. Guttuso said. Although about 40 percent of the women taking 2,400 milligrams of gabapentin daily reported side effects (sleepiness, dizziness and swelling of the feet), they felt that the benefit of the drug outweighed them, Dr. Guttuso said.
Gabapentin has other benefits. "It does not interact with any other medications, which is very unique," Dr. Guttoso said, "so doctors don't have to worry about other drugs a patient might be taking. Also, gabapentin is not metabolized, so it has no effect on the liver. It's fully excreted in the urine." He said that it works through a receptor on the membranes of brain and peripheral nerve cells.
Estrogen normally acts as a brake on cells in the brain's temperature-regulating center through pathways called calcium channels. Gabapentin binds to a channel.
Gabapentin was developed to help avoid the addictive quality of drugs called GABA analogues (Valium, Ativan and Xanax) used for anxiety and seizure disorders. The modified drug proved nonaddictive.
Properly designed clinical trials are needed to show just how helpful gabapentin is against various conditions and whether prolonged use may have unexpected adverse effects. At high doses, side effects like drowsiness, dizziness and weight gain from retained water can limit its usefulness.
Now that the drug is without patent protection, future F.D.A. approvals will depend on studies by two companies. One, PharmaNova, has patented a sustained-release formulation of gabapentin and is studying its role in treating hot flashes. Meanwhile, Pfizer has introduced a chemical cousin of gabapentin, sold as Lyrica and approved for treating nerve pain caused by shingles and diabetes. It should control hot flashes, too.
Lyrica is being studied in patients with hot flashes under a licensing agreement with the University of Rochester, which has patented new uses of gabapentin and other drugs that use the same mechanism.
###
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Emotions Key
Dana Reeve tells viewers: “Your emotional state has a tremendous amount to do with sickness, health and well-being."
It's one of those insights which seems obvious at first, but then we don't live as if we believe it.We must.
Enjoy.
MSNBC.com
Dana Reeve poignantly begins PBS program
Months before death, is ‘hopeful' in introduction to ‘The New Medicine’
The Associated Press
Updated: 6:08 p.m. ET March 25, 2006
CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Dana Reeve would live only about three more months after she taped an introduction to the two-hour PBS documentary “The New Medicine.”
The widow of paralyzed “Superman” actor Christopher Reeve was battling lung cancer diagnosed last summer, but was upbeat on that late November day of the taping.
“She was very hopeful at that point that she would survive,” director Muffie Meyer recalled. “She was buying Christmas presents for her son that day, and really had a tremendous amount of energy.”
In her introduction to the first segment of “The New Medicine,” Reeve tells viewers: “Your emotional state has a tremendous amount to do with sickness, health and well-being. For years, my husband and I lived on — and because of — hope. Hope continues to give me the mental strength to carry on.”
The project was the last she is known to have completed before her death March 6. “The New Medicine,” which debuts Wednesday (check local listings), looks at how mainstream doctors are embracing the idea that true healing involves treating the whole patient — not just the symptoms of a disease.
By airing after her death, Reeve’s appearance unintentionally underscores one of the central points of the documentary: Holistic medicine is a tool for fighting illness — not a cure-all.
“Part of the challenge is we get patients all the time that are really looking for a magic cure,” said Dr. Tracy Gaudet, an obstetrician-gynecologist who heads the Duke Center for Integrative Medicine in Durham and is featured in the PBS program. “We’re not in the business of magic cures; we’re in the business of good medicine.”
The idea behind her center, Gaudet said, is to use any available techniques — from alternative to mainstream — that might improve a patient’s experience. Accepted practices include herbal supplements, acupuncture, massage and meditation.
“The Science of Emotion,” the first hour of the documentary, follows Gaudet as she treats Tammy Patton following her hospitalization in the 25th week of pregnancy. Patton’s water has broken prematurely, exposing her fetus to the risk of infection and increasing the chance of premature birth.
Stress is known to raise the risk of infection and to spur early labor, so Gaudet led Patton through a series of relaxation exercises intended to hold off labor.
“We can help your mind take a little vacation,” Gaudet told her patient. Patton ended up carrying her baby boy four more weeks. So the birth was still premature, but the boy has a good chance of a healthy life.
Also featured in the program is Dr. Ralph Snyderman, the chancellor emeritus of health affairs at Duke who helped start the center. Snyderman said recently that before he was an administrator, he specialized in technology-driven, federally financed research.
“I was about as hard-nosed a physician-scientist as you could find,” he said. But he learned that patients had problems “beyond what was going to be solved through pure science and technology alone.”
Reeve, in an off-camera interview with the film’s producers on the day she taped her introductions, said she had consulted with integrative medicine guru Dr. Andrew Weil and was doing “creative image work” — a technique in which patients learn to relax by evoking images and sensations.
With her doctors’ blessing, she said, she also was taking botanical supplements along with the medicines she was prescribed at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Medical Center.
The PBS film almost consciously avoids a New Age tone. There are a few shots of yoga classes and one segment in which scientists study the brain waves of a Buddhist monk as he meditates.
But there are no magic crystals, no “cancer diets” or trips to Mexico for treatments outlawed in the United States. Just a sincere effort to find something — anything — that will lead to a better quality of life for patients.
© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
© 2006 MSNBC.com
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12012024/from/RS.4/
Saturday, March 25, 2006
End of life Issues
Who among us does not identify with this article ? This is why I felt it was so important to my life and the lives of those I might help in some way, that I volunteer my time to the Hospice organization. It is among the best personal decisions i have ever made. Enjoy.
pic at left:Edith Tusubira, right, a nurse, helped Bernice Goodman at the home of Ms. Goodman's daughter Nancy in West Roxbury, Mass. Nancy Goodman's company offers care benefits, but she says they are nearly useless.
pic at right: Kent Burtis, right, a technician for Verizon in Bayville, N.J., gets lunch for his father, Ivan Burtis, each workday, but an aide does the morning shift. "It's kept me from slitting my throat," Kent Burtis said of that benefit.
The New York Times
March 25, 2006
As Parents Age, Baby Boomers and Business Struggle to Cope
By JANE GROSS
Nancy Goodman's employer, a telecommunications company in Boston, offers benefits to help employees care for elderly parents. But she found them nearly useless during four years of caring for her mother, who has Parkinson's disease, and her father, who died of kidney failure last year.
"They say they want to do the right thing," Ms. Goodman, 58, said of her employer, which she would not identify for fear of losing her job. "But when it comes down to it, they're not seeing the true picture."
Ms. Goodman's lament is common, as corporate America scrambles to help the soaring number of baby boomers, mostly working women, whose obligation to frail, elderly parents results in absenteeism, workday distractions or stress-related health problems.
Companies are responding, but experts say they often use child care benefits as a model when they do not suit the different and unpredictable needs of the elderly. In addition, at a time of cutbacks in expensive health insurance and pensions, the most commonly offered benefits are those that cost a company little or nothing, like referral services and unpaid leaves.
Ms. Goodman, for instance, tried her company's referral service to supplement inadequate staffing when her parents lived at an assisted living center in Connecticut. It was "like going to the yellow pages," she said, since it did not relieve her of the time-consuming tasks of arranging for and supervising the services from afar. Ms. Goodman was also entitled to a year's leave of absence, a benefit a new mother might appreciate. But if she took a leave now, what happened if her mother lingered?
Employees with ailing parents, more than 20 million nationwide, cite other benefits that would allow them to focus more on their jobs, like geriatric case managers to guide them through the mysteries of Medicaid and Medicare, or backup care for emergencies like a last-minute business trip. Companies that offer this kind of hands-on assistance generally pay for at least part of the service.
But they are rare. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, which represents more than 200,000 human resource and other corporate officials, 39 percent of its members said in 2003 that elder care benefits were "too costly to be feasible." Only 1 percent of their companies subsidized any elder care benefits last year. And only 3 percent offered the emergency backup care — subsidized or otherwise — that experts say saves money by keeping workers at work.
"The perception among companies is that they can't afford elder care benefits," said Frank Scanlan, a spokesman for the society.
It is the largest companies that are the most generous, but even those often subscribe to the mistaken notion that the Mommy Track and the Daughter Track are the same, said Chris Gatti, president of the Work Options Group in Superior, Colo. Work Options, whose clients employ 400,000 people nationwide, provides in-home care for children and the elderly.
"These benefits fall under the same umbrella but are fundamentally different," Mr. Gatti said. "Child care programs are relatively straight-forward and easy to administer compared to elder care, which is a maze with lots of sharp corners and dark secluded places."
An individual supervisor can ease an employee's burden but still leave them vulnerable to management changes. Just 6 percent of employers have written policies about elder care, according to surveys by the Society for Human Resource Management, while 76 percent say they help employees on a case-by-case basis.
For Ms. Goodman, the one godsend since her father died and her mother moved into her Boston apartment has been permission to work at home. But that is likely to change with a new boss. "I'm walking on eggs right now," Ms. Goodman said.
The distinctions between child care and elder care have become apparent as the first of the 77 million baby boomers turn 60 and their parents live past 85, joining the fastest-growing segment of the population.
The most obvious is that children's schedules are predictable — a school holiday next Monday — while elderly parents' needs — a trip to the emergency room — are crisis-driven. Also, children are raised at home; an elderly parent often lives far away.
Guiding the decisions of an elderly parent also requires mastery of arcane legal, financial and medical matters.
"It's a new and very confusing skill set," said Maureen Corcoran, a vice president at Prudential Financial. "You don't just give people a list; you lead them there. Otherwise they spend hours upon hours figuring it out themselves."
For both employees and employers, the costs of elder care are enormous, according to studies by the MetLife Mature Market Institute, which is in the midst of updated analysis to reflect rapidly changing demographics.
The price tag for employers in 1997 ranged from $11.5 billion to $29 billion a year. Most expensive were the replacement of lost workers (at least $4.9 billion a year), workday interruptions ($3.7 billion) and absenteeism ($885 million). The employees lose salary, Social Security and pension benefits as a result of refusing promotions, switching to part-time work or retiring early.
Certain benefits mitigate these costs, and certain companies have learned there is a clear return on investment. At Prudential, for instance, subsidized emergency backup care prevents absenteeism and workday interruptions. Prudential's 21,000 employees, with one phone call to Work Options Group, can get help for parents by the next morning, for a co-payment of $4 an hour.
A $20-an-hour aide, on an eight-hour shift, would otherwise cost a Prudential employee $160, rather than $32. Yet the company says it will save $650,000 during a three-year contract with Work Options, Ms. Corcoran said, because "if our employees needs are taken care of, they can focus on work."
Diane Yankencheck, a Prudential employee in Newark, said the service kept her working during a crisis. Her father has a degenerative neurological disease and round-the-clock care. Her mother manages the household, or did until she broke her wrist. Now an aide from Work Options cooks, cleans and helps her bathe and dress.
Kent Burtis, a Verizon technician in Bayville, N.J., uses similar backup care for his father, who is paralyzed and incontinent. For a while, Mr. Burtis spent hours before work feeding, diapering and dressing him. Now an aide does the morning shift. "It's kept me from slitting my throat," Mr. Burtis said.
Elder care benefits most often seem a luxury at small companies and nonprofits. So even at AARP, dedicated to the needs of older Americans, Deborah Russell, the director of work force issues, was daunted by coordinating long-distance care for her mother and then missing weeks of work to be at her bedside when death neared.
Ms. Russell and her two sisters, grateful for AARP's excellent referral service, still spent "an inordinate amount of time on the telephone" during working hours, distracted and unproductive. As their mother's condition deteriorated, and the siblings rotated weeks in Florida, Ms. Russell used paid vacation time rather than the 12 weeks of unpaid leave guaranteed by the federal Family Medical Leave Act or AARP's more generous 16-week program, also unpaid.
Another benefit assumed to be useful is the flexible spending account, governed by the Internal Revenue Service and widely offered by companies. It permits the use of pretax dollars for dependent care, as long as the dependent meets the I.R.S. definition. Virtually all children do, but most aged parents do not. That means tax breaks for baby sitters but not companions for the elderly.
Experts disagree about whether women will push employers for help with their parents, as they did 30 years ago when child care was their pressing issue.
Ellen Galinsky, 63, president of the Family and Work Institute, led the charge for a day care center at Bank Street College when she was a researcher there in 1969. After "huge resistance," the center opened in 1974. Ms. Galinsky predicts a similar awakening to elder care issues because "demographics are destiny."
"Everyone I know is dealing with this," said Ms. Galinsky, who recently stayed at the bedside of her 98-year-old mother for the last two months of her life. The institute allows unlimited sick leave for such family emergencies. But even with that leeway, Ms. Galinsky said: "I was on another planet. It's like no other experience. I barely have words for how hard it is."
Todd Groves, founder of LTC Financial Partners in Seattle, who advises human resource managers on long term care, is not convinced that women like Ms. Galinsky will have the same galvanizing effect this time around, regardless of their numbers or their passion.
"Back then you still had a paternal business culture," Mr. Groves said. "Now people feel out on their own. They are fearful about their careers and don't feel they can ask for help."
###
Not at home-cooked Meals
I am constantly amazed at the niche industries that inventive folks , well, invent ! This is a remarkable concept that is already earning hundreds of millions of dollars a year. I still do it the old-fashioned way: cooking from scratch at home ! But what this article describes is far better than eating at chains or bringing home takeout. Enjoy.
PHOTO: Jeannette Balantic, center, and Madeline Craig, of Floral Park, on Long Island, put together enchiladas at Super Suppers in Bethpage, N.Y.
The New York Times
March 26, 2006
Meals That Moms Can Almost Call Their Own
By KIM SEVERSON and JULIA MOSKIN
SEATTLE — Jodi Robbins and her family were on a grim dinnertime merry-go-round.
Takeout pizza was a mainstay, except on the nights when Chinese food seemed more appealing. When Ms. Robbins cooked, it was spaghetti or tuna casserole over and over, with rarely enough time to make a salad.
Their routine was expensive, fattening and boring. In the rush to get through the day, the family had lost control of the dinner table.
So Ms. Robbins now goes to Dream Dinners in West Seattle, where she spends just under two hours assembling dishes like cheesy chicken casserole and Salisbury steak from ingredients that have been peeled and chopped for her. She does not have to pick up a knife, turn on a stove or wash a dish.
All she has to do is pop the meals in her oven and, for about $3.50 a serving, experience the satisfaction of putting a home-cooked meal — of a sort — on the table.
Americans, pinched for time and increasingly uncomfortable in their kitchens, have been on a 50-year slide away from home cooking. Now, at almost 700 meal assembly centers around the country, families like the Robbinses prepare two weeks' worth of dinners they can call their own with little more effort than it takes to buy a rotisserie chicken and a bag of salad.
The centers are opening at a rate of about 40 a month, mostly in strip malls and office parks in the nation's suburbs and smaller cities, and are projected to earn $270 million this year, according to the Easy Meal Prep Association, the industry's trade group.
"It's been keeping us from ordering pizza all the time," Ms. Robbins said. "And you still feel like you're cooking."
The prototype, a kind of elevated cooking session among friends in a commercial kitchen, popped up in the Northwest in 1999. The concept did not take off until 2002, when two Seattle-area women streamlined the process so customers could make 12 dinners for six in two hours for under $200. That company became Dream Dinners, which opened a year later and now has 112 franchise stores, with 64 under construction.
Super Suppers, which opened a year later in Fort Worth, is the largest chain, with 121 franchise stores and 77 more under construction. For people with few cooking skills, the centers keep things simple with a rotating menu of mostly stews and casseroles designed to be assembled in freezer bags or aluminum trays, then taken home to be baked or simmered in a single pot.
Customers select their dishes online ahead of time. When they show up, they follow recipes that hang over restaurant-style work stations filled with ingredients like frozen chicken breasts, chopped onions and jars of seasonings.
Cheerful workers hover around, carting off measuring spoons as soon as they are dirty and pouring fresh coffee. They encourage the calorie conscious or sodium sensitive to customize meals. And if someone hates broccoli, it can be left out. For people who feel guilty about not cooking for their families, the centers offer absolution in just a couple of hours.
Lisa Johnson, who lives in a suburb of Raleigh, N.C., especially hates shopping and cleanup. But she is determined to keep the family together at the table, at least occasionally. She became a meal assembly convert after just one visit.
"We're always hearing that eating dinner together is the cure for obesity, learning disorders, drugs, divorce and every kind of problem we have in society," she said. "But what no one tells you is how to do all that cooking."
Although women still do 80 percent of the food-related work at home, the amount of time Americans spend cooking dinner has declined to about 30 minutes from about two and a half hours since the 1960's, according to market research by Mintel International and the NPD Group. At the same time, the country is showing signs of restaurant fatigue. Spending in restaurants, which had been growing steadily since World War II, has been flat since 2001.
Meal assembly centers are not necessarily a return to the home-cooked food generations grew up eating. For one, no one actually cooks at them. The chopped vegetables and frozen meats at most of the centers come from industrial food suppliers like Sysco, and recipes include ingredients like canned wax beans and that old hot dish standby, cream of chicken soup. Nothing is cooked on site, although workers in the back room may chop scallions or slice raw beef into serving sizes.
But it may be a start.
"With every generation, fewer and fewer girls — and boys — are growing up hanging around the kitchen," said Laura Shapiro, who writes about modern cooking in America. "But the incredible popularity of cooking shows on TV shows that people are hungry to cook, hungry to be in the kitchen."
Even an "assembled" family meal will always be more meaningful than takeout because of the physical connection between the cook, the food and the family, said Bradd Shore, director of the Emory Center on Myth and Ritual in American Life.
"When a mother says, 'Do you like my lasagna?' that is much more loaded than, 'Do you like the lasagna?' " Dr. Shore said. "The fact that she made it with her hands is powerful."
Mayra Didomenico, a mother of two and a pharmacist, just wants to save time and money.
"Every week I go to the supermarket and spend $200 and I still have to cook it," she said as she filled bags with frozen marmalade-glazed pork chops at a new Super Suppers store in Bethpage, N.Y.
So why not just buy frozen food? "At least here I am seeing the ingredients," she said.
In addition to dinner, the centers offer a kind of canned camaraderie.
"People are looking for a communal feeling, whether it's around a table eating together or in a storefront measuring food into little bags with their friends," said Marc Halperin, director of the Center for Culinary Development in San Francisco, which develops products for clients including Kellogg's and Starbucks.
Meal assembly centers often encourage customers to attend with friends, drink wine while they "cook" and even dance, as a set of couples did on a recent night at Super Suppers in Bethpage.
"They turned off the music, pulled out a big-screen TV and we all watched 'American Idol,' " said Evan Glass, a construction company executive.
Stephanie Allen, who helped found Dream Dinners in the Seattle area in 2002, says her customers first come in with friends, but after two or three visits return alone. "They want to get in and get out and get their dinners done," Ms. Allen said. "They can say, this is something I made, I can have my in-laws over to dinner, and I won't get a hard time from them."
As long as the in-laws are not food critics. Some of the nation's most experienced cooking professionals who attended a food panel recently at New York University had never heard of meal preparation centers. Once it was explained, they expressed disdain.
"People basically don't want to cook but they don't want to be told they are not cooking," said Madhur Jaffrey, the Indian cookbook author and actor. "It's an illusion."
###
Thursday, March 23, 2006
Hair today - gone tomorrow
Every now and then, a post is so good, I will lift it from its original home (in this case, Humor Me blog) and reprint it here in 3deye. The following article about the fine art of waxing is one such post. Enjoy (and put that drink down, you will be laughing out loud).
play with the kids. I then had the thought that would ring painfully
in my mind for the next few hours: "Maybe I should pull the waxing
kit out of the medicine cabinet." So I headed to the site of my
demise: the bathroom.
It was one of those "cold wax" kits. No melting a clump of hot wax,
you just rub the strips together in your hand, they get warm and you
peel them apart and press them to your leg (or wherever else) and you
pull the hair right
off. No muss, no fuss. How hard can it be? I mean, I'm not a genius,
but I am mechanically inclined enough to figure this out. (YA
THINK!?!)
So I pull one of the thin strips out. Its two strips facing each
other stuck together. Instead of rubbing them together, my genius
kicks in so I get out the hair dryer and heat it to 1000 degrees.
("Cold wax," yeah...right!) I lay the strip across my thigh. Hold the
skin around it tight and pull. It works! OK, so it wasn't the best
feeling, but it wasn't too bad. I can do this! Hair removal no longer
eludes me! I am She-rah, fighter of all wayward body hair and maker
of smooth skin extraordinaire.
With my next wax strip I move north. After checking on the kids, I
sneak back into the bathroom, for the ultimate hair fighting
championship. I drop my panties and place one foot on the toilet.
Using the same procedure, I apply the one strip across the right side
of my bikini line, covering the right half of my *hoo-hoo* and
stretching down to the inside of my butt cheek (Yes, it was a long
strip) I inhale deeply and brace myself....RRRRIIIPPP!!!!
I'm blind!!! Blinded from pain!!!!....OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!! Vision
returning, I notice that I've only managed to pull off half the
strip. CRAP!!! Another deep breath and RRIIP! P!! Everything is
swirly and spotted. I think I may pass out...must stay conscious...Do
I hear crashing drums??? Breathe, breathe...OK, back to normal.
I want to see my trophy - a wax covered strip, the one that has
caused me so much pain, with my hairy pelt sticking to it. I want to
revel in the glory that is my triumph over body hair. I hold up the
strip! There's no hair on it. Where is the hair??? WHERE IS THE WAX???
Slowly I ease my head down, foot still perched on the toilet. I see
the hair. The hair that should be on the strip. I touch. I am
touching wax.
CRAP! I run my fingers over the most sensitive part of my body, which
is now covered in cold wax and matted hair.
Then I make the next BIG mistake...remember my foot is still propped
up on the toilet? I know I need to do something. So I put my foot
down.
DAMN!!!!!!!! I hear the slamming of a cell door. *hoo-hoo*? Sealed
shut! Butt?? Sealed shut!
I penguin walk around the bathroom trying to figure out what to do
and think to myself "Please don't let me get the urge to poop. My
head may pop off!"
What can I do to melt the wax? Hot water!! Hot water melts wax!!!
I'll run the hottest water I can stand into the bathtub, get in,
immerse the wax-covered bits and the wax should melt and I can gently
wipe it off, right??? WRONG!!!!!!!
I get in the tub - the water is slightly hotter than that used to
torture prisoners of war or sterilize surgical equipment - I sit.
Now, the only thing worse than having your nether regions glued
together is having them glued together and then glued to the bottom
of the tub...in scalding hot water. Which, by the way, doesn't melt
cold wax.
So, now I'm stuck to the bottom of the tub as though I had cement-
epoxied myself to the porcelain!!
God bless the man who had convinced me a few months ago to have a
phone put in the bathroom!!!!!
I call my friend, thinking surely she has waxed before and has some
secret of how to get me undone. It's a very good conversation
starter - "So, my butt and who-ha are glued together to the bottom of
the tub!"
There is a slight pause. She doesn't know any secret tricks for
removal but she does try to hide her laughter from me. She wants to
know exactly where the wax is located, "Are we talking cheeks or who-
ha?"
She's laughing out loud by now...I can hear her. I give her the
rundown and she suggests I call the number on the side of the box.
YEAH!!!!! Right!! I should be the joke of someone else's night.
While we go through various solutions. I resort to scraping the wax
off with a razor. Nothing feels better then to have your girlie
goodies covered in hot wax, glued shut, stuck to the tub in super hot
water and then dry-shaving the sticky wax off!!
By now the brain is not working, dignity has taken a major hike and
I'm pretty sure I'm going to need Post-Traumatic Stress counseling
for this event.
My friend is still talking with me when I finally see my saving
grace....the lotion they give you to remove the excess wax. What do I
really have to lose at this point? I rub some on and OH MY GOD!!!!!!!
The scream probably woke the kids and scared the dickens out of my
friend.
It's sooo painful, I but I really don't care. "IT WORKS!! It works!!"
I get a hearty congratulation from my friend and she hangs up.
I successfully remove the remainder of the wax and then notice to my
grief and despair....THE HAIR IS STILL THERE.......ALL OF IT!!!!!!!!!!
So I recklessly shave it off. Heck, I'm numb by now. Nothing hurts. I
could have amputated my own leg at this point.
Next week I'm going to try hair color......
Now that's funny ........ Notttttttttt Send this on to other folks
who need a good laugh! ###
Hair today - gone tomorrow
My night began as any other normal weeknight. Come home, fix dinner,play with the kids. I then had the thought that would ring painfully
in my mind for the next few hours: "Maybe I should pull the waxing
kit out of the medicine cabinet." So I headed to the site of my
demise: the bathroom.
It was one of those "cold wax" kits. No melting a clump of hot wax,
you just rub the strips together in your hand, they get warm and you
peel them apart and press them to your leg (or wherever else) and you
pull the hair right
off. No muss, no fuss. How hard can it be? I mean, I'm not a genius,
but I am mechanically inclined enough to figure this out. (YA
THINK!?!)
So I pull one of the thin strips out. Its two strips facing each
other stuck together. Instead of rubbing them together, my genius
kicks in so I get out the hair dryer and heat it to 1000 degrees.
("Cold wax," yeah...right!) I lay the strip across my thigh. Hold the
skin around it tight and pull. It works! OK, so it wasn't the best
feeling, but it wasn't too bad. I can do this! Hair removal no longer
eludes me! I am She-rah, fighter of all wayward body hair and maker
of smooth skin extraordinaire.
With my next wax strip I move north. After checking on the kids, I
sneak back into the bathroom, for the ultimate hair fighting
championship. I drop my panties and place one foot on the toilet.
Using the same procedure, I apply the one strip across the right side
of my bikini line, covering the right half of my *hoo-hoo* and
stretching down to the inside of my butt cheek (Yes, it was a long
strip) I inhale deeply and brace myself....RRRRIIIPPP!!!!
I'm blind!!! Blinded from pain!!!!....OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!! Vision
returning, I notice that I've only managed to pull off half the
strip. CRAP!!! Another deep breath and RRIIP! P!! Everything is
swirly and spotted. I think I may pass out...must stay conscious...Do
I hear crashing drums??? Breathe, breathe...OK, back to normal.
I want to see my trophy - a wax covered strip, the one that has
caused me so much pain, with my hairy pelt sticking to it. I want to
revel in the glory that is my triumph over body hair. I hold up the
strip! There's no hair on it. Where is the hair??? WHERE IS THE WAX???
Slowly I ease my head down, foot still perched on the toilet. I see
the hair. The hair that should be on the strip. I touch. I am
touching wax.
CRAP! I run my fingers over the most sensitive part of my body, which
is now covered in cold wax and matted hair.
Then I make the next BIG mistake...remember my foot is still propped
up on the toilet? I know I need to do something. So I put my foot
down.
DAMN!!!!!!!! I hear the slamming of a cell door. *hoo-hoo*? Sealed
shut! Butt?? Sealed shut!
I penguin walk around the bathroom trying to figure out what to do
and think to myself "Please don't let me get the urge to poop. My
head may pop off!"
What can I do to melt the wax? Hot water!! Hot water melts wax!!!
I'll run the hottest water I can stand into the bathtub, get in,
immerse the wax-covered bits and the wax should melt and I can gently
wipe it off, right??? WRONG!!!!!!!
I get in the tub - the water is slightly hotter than that used to
torture prisoners of war or sterilize surgical equipment - I sit.
Now, the only thing worse than having your nether regions glued
together is having them glued together and then glued to the bottom
of the tub...in scalding hot water. Which, by the way, doesn't melt
cold wax.
So, now I'm stuck to the bottom of the tub as though I had cement-
epoxied myself to the porcelain!!
God bless the man who had convinced me a few months ago to have a
phone put in the bathroom!!!!!
I call my friend, thinking surely she has waxed before and has some
secret of how to get me undone. It's a very good conversation
starter - "So, my butt and who-ha are glued together to the bottom of
the tub!"
There is a slight pause. She doesn't know any secret tricks for
removal but she does try to hide her laughter from me. She wants to
know exactly where the wax is located, "Are we talking cheeks or who-
ha?"
She's laughing out loud by now...I can hear her. I give her the
rundown and she suggests I call the number on the side of the box.
YEAH!!!!! Right!! I should be the joke of someone else's night.
While we go through various solutions. I resort to scraping the wax
off with a razor. Nothing feels better then to have your girlie
goodies covered in hot wax, glued shut, stuck to the tub in super hot
water and then dry-shaving the sticky wax off!!
By now the brain is not working, dignity has taken a major hike and
I'm pretty sure I'm going to need Post-Traumatic Stress counseling
for this event.
My friend is still talking with me when I finally see my saving
grace....the lotion they give you to remove the excess wax. What do I
really have to lose at this point? I rub some on and OH MY GOD!!!!!!!
The scream probably woke the kids and scared the dickens out of my
friend.
It's sooo painful, I but I really don't care. "IT WORKS!! It works!!"
I get a hearty congratulation from my friend and she hangs up.
I successfully remove the remainder of the wax and then notice to my
grief and despair....THE HAIR IS STILL THERE.......ALL OF IT!!!!!!!!!!
So I recklessly shave it off. Heck, I'm numb by now. Nothing hurts. I
could have amputated my own leg at this point.
Next week I'm going to try hair color......
Now that's funny ........ Notttttttttt Send this on to other folks
who need a good laugh! ###
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Let's Talk !
Conversation is my second favorite way of creating loving, interesting, exciting, heuristic moments in my life and the lives of those i love. Enjoy.
The New York Times
March 20, 2006
Connections
Are We Having a Conversation Yet? An Art Form Evolves
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
What is there to talk about?
The question should be taken literally. We can talk about the weather — which means just making casual contact, assuring each other that we are temperate in nature and not about to erupt in torrential outbursts. We can talk about politics — if we can assume certain shared convictions that will prevent other kinds of storms and disruptions. We can talk about family — if we can assume that we take that kind of a personal interest in each other.
But whatever we choose, there's a certain amount of risk involved, a tentative guess made about what should be shared and what should not, what would please the other and what would not. La Rochefoucauld said, "We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those who find us boring." That is only the beginning.
Conversation is one of those acts that require subtle forms of social imagination: an ability to listen and interpret and imagine, an attentiveness to someone whose perspective is always essentially different, a responsiveness that both makes oneself known and allows the other to feel known — or else does none of this, but just keeps up appearances. It may be, then, one of the most fundamental political and social acts, indispensable to negotiating allegiances, establishing common ground, clearing tangled paths. Conversation may reflect not just the state of our selves, but the state of society.
O.K. But listen to "talk" radio, with its combative recruitment of allies; or "talk" shows in which guests are promoting themselves or their products and hosts are prepared with leading questions; or "talk" news shows in which conversation becomes a form of shouting. Look at our isolating iPods, at text messaging with its prepackaged formulas, or instant messaging with its iconic smilies, so necessary to make sure the telegraphic prose is not misunderstood. CUL8R.
This state of affairs helped inspire Stephen Miller's new book, "Conversation: A History of a Declining Art" (Yale, $27.50). Mr. Miller, who is a contributing editor to The Wilson Quarterly, finds countertrends, as well — Internet communities that lead to new forms of conversation, diverse gatherings in which disagreements become an expected aspect of conversation. But, he writes, the "forces sapping conversation seem stronger than the forces nourishing it." So Mr. Miller, in response, is recounting another kind of conversation that has taken place over the centuries, one whose subject is conversation itself.
Cicero gave advice about conversation (It ought "to be gentle and without a trace of intransigence; it should also be witty"). Montaigne hailed its pleasures ("I find the practice of it the most delightful activity in our lives"). Henry Fielding praised it ("This grand Business of our Lives, the Foundation of every Thing, either useful or pleasant"). Adam Smith prescribed it (calling it one of "the most powerful remedies for restoring the mind to its tranquillity").
There were also those who opposed it, or at least strongly declared other preferences. Rousseau sneered at the chatter in French salons. Wordsworth preferred nature and solitude. The writers of Romanticism shifted the emphasis, preferring to share feelings and perceptions rather than honor conversation for its own sake. Conversation became confessional — which in many ways, it still is. "Modern writers," Mr. Miller suggests, "tend to dwell on the emotional rewards that come from conversation."
In fact, in Mr. Miller's account, the United States may have played an important role in the evolution of the mode of non-conversation now developing. During the 19th century many European writers scorned American conversation, perhaps too much, Mr. Miller suggests, accusing it of excessive focus on money and commerce. There may have also been an American suspicion of conversation altogether: Thoreau couldn't be bothered with it, and Melville was wary.
Mr. Miller points out that in the 20th century, literary figures were also admired for being laconic. Was this an extension of early Romantic early suspicions? A democratic rebellion against the artifice and artfulness of 18th-century conversation? Did it even lead, perhaps, to the self-absorbed focus on self-fulfillment and self-expression that have, in Mr. Miller's view, extended from the years of the counterculture into the present?
Like a well-mannered host, Mr. Miller presents some hypotheses, but also leads the conversation along. For him, the powers and possibilities of conversation were most clearly revealed in the 18th century. Samuel Johnson praised the two key journals of the age, The Spectator and The Tattler; they were being published at a time, he said, "when two parties, loud, restless, and violent, each with plausible declarations, and each perhaps without any distinct termination of its views, were agitating the nation."
The journals, Johnson said, "adjusted" conversation with their "propriety and politeness." That character also helped define London coffeehouses, in which political debate and conversation between varied classes took place. Andrew Marvell wrote: "It is wine and strong drinks make tumults increase/ Choc'late, tea, and coffee are liquors of peace."
But Hume may be the patron saint of conversation here, for though he noted that politeness "runs often into affectation and foppery, disguise and insincerity," he also saw a necessary connection between politeness and freedom. Hume suggested that politeness was not, in fact, "natural to the human mind," but "presumption and arrogance" were. Society depends on artifice. Conversation is an art.
As Mr. Miller suggests, American conversation now prides itself on angry authenticity or on being kind and "nonjudgmental"; it is meant to be "natural" and full of "self-expression." This does not make for great conversation or a vital political life.
Hume, in contrast, welcomed the necessary artifice of manners, through which, he argued, "a mutual deference is affected; contempt of others disguised; authority concealed; attention given to each in his turn; and an easy stream of conversation maintained, without vehemence, without interruption, without eagerness for victory, and without any airs of superiority."
It is an ideal worth talking about.
Connections, a critic's perspective on arts and ideas, appears every other Monday.
###
The New York Times
March 20, 2006
Connections
Are We Having a Conversation Yet? An Art Form Evolves
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
What is there to talk about?
The question should be taken literally. We can talk about the weather — which means just making casual contact, assuring each other that we are temperate in nature and not about to erupt in torrential outbursts. We can talk about politics — if we can assume certain shared convictions that will prevent other kinds of storms and disruptions. We can talk about family — if we can assume that we take that kind of a personal interest in each other.
But whatever we choose, there's a certain amount of risk involved, a tentative guess made about what should be shared and what should not, what would please the other and what would not. La Rochefoucauld said, "We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those who find us boring." That is only the beginning.
Conversation is one of those acts that require subtle forms of social imagination: an ability to listen and interpret and imagine, an attentiveness to someone whose perspective is always essentially different, a responsiveness that both makes oneself known and allows the other to feel known — or else does none of this, but just keeps up appearances. It may be, then, one of the most fundamental political and social acts, indispensable to negotiating allegiances, establishing common ground, clearing tangled paths. Conversation may reflect not just the state of our selves, but the state of society.
O.K. But listen to "talk" radio, with its combative recruitment of allies; or "talk" shows in which guests are promoting themselves or their products and hosts are prepared with leading questions; or "talk" news shows in which conversation becomes a form of shouting. Look at our isolating iPods, at text messaging with its prepackaged formulas, or instant messaging with its iconic smilies, so necessary to make sure the telegraphic prose is not misunderstood. CUL8R.
This state of affairs helped inspire Stephen Miller's new book, "Conversation: A History of a Declining Art" (Yale, $27.50). Mr. Miller, who is a contributing editor to The Wilson Quarterly, finds countertrends, as well — Internet communities that lead to new forms of conversation, diverse gatherings in which disagreements become an expected aspect of conversation. But, he writes, the "forces sapping conversation seem stronger than the forces nourishing it." So Mr. Miller, in response, is recounting another kind of conversation that has taken place over the centuries, one whose subject is conversation itself.
Cicero gave advice about conversation (It ought "to be gentle and without a trace of intransigence; it should also be witty"). Montaigne hailed its pleasures ("I find the practice of it the most delightful activity in our lives"). Henry Fielding praised it ("This grand Business of our Lives, the Foundation of every Thing, either useful or pleasant"). Adam Smith prescribed it (calling it one of "the most powerful remedies for restoring the mind to its tranquillity").
There were also those who opposed it, or at least strongly declared other preferences. Rousseau sneered at the chatter in French salons. Wordsworth preferred nature and solitude. The writers of Romanticism shifted the emphasis, preferring to share feelings and perceptions rather than honor conversation for its own sake. Conversation became confessional — which in many ways, it still is. "Modern writers," Mr. Miller suggests, "tend to dwell on the emotional rewards that come from conversation."
In fact, in Mr. Miller's account, the United States may have played an important role in the evolution of the mode of non-conversation now developing. During the 19th century many European writers scorned American conversation, perhaps too much, Mr. Miller suggests, accusing it of excessive focus on money and commerce. There may have also been an American suspicion of conversation altogether: Thoreau couldn't be bothered with it, and Melville was wary.
Mr. Miller points out that in the 20th century, literary figures were also admired for being laconic. Was this an extension of early Romantic early suspicions? A democratic rebellion against the artifice and artfulness of 18th-century conversation? Did it even lead, perhaps, to the self-absorbed focus on self-fulfillment and self-expression that have, in Mr. Miller's view, extended from the years of the counterculture into the present?
Like a well-mannered host, Mr. Miller presents some hypotheses, but also leads the conversation along. For him, the powers and possibilities of conversation were most clearly revealed in the 18th century. Samuel Johnson praised the two key journals of the age, The Spectator and The Tattler; they were being published at a time, he said, "when two parties, loud, restless, and violent, each with plausible declarations, and each perhaps without any distinct termination of its views, were agitating the nation."
The journals, Johnson said, "adjusted" conversation with their "propriety and politeness." That character also helped define London coffeehouses, in which political debate and conversation between varied classes took place. Andrew Marvell wrote: "It is wine and strong drinks make tumults increase/ Choc'late, tea, and coffee are liquors of peace."
But Hume may be the patron saint of conversation here, for though he noted that politeness "runs often into affectation and foppery, disguise and insincerity," he also saw a necessary connection between politeness and freedom. Hume suggested that politeness was not, in fact, "natural to the human mind," but "presumption and arrogance" were. Society depends on artifice. Conversation is an art.
As Mr. Miller suggests, American conversation now prides itself on angry authenticity or on being kind and "nonjudgmental"; it is meant to be "natural" and full of "self-expression." This does not make for great conversation or a vital political life.
Hume, in contrast, welcomed the necessary artifice of manners, through which, he argued, "a mutual deference is affected; contempt of others disguised; authority concealed; attention given to each in his turn; and an easy stream of conversation maintained, without vehemence, without interruption, without eagerness for victory, and without any airs of superiority."
It is an ideal worth talking about.
Connections, a critic's perspective on arts and ideas, appears every other Monday.
###
Sunday, March 19, 2006
POP access
Readers who know me - understand instantly how important this article is to me - it strikes at the very center of my soul and heart and mind and body right now. CP is 11. The "Classic Childhood" portion (literacy to puberty) of his life is just about over. I am hoping - after his mother reads this - that she will permit more contact. Pray for us. Enjoy.
The New York Times
March 19, 2006
Weekends With Dad, Courtesy of D.S.L.
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON
WITH work and the school week behind them, Charles A. Mason III and his daughter, Arielle, who live more than 1,500 miles apart, prepared for their scheduled weekend visit. There was no packing involved, no plane tickets, no car rides or drop-offs. All it took was some instant messaging on their home computers and a little fidgeting in front of their respective Webcams, and father and daughter were chatting, playing checkers and practicing multiplication tables.
"It's funner than talking on the phone, because I can see him," said Arielle, 10, who lives with her mother in Longmont, Colo., but has regular "virtual visits" with her father as part of the custody arrangement her parents worked out after her mother moved eight years ago. "It's just like being in front of him, but with games and computer stuff added."
As for Mr. Mason, who lives in Warrenton, Va., the video chats are a vast improvement over telephone calls, during which his daughter — like many children her age — is often monosyllabic and easily distracted.
"I can barely hold her attention on the phone for five minutes," he said. "When we can play checkers and look at one another, I can keep her talking about school and life for an hour or more."
As divorce has remained a constant, custody arrangements have evolved over the last half-century. Increased awareness of the toll divorce can take on children and fathers' increased involvement as parents, combined with the demands of working parents who often have to move in order to get and keep jobs, have made for increasingly creative and sometimes complex custody agreements.
As the legal system begins to acknowledge the potential benefits of technology in bridging the physical and emotional distance caused by divorce and separation, more families are experimenting with computer-assisted custody sharing.
Although any separating couple can opt for virtual visits in their custody agreement, debate surrounding the issue is unfolding on the state level as advocates push to have the option spelled out in state laws in order to broaden awareness of the practice and enable judges to grant such visits where they see fit.
In January the Wisconsin Legislature passed a measure allowing judges to grant virtual visits in custody agreements. If Gov. James E. Doyle signs the bill, Wisconsin will become the second state officially to allow such visits, following Utah, which entered virtual visits into its state code in 2004.
Efforts to push similar legislation are in various stages in several states, including Virginia, Illinois, Missouri, Florida, California and New York.
But not everyone gives virtual visits a ringing endorsement. In addition to concerns that it may be used to limit in-person visits, some lawyers and noncustodial parents also worry that it may be used to bolster the case for a custodial parent's contested relocation.
In 2001 an appeals court in New Jersey overruled a lower court decision denying a custodial parent's request to move out of state, reasoning that the court did not consider computer-assisted visits as an option for the noncustodial parent who objected to the move.
A Massachusetts court ordered video visits in 2002 in another contested relocation dispute. The father in the case, who argued that video visits were being imposed to replace in-person visits with his children, lost his appeal to stop the move.
"The danger is that it will become a substitute for real time," said David L. Levy, chief executive of the Children's Rights Council, based in Hyattsville, Md., which advocates for children affected by divorce and separation. "Virtual time is not real time. You can't virtually hug your child or walk your child to school. We don't want this to be seen as an excuse to encourage move-aways."
The Utah and Wisconsin regulations specify that virtual visits should be used as a supplement to, not a substitute for, traditional visits. The Wisconsin bill also specifies that virtual visits should not be used to justify a custodial parent's relocation. The laws define "electronic communication" as contact by video conference, e-mail, instant message, telephone or other wired or wireless technology.
"I think that most judges understand that children require physical one-on-one contact with the absent parent," said Cheryl Lynn Hepfer, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.
Mr. Mason, who sees Arielle in person over spring and summer breaks and alternating holidays, said virtual chats allow him to maintain a comfortable rapport with his daughter between visits. At one point during a recent call, Arielle repositioned the camera toward her piano keyboard and played him a few songs she had learned.
"I have always wanted to attend my daughter's recitals," said Mr. Mason, 42, a director of information systems for the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts. "And here it was, Sunday afternoon, and I was getting a private recital just for me. It makes me feel closer, like I have some input."
Some parents fear that incorporating a Webcam into their children's computer activities will make them vulnerable to online predators. Those who allow virtual visits say the equipment involved requires the same parental supervision as any other technology in the home.
Vada Dreisbach, Arielle's mother, said she maintains control of the Webcam and the passwords for logging on to the necessary computer programs. She also has the computer set up so that Arielle can receive instant messages from only her father. She logs her daughter on and off before and after each visit.
"It's a very isolated connection," said Ms. Dreisbach, 43, a meteorological systems engineer. "There is a lot of coordination involved, but the more comfortable a person is with the technology, the less scary it is."
Despite the demand for long-distance custody arrangements, those who support virtual visitations say it is an option that is still relatively unknown. Some lawmakers and lawyers said legislation is needed, if only to raise awareness among lawyers.
"Lawyers and judges tend to be behind the technology curve," said Brian M. Hirsch, a family lawyer in Reston, Va., who represented Mr. Mason in his custody case. "We tend to look at something new and immediately think, 'How can this be abused?' And the judges I have asked to do this have had a very negative reaction to it."
Judge James C. Hallock, an associate judge in Kane County, Ill., who supports virtual visit legislation, said many judges need the parameters of such measures spelled out for them. "Some judges my generation and older never even turn on a computer," he said. "That makes it difficult to understand how this could be a good supplement to a relationship."
State Senator Jay O'Brien of Virginia said he introduced virtual visiting legislation this year after witnessing a divorced relative's difficulty with trying to see his children. His bill failed to pass Virginia's Senate Courts of Justice Committee, which decided that since there was nothing expressly barring virtual visits, there was no need to permit it officially.
Senator O'Brien said he plans to work on the language of his bill and reintroduce it. "In my own life I have seen a family member struggle with this, and if his requests weren't specifically permitted by the code, it was not going to be granted in his case," he said. "I think it is necessary to inform courts and attorneys to ask for this where it is appropriate."
John M. Speer, a financial consultant in Palm Valley, Tex., says he could benefit from state involvement. Though technically permitted by the terms of his custody agreement to visit with his three children every other weekend, such visits have become financially prohibitive since he moved from the Chicago area, where his children live, to Texas in 2001.
"Flying all three children here so often, or flying myself there and paying for a hotel, as much as I want to, I just can't do that all that often," Mr. Speer said. "Having another way to see one another and communicate would prevent the distance from growing between us during the months we're apart."
Because his ex-wife, he said, has yet to approve his requests for Web visits, having the option of such visits written into Illinois statute would allow a judge to approve the visits over her objections.
Michael Gough, who successfully lobbied for the Utah provision after his ex-wife and daughter, who was 4 at the time, moved to Wisconsin in 2003 and led the advocacy effort for the Wisconsin legislation, is working with lawyers and noncustodial parents around the country to push for similar legislation in other states.
Mr. Gough, a computer security consultant, runs a Web site called www.internetvisitation.org, which tracks legislation, offers divorce resources and gives user testimonials. He also runs a how-to site called www.videocalltips.com that walks users through the mechanics of video conferencing and rates software and Webcams.
Still, some families have found virtual visits more hassle than they're worth. When Alex Tomaszczuk moved to California in 2004, he bought a Webcam for himself and one for his ex-wife and children, who remained in Virginia. The image on the screen broke up if the kids moved around too much, and coordinating visits around the three children's busy schedules proved difficult.
"In some respects it's just easier to pick up the cellphone when I'm on the freeway and talk to them for 45 minutes," said Mr. Tomaszczuk, 50, a government contracts litigator who still works from Virginia part time and sees his children in person at least twice a month.
Jim Buie and his son Matthew struggled with myriad technical problems when they began experimenting with video visits in 1999. Matthew, then in high school, was living with his mother in North Carolina, and Mr. Buie was living in Maryland. But as the technology improved, Web visits became a cherished link between father and son, and they continue them, even though Matthew is now 22.
Matthew, who directs audio systems for a cruise line, took a break in a cafe in Aruba during a recent Caribbean cruise to check in with his dad via Webcam.
The two chatted about Matthew's forthcoming cruise schedule and joked about the bold Caribbean shirt he was wearing. Mr. Buie remarked that he still had not met his son's new girlfriend and asked him to bring her along for an introduction on their next virtual visit.
"This way of communicating has become something special that we share," said Mr. Buie, 51. "Of course it's not as good as seeing him in person. But at least I can see him. It has kept us close."
###
The New York Times
March 19, 2006
Weekends With Dad, Courtesy of D.S.L.
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON
WITH work and the school week behind them, Charles A. Mason III and his daughter, Arielle, who live more than 1,500 miles apart, prepared for their scheduled weekend visit. There was no packing involved, no plane tickets, no car rides or drop-offs. All it took was some instant messaging on their home computers and a little fidgeting in front of their respective Webcams, and father and daughter were chatting, playing checkers and practicing multiplication tables.
"It's funner than talking on the phone, because I can see him," said Arielle, 10, who lives with her mother in Longmont, Colo., but has regular "virtual visits" with her father as part of the custody arrangement her parents worked out after her mother moved eight years ago. "It's just like being in front of him, but with games and computer stuff added."
As for Mr. Mason, who lives in Warrenton, Va., the video chats are a vast improvement over telephone calls, during which his daughter — like many children her age — is often monosyllabic and easily distracted.
"I can barely hold her attention on the phone for five minutes," he said. "When we can play checkers and look at one another, I can keep her talking about school and life for an hour or more."
As divorce has remained a constant, custody arrangements have evolved over the last half-century. Increased awareness of the toll divorce can take on children and fathers' increased involvement as parents, combined with the demands of working parents who often have to move in order to get and keep jobs, have made for increasingly creative and sometimes complex custody agreements.
As the legal system begins to acknowledge the potential benefits of technology in bridging the physical and emotional distance caused by divorce and separation, more families are experimenting with computer-assisted custody sharing.
Although any separating couple can opt for virtual visits in their custody agreement, debate surrounding the issue is unfolding on the state level as advocates push to have the option spelled out in state laws in order to broaden awareness of the practice and enable judges to grant such visits where they see fit.
In January the Wisconsin Legislature passed a measure allowing judges to grant virtual visits in custody agreements. If Gov. James E. Doyle signs the bill, Wisconsin will become the second state officially to allow such visits, following Utah, which entered virtual visits into its state code in 2004.
Efforts to push similar legislation are in various stages in several states, including Virginia, Illinois, Missouri, Florida, California and New York.
But not everyone gives virtual visits a ringing endorsement. In addition to concerns that it may be used to limit in-person visits, some lawyers and noncustodial parents also worry that it may be used to bolster the case for a custodial parent's contested relocation.
In 2001 an appeals court in New Jersey overruled a lower court decision denying a custodial parent's request to move out of state, reasoning that the court did not consider computer-assisted visits as an option for the noncustodial parent who objected to the move.
A Massachusetts court ordered video visits in 2002 in another contested relocation dispute. The father in the case, who argued that video visits were being imposed to replace in-person visits with his children, lost his appeal to stop the move.
"The danger is that it will become a substitute for real time," said David L. Levy, chief executive of the Children's Rights Council, based in Hyattsville, Md., which advocates for children affected by divorce and separation. "Virtual time is not real time. You can't virtually hug your child or walk your child to school. We don't want this to be seen as an excuse to encourage move-aways."
The Utah and Wisconsin regulations specify that virtual visits should be used as a supplement to, not a substitute for, traditional visits. The Wisconsin bill also specifies that virtual visits should not be used to justify a custodial parent's relocation. The laws define "electronic communication" as contact by video conference, e-mail, instant message, telephone or other wired or wireless technology.
"I think that most judges understand that children require physical one-on-one contact with the absent parent," said Cheryl Lynn Hepfer, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.
Mr. Mason, who sees Arielle in person over spring and summer breaks and alternating holidays, said virtual chats allow him to maintain a comfortable rapport with his daughter between visits. At one point during a recent call, Arielle repositioned the camera toward her piano keyboard and played him a few songs she had learned.
"I have always wanted to attend my daughter's recitals," said Mr. Mason, 42, a director of information systems for the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts. "And here it was, Sunday afternoon, and I was getting a private recital just for me. It makes me feel closer, like I have some input."
Some parents fear that incorporating a Webcam into their children's computer activities will make them vulnerable to online predators. Those who allow virtual visits say the equipment involved requires the same parental supervision as any other technology in the home.
Vada Dreisbach, Arielle's mother, said she maintains control of the Webcam and the passwords for logging on to the necessary computer programs. She also has the computer set up so that Arielle can receive instant messages from only her father. She logs her daughter on and off before and after each visit.
"It's a very isolated connection," said Ms. Dreisbach, 43, a meteorological systems engineer. "There is a lot of coordination involved, but the more comfortable a person is with the technology, the less scary it is."
Despite the demand for long-distance custody arrangements, those who support virtual visitations say it is an option that is still relatively unknown. Some lawmakers and lawyers said legislation is needed, if only to raise awareness among lawyers.
"Lawyers and judges tend to be behind the technology curve," said Brian M. Hirsch, a family lawyer in Reston, Va., who represented Mr. Mason in his custody case. "We tend to look at something new and immediately think, 'How can this be abused?' And the judges I have asked to do this have had a very negative reaction to it."
Judge James C. Hallock, an associate judge in Kane County, Ill., who supports virtual visit legislation, said many judges need the parameters of such measures spelled out for them. "Some judges my generation and older never even turn on a computer," he said. "That makes it difficult to understand how this could be a good supplement to a relationship."
State Senator Jay O'Brien of Virginia said he introduced virtual visiting legislation this year after witnessing a divorced relative's difficulty with trying to see his children. His bill failed to pass Virginia's Senate Courts of Justice Committee, which decided that since there was nothing expressly barring virtual visits, there was no need to permit it officially.
Senator O'Brien said he plans to work on the language of his bill and reintroduce it. "In my own life I have seen a family member struggle with this, and if his requests weren't specifically permitted by the code, it was not going to be granted in his case," he said. "I think it is necessary to inform courts and attorneys to ask for this where it is appropriate."
John M. Speer, a financial consultant in Palm Valley, Tex., says he could benefit from state involvement. Though technically permitted by the terms of his custody agreement to visit with his three children every other weekend, such visits have become financially prohibitive since he moved from the Chicago area, where his children live, to Texas in 2001.
"Flying all three children here so often, or flying myself there and paying for a hotel, as much as I want to, I just can't do that all that often," Mr. Speer said. "Having another way to see one another and communicate would prevent the distance from growing between us during the months we're apart."
Because his ex-wife, he said, has yet to approve his requests for Web visits, having the option of such visits written into Illinois statute would allow a judge to approve the visits over her objections.
Michael Gough, who successfully lobbied for the Utah provision after his ex-wife and daughter, who was 4 at the time, moved to Wisconsin in 2003 and led the advocacy effort for the Wisconsin legislation, is working with lawyers and noncustodial parents around the country to push for similar legislation in other states.
Mr. Gough, a computer security consultant, runs a Web site called www.internetvisitation.org, which tracks legislation, offers divorce resources and gives user testimonials. He also runs a how-to site called www.videocalltips.com that walks users through the mechanics of video conferencing and rates software and Webcams.
Still, some families have found virtual visits more hassle than they're worth. When Alex Tomaszczuk moved to California in 2004, he bought a Webcam for himself and one for his ex-wife and children, who remained in Virginia. The image on the screen broke up if the kids moved around too much, and coordinating visits around the three children's busy schedules proved difficult.
"In some respects it's just easier to pick up the cellphone when I'm on the freeway and talk to them for 45 minutes," said Mr. Tomaszczuk, 50, a government contracts litigator who still works from Virginia part time and sees his children in person at least twice a month.
Jim Buie and his son Matthew struggled with myriad technical problems when they began experimenting with video visits in 1999. Matthew, then in high school, was living with his mother in North Carolina, and Mr. Buie was living in Maryland. But as the technology improved, Web visits became a cherished link between father and son, and they continue them, even though Matthew is now 22.
Matthew, who directs audio systems for a cruise line, took a break in a cafe in Aruba during a recent Caribbean cruise to check in with his dad via Webcam.
The two chatted about Matthew's forthcoming cruise schedule and joked about the bold Caribbean shirt he was wearing. Mr. Buie remarked that he still had not met his son's new girlfriend and asked him to bring her along for an introduction on their next virtual visit.
"This way of communicating has become something special that we share," said Mr. Buie, 51. "Of course it's not as good as seeing him in person. But at least I can see him. It has kept us close."
###
Looking for Mr Good Sperm
Wow. The search for "the right one" used to mean a choice of mates with whom you lived on a day-to-day basis. Now it could mean what this article explains. Enjoy.
The New York Times
March 19, 2006
Wanted: A Few Good Sperm
By JENNIFER EGAN
One day last October, Karyn, a 39-year-old executive, pulled her online dating profile off JDate and Match.com, two sites she had been using, along with an endless series of leads, tips and blind dates arranged by friends and colleagues, to search for a man she wanted to marry and raise a family with. At long last, after something like 100 dates in the past 10 years and several serious relationships, she had found the man she refers to, tongue only slightly in cheek, as "the one." It all began last summer, when she broke off a relationship with a younger man who wasn't ready for children and got serious about the idea of conceiving on her own. She gathered information about fertility doctors and sperm banks. "Then a childhood friend of mine was over," she told me. "I pulled up the Web site of the only sperm bank that I know of that has adult photos. There happened to be one Jewish person. I pulled up the photo, and I looked at my friend, and I looked at his picture, and I said, 'Oh, my God.' I can't say love at first sight, because, you know. But he was the one."
Sperm donors, like online daters, answer myriad questions about heroes, hobbies and favorite things. Karyn read her donor's profile and liked what she saw. "You can tell he comes from a warm family, some very educated," she said. He had worked as a chef. He had "proven fertility," meaning that at least one woman conceived using his sperm. Like all sperm donors, he was free from any sexually transmitted diseases or testable genetic disorders. "People in New York change sex partners quicker than the crosstown bus," Karyn said. "I'd be a lot more concerned about my date next week." But she especially liked the fact that he was an identity-release donor (also called an "open donor" or a "yes donor") — a growing and extremely popular category of sperm donors who are willing to be contacted by any offspring who reach the age of 18.
The next morning, Karyn called the bank and spoke with a woman who worked there. "She said: 'I have to be honest. He's very popular, and I only have eight units in store right now. I'm not sure how much longer he might be in the program,"' Karyn told me. "Most women in New York impulse-buy Manolo Blahniks, and I said, 'I'll take the eight units.' It was $3,100." The price included six months of storage.
That hefty purchase, and the strong sense of connection she felt to the donor, galvanized Karyn: she made an appointment with a reproductive endocrinologist and gave up alcohol and caffeine. At work, she took on a position of greater responsibility and longer hours — with a higher salary — to save money. She went on a wait list to buy more of the donor's sperm when it became available. (All donor sperm must be quarantined for six months — the maximum incubation period for H.I.V. — so that the donor can be retested for the disease before it is released.) She told her parents and married sister what was going on, e-mailing the donor's picture to her father with an invitation that he meet his son-in-law. She also printed the donor's picture and kept it on the coffee table of her Manhattan studio apartment, where she sleeps in a Murphy bed. "I kind of glance at it as I pass," she said of the picture. "It's almost like when you date someone, and you keep looking at them, and you're, like, Are they cute? But every time I pass, I'm, like, Oh, he's really cute. It's a comforting feeling."
When I suggested that she must be a type who is prone to love at first sight, she just laughed. "With online dating, friends used to say: 'What about him? What about him?' I'd say: 'Don't like the nose. Ah, the eyes are a little buggy. He really likes to golf, and you know I don't like golfing.' There was always something. If I said this about everyone," she concluded, "I would have married someone about 75 dates ago."
Karyn said she hoped to join a population of women that everyone agrees is expanding, although by how much is hard to pin down because single mothers by choice (or choice mothers), as they are sometimes called, aren't separated statistically from, say, babies born to unwed teenagers. Between 1999 and 2003 there was an almost 17 percent jump in the number of babies born to unmarried women between ages 30 and 44 in America, according to the National Center for Human Statistics, while the number born to unmarried women between 15 and 24 actually decreased by nearly 6 percent. Single Mothers by Choice, a 25-year-old support group, took in nearly double the number of new members in 2005 as it did 10 years ago, and its roughly 4,000 current members include women in Israel, Australia and Switzerland. The California Cryobank, the largest sperm bank in the country, owed a third of its business to single women in 2005, shipping them 9,600 vials of sperm, each good for one insemination.
As recently as the early 60's, a "respectable" woman needed to be married just to have sex, not to speak of children; a child born out of wedlock was a source of deepest shame. Yet this radical social change feels strangely inevitable; nearly a third of American households are headed by women alone, many of whom not only raise their children on their own but also support them. All that remains is conception, and it is small wonder that women have begun chipping away at needing a man for that — especially after Sylvia Ann Hewlett's controversial 2002 book, "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children," sounded alarms about declining fertility rates in women over 35. The Internet is also a factor; as well as holding meetings through local chapters around the country, Single Mothers by Choice hosts 11 Listservs, each addressing a different aspect of single motherhood. Women around the world pore over these lists, exchanging tips and information, selling one another leftover vials of sperm. (Once sperm has shipped, it can't be returned to the bank.) Karyn found both her sperm bank and reproductive endocrinologist on these Listservs. Three-quarters of the members of Single Mothers by Choice choose to conceive with donor sperm, as lesbian couples have been doing for many years — adoption is costly, slow-moving and often biased against single people. Buying sperm over the Internet, on the other hand, is not much different from buying shoes.
In the 25 years since she founded Single Mothers by Choice after becoming pregnant by accident, Jane Mattes, now 62, has seen her group's membership conceiving at younger ages (the median age among members is 36) and more often having second children. But the biggest change, Mattes says, is that the stigma attached to this form of single motherhood has largely faded. "People used to come into our meetings literally afraid to walk in," she told me. "We don't see that as much anymore. Everyone seems to know somebody who did it, which wasn't the case even 10 years ago."
Karyn, who asked that I use only her middle name, never imagined her life unfolding in this way, she told me over dinner at Caliente Cab, where we sat outdoors on an unseasonably warm November night. She has big blue-green eyes, shiny brown hair past her shoulders and an ironic appreciation of certain parallels between her life and Carrie Bradshaw's. She has always known she wanted to marry and have kids. "I certainly never thought I would be the last one standing," she said. "You feel a little bit resentful, like, Gosh, how did I get here? Blind date after blind date — why can't it be easy for me like it was for other people? Right up until I ordered the sperm and made the doctor's appointment, I was filled with anxiety. I felt sad, overwhelmed. Now I'm completely at peace with it."
In the month since we had first talked, she had seen the reproductive endocrinologist and received a clean bill of health. Her hormone levels looked excellent. She planned to have her first insemination in December. Her decision had meshed seamlessly with what had been, until now, a conventional life; her parents were driving in from Long Island the next morning to take her for a medical test to check that her fallopian tubes were clear. Of her mother, Karyn said: "She used to call me once a week with a blind date. Now she'll call once a week with a friend of a friend of a friend who has a daughter who became a single mother by choice."
Karyn carried a wallet-size copy of the donor's photo between her MetroCard and her work ID: a fair, sharp-featured young man in a crisp white shirt, his arms crossed. In the past month, she had had a couple of residual online dates, but now she seemed relieved to let that go. "People would say, 'Oh, it's just a date — don't expect anything,"' she said, sipping her ice water. "'Just go out and have a good time.' But then you'd get four calls that night: How was it? What did you think? Did you like him? Why wouldn't you go out with him again? There was so much pressure. It became a job." Online dating has, if anything, made the search for a partner more callous and mystifying than ever; disappearing has become so easy. "I imagine one day when I get to heaven there will be a whole room full of missing socks and men :)," Karyn once wrote to me in an e-mail message. "I hope the men will be wearing the socks."
Now, as we sat outside, she said: "There's nothing I'd like more in life than to have the whole picture and to share it all. To have the baby, to have the miniwagon, to have the husband, morning soccer games and P.T.A. — he's out manning the grill, and I'm mixing the margaritas. But I think if I had to choose today between becoming a mom or finding the perfect man and I could only have one today, I would choose becoming a mom. And hope that I have my lifetime to find the other."
Discussion of single motherhood nearly always leads to talk of divorce. More than a third of American marriages end that way; often there are children involved, and often the mothers end up caring for those children mostly on their own, saddled with ex-spouses, custody wrangles and nagging in-laws. Considered this way, single motherhood would seem to have a clean, almost thrilling logic — more than a third of the time, these women will have circumvented a lot of pain and unpleasantness and cut straight to being mothers on their own.
Last October, when I visited the Manhattan apartment of Daniela, a 38-year-old German advertising executive who had recently been inseminated with the sperm of a male friend, her guest room was peppered with toys belonging to the young son of a visiting friend who had broken up with the boy's father by the time he was born. "They got a child out of love, and the parents couldn't deal with one another," Daniela, who asked that I use only her first name, told me. "And now she lives in Germany; he lives here. He doesn't pay any money if he doesn't see the child. So there's a constant battle over it. The child is torn in between. She has to deal with the father. I won't have to deal with the father."
Daniela's apartment is neat and spare, with hardwood floors, a basket of colorful slippers by the front door for guests and an entire wall devoted to pictures of her family in Germany. (She also has a married sister with three children who lives in New Jersey.) A 6-foot-1 blonde who speaks with disarming frankness, she came to America 10 years ago with the man she would later marry, only to find that he didn't want children. After their divorce, she was engaged to another man who kept postponing their wedding — she still has a set of "Save the Date" cards in her closet. Having always wanted passionately to be a mother, she decided to use a "known donor," a close gay friend, also German, to help her conceive. Known donors have some big advantages over anonymous ones: they can contribute fresh sperm, which is more motile and long-lived than frozen. (As much as half of a man's sperm dies during freezing, which is why sperm-bank donors need to have extremely high sperm counts.) With a known donor, there is a theoretically endless supply, and it's free, whereas "washed" sperm, cleared of debris for an intrauterine insemination, or IUI (recommended for women using frozen sperm because the sperm is placed directly into the uterus and doesn't have to swim past the cervix), generally costs between $200 and $400 a vial, plus $100 for shipping, not to mention another $100 if the donor is "open."
The big disadvantage to using a known donor, as Daniela learned when she posted a query on a Listserv of Single Mothers by Choice (she had been avoiding the meetings, finding them too full of "personalities"), is that in most states the donor will always have full parental rights, regardless of whatever deal he and the mother might have worked out in advance. This didn't worry Daniela; she wanted her child to have a father, even a partial one. "His parents are ecstatic about it," she said of her donor friend as we sat drinking tea at her dining table. "He's smart; he has a great character; he's a friendly person. I said, You don't have to pay for the child, but if you want to have it with you or you want to participate, you're more than welcome."
An unforeseen hitch emerged at the reproductive endocrinologist's office, where Daniela and her friend were posing as an engaged couple to avoid having to quarantine his sperm, as required by federal and New York State regulations before a woman can be inseminated by a man who isn't already her sexual partner: he had an extremely low sperm count. The doctor "spun" the sperm to concentrate it before placing it in Daniela's uterus, and she and her friend had already tried three inseminations, the last one a few days before my visit. She was now in the middle of what is known in fertility parlance as the "two-week wait" to find out if she was pregnant. She wasn't optimistic. In vitro fertilization might be more successful, but she has a stressful job and was leery of the intense hormone treatments.
Daniela also found anonymous donors deeply unappealing. "These people don't do that because they want to help the population, let's face it," she said. "They're doing it for the money and because they maybe want to populate the earth. A) you're going to have a lot of siblings out there. B) I question what kind of personality these people can be. You read characteristics like height and ethnicity, what kind of education — it's the information that you don't get that is much more important. I'm thinking about happiness or moods, these kind of things."
Sperm banks do try to address the amorphous question of character; many include psychological studies of donors as well as "staff impressions." Some offer audiotaped interviews in addition to the lengthy written questionnaires, but Daniela said she felt that these materials would only confuse her. She did have a few ideas of what she might look for: she wanted a man of her same blood type, O positive. Because she herself is so tall, she preferred a medium height. (Short donors don't exist; because most women seek out tall ones, most banks don't accept men under 5-foot-9.) She was also attracted by the idea of a donor of another race. "I believe in multiculturalism," she said. "I would probably choose somebody with a darker skin color so I don't have to slather sunblock on my kid all the time. I want it to be a healthy mix. You know how mixed dogs are always the nicest and the friendliest and the healthiest? If you get a clear race, they have all the problems. Mutts are always the friendly ones, the intelligent ones, the ones who don't bark and have a good character. I want a mutt." Her African-American friends questioned this strategy, suggesting that her child's life would be harder if he or she was perceived as nonwhite, but Daniela said: "If that's what I believe, I have to go by that. And it might help the world also if more people are doing it that way."
While many single mothers look for donors whose features and coloring resemble their own, Daniela's attraction to a diverse gene pool isn't so unusual. A 40-year-old African-American woman I spoke with wanted a Latino donor so that her child would have lighter skin and nonkinky hair. "I'm the African-American," she told me. "The child will get that from me." Q., a 43-year-old health-care manager who attended a yeshiva from kindergarten through high school (she asked that I use only one of her initials), first sought out a Jewish donor. "Everybody either had glasses, they're balding or their grandmother was diabetic and had heart disease — typical Jewish population," she told me. Her solution: a 6-foot-2 Catholic, German stock on both sides, with curly blond hair and blue eyes. "He really was the typical Aryan perfect human being," she said, laughing. "He was a bodybuilder. He played the guitar and the drums, and he sang. He was captain of the rugby team in college. When I had the in vitro process done, the embryologist said: 'This is some of the best sperm I've ever seen. It just about jumped out of the test tubes."' Q.'s golden-curled, blue-eyed daughter has just turned 2.
For the moment, though, Daniela was still hoping that this recent insemination with her friend's sperm would take. She dreamed of a little girl. And like virtually all of the prospective single mothers I spoke with, she had every intention of finding a mate after the child was born. "Taking this whole 'I have to find the father of my child' out of the equation might make it a lot more relaxed and easier," she said. "The guys are smelling it, and they run." And even if the guy held still, he might not be the one you'd pick — or even consider — if you weren't desperate for kids. "I see so many women who are in unhealthy relationships, where they really just try to get married and then have a child and break it off," Daniela said. "If they would consider this as an option, I think they would be happier, and the children would be happier."
I went to a special meeting of the New York chapter of Single Mothers by Choice a few weeks later, in mid-November. It had been arranged for members willing to have a reporter present. We met on the Upper West Side, in a long rectangular rented room whose high ceiling magnified the yelps and stomping feet of toddlers who had come with their mothers. Women contemplating single motherhood or trying to get pregnant ("thinkers" and "tryers") arrived an hour later, Karyn among them. It was her third meeting.
The mothers' discussion was mostly practical: a pretty blonde in a black T-shirt that read "Sweet and Toxic" had noticed a sign in her health club forbidding children over the age of 3 to change in opposite-sex bathrooms: what would she do in a year when her son was 3? She also wondered about teaching him how to urinate into the toilet bowl; a friend had suggested throwing Cheerios in for him to aim at. (A mother of a 4-year-old boy discouraged this practice; it might tempt him to throw other things into the toilet.) A woman trying to arrange a domestic adoption asked about nannies versus day care.
When the general meeting began, each woman in the largely white group introduced herself. Two were pregnant; another had twins; one had adopted a daughter from Haiti. One had not been able to conceive and planned to become a foster parent. Anyone walking into the room would have assumed that the women with kids had husbands or partners at home, but in three hours of discussion, the only men who were mentioned were donors, anonymous and known. These women's independence of male partners in their family-making often brings a corollary reliance on one another — for sympathy and information, for companionship (Single Mothers by Choice sponsors vacations every year for single mothers and their kids) and the chance to show their children other families like their own. At times, the relationships can become even more enmeshed: one mother I spoke with, whose twin sons were conceived using both donor eggs and donor sperm, gave her leftover frozen embryos to a friend who was having fertility problems. The friend is now pregnant with a child who will be this mother's own sons' full sibling.
While nearly every woman I spoke with had her own history of romantic near misses and crushing disappointments, most also saw advantages to proceeding on their own. "This baby will be my baby, only my baby," Karyn told me that night at Caliente Cab. "The thing I'm afraid of is that after doing this, I might not want to get married. It seems like a lot of hard work, a lot of compromise. Someone ends up short, and usually it's the mom, because by the time you get to the child and your husband and the dog, there's not much left."
After introductions, the group broke into smaller discussion groups, mothers and pregnant women at one end of the room, thinkers and tryers at the other. Among the thinkers, two women were holding off on making a decision while they looked for work — something I heard a lot. Such delays put these women in a bind, though; each month is precious in terms of fertility. "I can't stress enough how much money worries me in this process," I was told by a 35-year-old Canadian woman who will soon begin trying to get pregnant. "I'm alone; there's no safety net. If you picture it like the scales, on the one side there's my money and on the other are the years left to have children."
Karyn had moved from the thinkers group into the tryers since her last meeting. She had brought a bag of pretzels, which she shared with the others, most of whom were slightly older than she — slightly in real terms, but through the telescopic lens of a woman's fertility, the difference was vast. "Trying to get pregnant at age 41 is nothing like trying to get pregnant at age 38," a 41-year-old grimly remarked when Karyn asked if she had begun trying. "My gynecologist wouldn't even do any of the tests. She said because of my age, just go to deal with infertility, don't waste any time."
Because many single women have waited years, hoping the right man would come along, and because the majority use sperm that has been frozen, they are disproportionately at risk for fertility problems when they finally decide to have children. Many report being stunned that their fertility was so fragile. "I thought I could have kids until my period ended, and menopause is 50, right?" said another woman I met at a Single Mothers by Choice meeting in Washington, who began trying to conceive at 44. The sense of not having been informed, of being too late, is so often expressed by would-be single mothers in their 40's that it has doubtless spurred some younger women in the Single Mothers by Choice network to act more precipitously. (I interviewed two women who conceived while still in their 20's.) Still, the near-miraculous success of some older mothers can give hope — often unrealistic — to those still fighting the odds. Most doctors refused to take the 44-year-old Washington woman except as an egg-donor patient, but one did — and she became pregnant with a girl who is now almost 4. Another woman in the D.C. group went through 16 attempts and a miscarriage, using both IUI and I.V.F., before her son was finally born.
At 39, Karyn was still on the right side of this equation, but just barely. "I'm waiting for my next period to start the beginning of December," she told the older woman. "I'm about to start trying, either before or after Christmas Day."
But it didn't work out like that. A few days before Christmas, after receiving a string of e-mail messages from Karyn chronicling her march toward insemination, I found one with the subject line, "Do you believe in signs?" She had written: "Sit down, ready for this one? I arrived home from work again at 11:30 last night to be greeted by my doormen telling me how very sorry they were — a steam pipe explosion blew right through my apartment with a flood.. . .My apartment is destroyed and needs to be gutted.. . .I am taking all of the events as a sign that this is not the right month to get pregnant."
She planned to wait three months, at which point she would be weeks away from her 40th birthday.
In November, I met Daniela in her Midtown office, which has a modern industrial design and faces east into what that afternoon was a bleak gray day. As she had feared, the last insemination with her donor friend hadn't worked, and she had resigned herself to the idea of using an anonymous donor instead. She had even found two that appealed to her, both from a small Manhattan sperm bank where she would save money on shipping by picking up the samples herself and carrying them to her doctor's office. As I sat across her desk, she pulled up the donors' descriptions on her computer. One was Indian: "He's got black straight hair," she told me, "brown eyes, he's six feet but he only weighs 150. Which is good. If I have a girl, she wants to be skinny, and if she can eat what she wants, that's perfect. You don't have to get in fights about food." The Indian donor's complexion was described as "medium/dark," and he had proven fertility. He had a master's degree in business. He was bilingual, Hindu, single and liked traveling and music. His family-health history looked good.
The second donor was a mix of Chinese, Peruvian and Italian. He was olive-skinned, 5-foot-9 and weighed 169. "Thick hair, which is also nice," she said, "because if I happen to get a son, I don't like bald guys. He's Catholic, which I would obviously like, because I am. He has a very interesting book collection: he likes Hesse, Henry James, Lorca. Excellent vision. His parents are pretty boring professionally, so I was a little concerned about that. But when they started their businesses, they probably didn't have all that many chances, the father being Peruvian and the mother being Chinese-Italian." She especially liked the fact that he was a full-time student in theater. "He has creative aspirations," she said. "Those things are hereditary."
Mostly from a sense of obligation, she Googled "sperm" and began scanning lists of donors at other banks, using O-positive blood type as her first criterion. "This one is a Hispanic fair," she mused. "But Hispanics can still be very, very fair. Then we have a Dominican-Honduran, black straight hair, olive skin — he is really too heavy, 220, are you kidding me? Now here we have a Caucasian. Research assistant in psychology — no. You don't study that if you haven't touched upon it somewhere."
At the California Cryobank site, the donors numbered in the hundreds. "All those Germans," Daniela murmured, scrolling down. "How am I proving my healthiness if I do the same race again? Black African, they do have three of them. Look how tall they are. And see how heavy the two O-positives are?"
Eventually she happened on a search engine that listed donors from all of the banks without revealing which bank they were from without payment. Visibly weary as she scanned the list, she reflected: "I still like my Chinese-Peruvian-Italian. He seems a little bit more special somehow. From this little bank . . . it's like a little country. There he is. There he is! Chinese-Peruvian-Italian, full-time student!"
The sheer familiarity of the Chinese-Peruvian-Italian made him leap from the haze of anonymous data like an old friend. And that feeling counts for a lot. It's no wonder that a number of single mothers I spoke with used the phrase "I felt a connection" in explaining their choice of donors. Despite the obvious parallels between shopping for sperm and dating online, there is finally no comparing them — a sperm donor is providing half the DNA for your child, and whether or not you choose to think about it, he'll be there forever in the child's tastes and choices and personality. No one wants a decision like that to feel arbitrary.
Daniela had other news: she had met a man she was interested in. It happened during a business trip the week before; he was meeting friends in the bar of her hotel. "He was so good with his friend's kid," she said. "I'm, like, 'Oh, you must have three kids.' He said, 'No, just nieces and nephews."' They struck up a conversation, and she ended up joining his group for dinner. She was honest with him about her plans to get pregnant, but the news may not have sunk in; he had been calling ever since, eager to see her again. He was in his 40's, African-American, and had his own business. "It's nice to know that just because you have these plans, you're not unattractive or undesirable," Daniela said. She felt more at ease with this man than she had with other men in recent years and attributed this to her decision to move ahead with motherhood. "It was a completely different feeling," she said. "It empowers one, because you're not relying on somebody else. You don't have to bring up the big life conversations."
While many women, like Karyn, relish their emancipation from the grind of dating and pursue motherhood with a single mind, others are intrigued by what romance could mean, absent the imperative of finding a father for their children. One woman, a 40-year-old graduate student in biology in the Midwest, told me shortly after her first insemination: "One of the things that was so powerful about deciding to have a baby on my own was saying, I'm taking charge of this piece of it; I'm not going to wait around for a guy to give it to me. And my feelings about what I want from men right now are really changed. I don't actually want a big relationship. Now I want occasional companionship and sex."
On a recent date, between inseminations, this woman noticed the difference. "It was one of these dates where the guy's just telling you his sad story and his complicated relationship with his mother. In my previous dating life, I would have been, like, I'm not going to get seriously involved with a man like this. I'm going to get rid of him. This time I was, like, I think he's hot, so if I just keep listening, maybe eventually we'll have sex. And we had great sex. It was really hot." At one point, she had sex with two different men in the same weekend (both times using condoms) not long after an insemination. Observing her own behavior, she said: "Maybe in six months or a year I'll have more insight about it, but something radical is going on in my brain about my relationships with men. O.K., so I'm not going to keep trying to have this picket-fence-y life. I'm waving the white flag. And now I have permission to directly pursue what I want. It's a very curious and ambivalent liberation, because I would rather not be single. It's not my first choice."
Daniela told me that regardless of what happened with the new man, she was certain of one thing: she would go ahead with her plan to inseminate. "I've done the mistake of putting this on hold several times, and I cannot afford it," she said. We looked together at her November calendar on her office computer; sandwiched among coming trips and meetings were her expected days of menstruation and ovulation, noted in German. She planned to inseminate in December, so she would have to pick the donor by the end of the month. Meanwhile, the new man had proposed coming to New York in mid-December, which happened to be the time when she thought she would be ovulating. Daniela said she wouldn't feel comfortable using protection with him while she was going to a doctor's office to be inseminated. "That would be weird," she said. "But leave it up to destiny? That's a possibility, I think."
I was astonished. Had she thought through the implications of having this man's child? I asked. What if the relationship didn't last? What if she turned out not to like him at all? Daniela countered that his parents were happily married, and he had good relationships with his siblings, but what I heard in her voice was confusion. Then I recalled something she had told me in a previous conversation: "I have this big fear in my life that I never will be pregnant. You see these pregnant women on the street, and you're, like, How does it feel? What's going on in your mind, in your heart? I want to feel it!" Remembering this helped me to understand: it is hard to want something so badly and to try to prevent it.
As it turned out, he didn't visit in December. Daniela didn't inseminate, either. Her Indian donor was out of stock, and the Chinese-Peruvian-Italian's sperm was in quarantine until early January. Meanwhile, she had learned that her health insurance had a $2,000 annual cap on fertility treatments that she had already exhausted on the inseminations with her gay friend.
So it was early January when I finally met Daniela at 8 a.m. outside the Empire State Building, where her sperm bank is located, to pick up two vials of sperm from her Chinese-Peruvian-Italian donor. She had hardly slept the night before from excitement, she told me. At the bank, a nondescript lab, Daniela paid $450 and was given an 18-pound white canister with an orange "Biohazard" sticker on it. She had been there once before; her donor friend had had to go out of town and left frozen sperm for her. "You walk out on the street, and you've got the container in your hand," she said, "and then there's all these containers on two legs."
One such two-legged container was in the elevator when we got on: a workman surrounded by tools. "You're unbuttoned, you know that," Daniela said, looking at his fly.
The guy's fair skin turned crimson, and he buttoned up, grinning but avoiding her eyes.
She explained, "I think it's better that I tell you now, so you don't go through the day like that."
"If they notice, they shouldn't be looking there," he said in a strong Irish accent, smiling right at her now.
Daniela smiled back. "Are you Irish?" she asked. "I'm German. That's why I don't understand a word you're saying."
This was flirtation, right? I was still asking myself that question as we left the elevator, but I wasn't sure: what does flirtation even mean in the context of a woman hauling a canister of sperm to a doctor's office so he can inseminate her? Or, to put it another way, what's the point?
"He was a sweet kid," Daniela said briskly as we left the building and stepped onto the dusty, bacon-smelling street.
At the doctor's office, we repaired to an examining room, where Daniela's doctor, an avuncular man in wire-rimmed glasses, took a sonogram of her ovaries and uterus. "The lining looks very good," he said. "It's the proper time to do this. We'll thaw out the specimen."
In a different room, he removed a "straw" of frozen sperm from the canister of nitrogen and placed it into a tub of warm water to thaw. Most sperm banks use plastic vials nowadays, but this particular bank had stuck with an old system. The doctor left the room while the sperm was thawing, and Daniela filled me in on the new man. They hadn't seen each other since that first meeting two months ago; trips had been arranged and fallen through, often because he was short of money. Still, they were in close touch. Three days ago, she told him on the phone about the planned insemination, and his response was wary. "How do you react to dating a person that would be pregnant with somebody else?" Daniela said, paraphrasing his reaction. "Just like I am feeling completely weird carrying that bucket, it must be the same feeling for him when he meets a person like me." Yet she was hopeful that things might still work out. "If we're going to be great together," she said, laughing, "we're going to be great together with that Eurasian child."
The doctor came back and placed the straw of clear, yellowish sperm in a slim glass cylinder and removed a drop to look at under a microscope. "We have very good motility," he said. "This is a good specimen."
Daniela looked, too. "I see lots of them," she said, excited. "Last time I had to look for four."
The doctor left so Daniela could change into a gown and lie down. When he came back, he drew the yellow liquid into an oversize syringe that tapered into a skinny tube. It is hard to say what Daniela's chances of becoming pregnant would be; statistics on the success rates of IUI using frozen sperm suggest that they are between 8 and 15 percent in a given cycle. Daniela would return the next morning for a second insemination; many doctors believe that consecutive inseminations increase the chances.
Wearing a small miner's light around his head, the doctor went to work. He was done in three minutes. Daniela lifted her hand, fingers crossed, as he left the room.
A week into Daniela's two-week wait, I heard from Karyn again. She had been living in a friend's apartment for weeks while the various insurance companies haggled about how much to pay out for the damage to her apartment. Her computer had been destroyed, along with many of her possessions, including her file of medical records and donor materials. "That's one thing that made me cry," she said. "Just to see all the papers with his information and history and his picture. . .seeing it all soaked."
She had resigned from her job — the brutal hours were wearing her down — and said she believed she had other good prospects. Meanwhile, she had decided to go ahead with her insemination plan. The big day came two weeks later, in late January. Her mother went with her, and Karyn called me a few hours after, elated. The next day I received an e-mail message whose subject line read, "I think I already feel a kick :)."
Over thanksgiving vacation, I took the train to Darien, Conn., to meet Shelby Siems and her 2-year-old son, Christopher, who had driven down from their home in Marblehead, Mass. Shelby, 44, grew up in Darien and had come to visit cousins and friends over the holiday weekend. She is part of a rising number of single mothers who are having second children; when we met in Connecticut, she was four months pregnant with a second son by the same donor who sired her first. She and Christopher picked me up at the train station, and we drove to a nearby pizza restaurant that was still quiet at that midmorning hour. Shelby is fair, with long blond hair and pale blue eyes that are prone to tears. Christopher is also pale, a watchful, intelligent child with wispy reddish hair. At lunch, he said "please" and "thank you" and rolled a small green train engine over the laminated tabletop while Shelby and I talked. For a 2-year-old he was remarkably patient, but occasionally he cried, "Mama, Mama, I want to hold you."
"I'm right here," Shelby said.
Once a journalist for The Christian Science Monitor, Shelby was finishing up an M.F.A. in nonfiction. Her thesis project is a book about her experience as a single mother, an experience that has been more grueling than Daniela's or Karyn's will most likely be because Shelby has no immediate family; she was an only child of older parents who died by the time she reached her early 30's. She inherited money that has allowed her to go back to school and to support Christopher, but she is alone in the world. In Christopher's first weeks of life, there were periods of many days when they saw no one but each other.
Shelby does have a boyfriend: a 52-year-old bachelor who works at a pharmaceutical company, whom she met at a party when Christopher was a month old. "He's been a great person in my life and Christopher's life, but he's not going to marry me," she explained over the phone when we first spoke. "Some people just don't want to do that, and he's one of those people."
The fact that Shelby is in a relationship at all is unusual; the majority of mothers I spoke with — even those with older children — had remained single. Many expressed a willingness to date if the opportunity were to come along, but they work long hours to support their kids, and when they're not working, they want to see them. For all the comparisons between being divorced with children and having them alone, there are critical differences: an ex-husband who spends any time at all with his kids frees up pockets of time when a woman could potentially see someone new. Even minimal child-support payments would reduce the financial burden on her, and substantial ones could allow her to work less. Perhaps most important, a child with only one parent is immensely dependent on that parent, and the mother of such a child tends to feel her responsibility acutely. It can be painful — and expensive — to leave your child with a baby sitter after a whole day away, just to go out on a date.
Despite her age — Shelby was 42 when Christopher was born — she was determined that her son have a sibling. "He has even less of a family than I do, because he doesn't have his whole father's side of the family," she told me. "The only person he has is me." She wanted to use the same donor again and put the matter to her boyfriend, who made it clear that he wasn't interested in fatherhood. She began stocking up on the donor's sperm (most banks keep a reserve supply of each donor's sperm for women who want second children) when Christopher was still an infant. "I want my son to have a full sibling," she said. "I want to feel like he has one person in the world who is a complete blood relative after I'm gone. I did not want my son to feel deprived, that the other sibling had a father and he didn't." To be sure that there was no chance the child would be his, Shelby and her boyfriend were celibate for the year it took her to conceive, which she finally did at 43, after eight tries, using I.V.F.
The fact that a child born of an anonymous donor knows only half his biological family concerns single mothers with more robust families than Shelby's, too. The Donor Sibling Registry, a Web site where families can register children conceived by donor insemination in hopes of being matched with half-siblings or even the donor himself, has proved a boon for many single mothers. The site's founder, Wendy Kramer, estimates that the majority of the 7,400 registered members are single. Recent publicity has prompted a jump in the registry's membership and matches — more than 1,500 have been made so far, not just among half-siblings but also among sperm (and egg) donors, 320 of whom are registered on the site, and their progeny.
Q., the former yeshiva student who ended up choosing the 6-foot-2 German rugby player as her donor, developed severe hypertension during her pregnancy and had to be hospitalized several times. Her symptoms lingered even after her daughter was born, and she became preoccupied with what would happen to the baby girl if she were to die. Her brother and a sister are selfish, she says, and her mother is elderly. Last fall, she went to the Donor Sibling Registry and got a shock: the Aryan bodybuilder with the leaping sperm has fathered 21 children (and counting — he is still an active donor), including four sets of twins. These children are all 3 and under, and their families — four lesbian couples, three heterosexual couples and six single mothers — have formed their own Listserv, where photographs of the children (all blond, with a strong familial resemblance) are posted, and daily e-mail messages are exchanged about birthdays, toilet training and the like. They are planning a group vacation in 2007. "I was elated," Q. told me. "To quote the granny on 'The Beverly Hillbillies,' I wanted her to have kin. Now here's kin that look like her; that're in her same age range. I even thought that if I get to know somebody really well from this group, maybe I would pick one of these other mothers, if they would be interested, to be designated as a guardian for my daughter."
Q. is one of several people in the group with a keen desire to meet her donor one day. And they aren't sitting idle; one woman had magnified his baby picture, in which the donor is blowing out candles on his birthday cake, to the point at which a first name may be legible. Another mother has a hunch about the donor's provenance based on the way he pronounced certain words on his audiotape. At the Washington Single Mothers by Choice meeting, I met a woman who had easily identified the donor for her 9-month-old son using Google. "The person left specific enough information for me to just type in those words and click," she told the group. "But what to do with that information? I'm bound to keep him anonymous as per the contract, but what about when my son says: 'What do you know? Tell me anything about my dad."'
When we'd finished our pizza and salad, Shelby drove to a playground. The brightly colored equipment was empty in the frigid cold, but Christopher bounced in his car seat. "Slides!" he cried.
He bounded out of the car, refusing mittens, and commenced to climb, panting plumes of steam. Whenever he was in earshot, Shelby spelled out the word D-A-D; lately Christopher had become fixated on the idea of a daddy. "He goes to a day care, and he's the only child of a single mother in his class. I think they spend a lot of time talking about Daddy," she told me. Christopher had referred to a neighbor as Daddy, as well as Regis Philbin. "Interestingly, he doesn't call my boyfriend Daddy; he's 'mamma's friend.' The other day, I said, 'Someone special's coming to see you today — do you know who it is?' I expected him to say [her boyfriend's name]. But he said, 'Daddy?"' The single mothers by choice I spoke with generally hold that the story of their children's origins should be told to them from the time of birth, long before the child is old enough to understand it. But Shelby feels that at 2, Christopher is too young to hear that he doesn't have a father.
Shelby's son is part of a population of kids that is only now beginning to be studied, though a 1992 survey of teenagers raised by single mothers found that they experienced markedly fewer adolescent problems than children of divorce. A continuing study of a group of children in England, now 2, who were conceived by single women using donor sperm concludes that so far they are healthy and well adjusted. But the long-term questions of how these children will fare or about the different experiences of girls and boys have yet to be answered.
As we watched Christopher tear around the playground, Shelby reflected on her occasional frustration at the distance her boyfriend maintains from her family. Over Christmas, he would be leaving town for two weeks to visit his family, and Shelby and Christopher would spend the holiday alone. They had no plans, and Shelby felt pressure to make Christmas festive for her son. "On the other hand," she said of her boyfriend, "he's still attracted to me physically through all my body changes, and he and Christopher are so fond of each other. They have a very sweet relationship." Her boyfriend usually visits on Sunday mornings. "A huge wave of relief comes over me," Shelby said. She can relax or do dishes or take a nap. "I feel, like, Wow, this must be what it's like to have a husband every day of the year. I can do my own thing, but I love to just stand across the room and watch them together."
When I next spoke to Daniela, in late January at the end of her two-week wait, she was on a business trip. Her voice sounded weak and tired. She had just gotten her period. And the new man had finally made it to New York, but the visit had been a disaster. "I guess it has to do with the fact that I'm going through this," she said. "You kind of protect yourself. He was saying he was one of these what he calls old-fashioned guys: if his wife is going to have a child, he's going to be in the waiting room until the child is delivered and washed. I'm, like, wait a second. Don't you think you should go through this together? He said, 'No, I'm going to faint, and I'm going to throw up."'
His visit to New York was supposedly a business trip, but in the end he didn't have much to do. "He's not cut out to be a provider, to be a protector or to be a patriarch," Daniela said. "He can't be there when the child is born; he can't make the living for the family. Maybe what bothered him is that he couldn't offer what he would like to offer. So he made it, like, taste bad."
I had never heard her so low. "Everything is so hard, and it's so degrading," she said. "You always think that you'd go through this with somebody that would support you. You don't think about having all the problems, let alone doing it on your own."
I was humbled by the grueling ordeals many women had undergone on their paths to single motherhood: years of trying to conceive, hormone treatments, hospitalizations, miscarriages, untold thousands of dollars spent — all without a partner to buffer the strains and disappointments. And being a single parent is no easier: whether it's a matter of trying to get a photo taken of you with your child or finding a way to shower without worrying that you won't hear your baby cry or accommodating a difficult work schedule, being a single parent can require compromises and jury-rigging that might awe a person with a partner. A longtime employee of New Jersey Transit spent a year working the 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. shift, which meant waking her daughter at 4 and walking her across the street in her pajamas to a neighbor's house. Her daughter slept on the sofa until the neighbor woke her and took her to school with her own children. "It's probably harder than you ever think it's going to be," this mother told me. After a moment, she added, "My only regret is that I didn't do it sooner." It is a measure of how deep the pull toward motherhood can be that thousands of women from many different walks of life are making this choice, using reproductive and communications technology in ways that not only break with tradition but also make it seem obsolete.
Daniela did another insemination in early February, this time mingling the sperm of her Chinese-Peruvian-Italian with another donor from the same bank who had proven fertility. It didn't work. Neither did Karyn's first try. When I spoke with her early this month, she was preparing to move back into her apartment, whose renovation would soon be complete. There was still one last chance to become pregnant before her 40th birthday in April. "In a perfect world, I'll get pregnant this cycle," she told me. "I'll start working the first week of April before I'm officially really pregnant, and we'll live happily ever after."
When I spoke to Daniela a couple of weeks ago, she had recovered from her disappointments and had just been inseminated again with the sperm of a French-English-German-Scandinavian attorney with proven fertility. She had also struck up an e-mail correspondence with another woman on the Single Mothers by Choice Listserv. They had met for a drink and hit it off, and Daniela planned to go with her to a Single Mothers by Choice meeting. She seemed reconciled to the fact that it might take a while to become pregnant, but she was no less determined. Her fellow would-be single mother is 36, Daniela told me, but her situation is complicated by a boyfriend who has children.
"Why don't you tell him you've got some kids, too?" Daniela recalled suggesting to her friend. "They're just not born yet."
Jennifer Egan last wrote for the magazine about online dating. Her new novel, "The Keep," will be published in August.
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The New York Times
March 19, 2006
Wanted: A Few Good Sperm
By JENNIFER EGAN
One day last October, Karyn, a 39-year-old executive, pulled her online dating profile off JDate and Match.com, two sites she had been using, along with an endless series of leads, tips and blind dates arranged by friends and colleagues, to search for a man she wanted to marry and raise a family with. At long last, after something like 100 dates in the past 10 years and several serious relationships, she had found the man she refers to, tongue only slightly in cheek, as "the one." It all began last summer, when she broke off a relationship with a younger man who wasn't ready for children and got serious about the idea of conceiving on her own. She gathered information about fertility doctors and sperm banks. "Then a childhood friend of mine was over," she told me. "I pulled up the Web site of the only sperm bank that I know of that has adult photos. There happened to be one Jewish person. I pulled up the photo, and I looked at my friend, and I looked at his picture, and I said, 'Oh, my God.' I can't say love at first sight, because, you know. But he was the one."
Sperm donors, like online daters, answer myriad questions about heroes, hobbies and favorite things. Karyn read her donor's profile and liked what she saw. "You can tell he comes from a warm family, some very educated," she said. He had worked as a chef. He had "proven fertility," meaning that at least one woman conceived using his sperm. Like all sperm donors, he was free from any sexually transmitted diseases or testable genetic disorders. "People in New York change sex partners quicker than the crosstown bus," Karyn said. "I'd be a lot more concerned about my date next week." But she especially liked the fact that he was an identity-release donor (also called an "open donor" or a "yes donor") — a growing and extremely popular category of sperm donors who are willing to be contacted by any offspring who reach the age of 18.
The next morning, Karyn called the bank and spoke with a woman who worked there. "She said: 'I have to be honest. He's very popular, and I only have eight units in store right now. I'm not sure how much longer he might be in the program,"' Karyn told me. "Most women in New York impulse-buy Manolo Blahniks, and I said, 'I'll take the eight units.' It was $3,100." The price included six months of storage.
That hefty purchase, and the strong sense of connection she felt to the donor, galvanized Karyn: she made an appointment with a reproductive endocrinologist and gave up alcohol and caffeine. At work, she took on a position of greater responsibility and longer hours — with a higher salary — to save money. She went on a wait list to buy more of the donor's sperm when it became available. (All donor sperm must be quarantined for six months — the maximum incubation period for H.I.V. — so that the donor can be retested for the disease before it is released.) She told her parents and married sister what was going on, e-mailing the donor's picture to her father with an invitation that he meet his son-in-law. She also printed the donor's picture and kept it on the coffee table of her Manhattan studio apartment, where she sleeps in a Murphy bed. "I kind of glance at it as I pass," she said of the picture. "It's almost like when you date someone, and you keep looking at them, and you're, like, Are they cute? But every time I pass, I'm, like, Oh, he's really cute. It's a comforting feeling."
When I suggested that she must be a type who is prone to love at first sight, she just laughed. "With online dating, friends used to say: 'What about him? What about him?' I'd say: 'Don't like the nose. Ah, the eyes are a little buggy. He really likes to golf, and you know I don't like golfing.' There was always something. If I said this about everyone," she concluded, "I would have married someone about 75 dates ago."
Karyn said she hoped to join a population of women that everyone agrees is expanding, although by how much is hard to pin down because single mothers by choice (or choice mothers), as they are sometimes called, aren't separated statistically from, say, babies born to unwed teenagers. Between 1999 and 2003 there was an almost 17 percent jump in the number of babies born to unmarried women between ages 30 and 44 in America, according to the National Center for Human Statistics, while the number born to unmarried women between 15 and 24 actually decreased by nearly 6 percent. Single Mothers by Choice, a 25-year-old support group, took in nearly double the number of new members in 2005 as it did 10 years ago, and its roughly 4,000 current members include women in Israel, Australia and Switzerland. The California Cryobank, the largest sperm bank in the country, owed a third of its business to single women in 2005, shipping them 9,600 vials of sperm, each good for one insemination.
As recently as the early 60's, a "respectable" woman needed to be married just to have sex, not to speak of children; a child born out of wedlock was a source of deepest shame. Yet this radical social change feels strangely inevitable; nearly a third of American households are headed by women alone, many of whom not only raise their children on their own but also support them. All that remains is conception, and it is small wonder that women have begun chipping away at needing a man for that — especially after Sylvia Ann Hewlett's controversial 2002 book, "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children," sounded alarms about declining fertility rates in women over 35. The Internet is also a factor; as well as holding meetings through local chapters around the country, Single Mothers by Choice hosts 11 Listservs, each addressing a different aspect of single motherhood. Women around the world pore over these lists, exchanging tips and information, selling one another leftover vials of sperm. (Once sperm has shipped, it can't be returned to the bank.) Karyn found both her sperm bank and reproductive endocrinologist on these Listservs. Three-quarters of the members of Single Mothers by Choice choose to conceive with donor sperm, as lesbian couples have been doing for many years — adoption is costly, slow-moving and often biased against single people. Buying sperm over the Internet, on the other hand, is not much different from buying shoes.
In the 25 years since she founded Single Mothers by Choice after becoming pregnant by accident, Jane Mattes, now 62, has seen her group's membership conceiving at younger ages (the median age among members is 36) and more often having second children. But the biggest change, Mattes says, is that the stigma attached to this form of single motherhood has largely faded. "People used to come into our meetings literally afraid to walk in," she told me. "We don't see that as much anymore. Everyone seems to know somebody who did it, which wasn't the case even 10 years ago."
Karyn, who asked that I use only her middle name, never imagined her life unfolding in this way, she told me over dinner at Caliente Cab, where we sat outdoors on an unseasonably warm November night. She has big blue-green eyes, shiny brown hair past her shoulders and an ironic appreciation of certain parallels between her life and Carrie Bradshaw's. She has always known she wanted to marry and have kids. "I certainly never thought I would be the last one standing," she said. "You feel a little bit resentful, like, Gosh, how did I get here? Blind date after blind date — why can't it be easy for me like it was for other people? Right up until I ordered the sperm and made the doctor's appointment, I was filled with anxiety. I felt sad, overwhelmed. Now I'm completely at peace with it."
In the month since we had first talked, she had seen the reproductive endocrinologist and received a clean bill of health. Her hormone levels looked excellent. She planned to have her first insemination in December. Her decision had meshed seamlessly with what had been, until now, a conventional life; her parents were driving in from Long Island the next morning to take her for a medical test to check that her fallopian tubes were clear. Of her mother, Karyn said: "She used to call me once a week with a blind date. Now she'll call once a week with a friend of a friend of a friend who has a daughter who became a single mother by choice."
Karyn carried a wallet-size copy of the donor's photo between her MetroCard and her work ID: a fair, sharp-featured young man in a crisp white shirt, his arms crossed. In the past month, she had had a couple of residual online dates, but now she seemed relieved to let that go. "People would say, 'Oh, it's just a date — don't expect anything,"' she said, sipping her ice water. "'Just go out and have a good time.' But then you'd get four calls that night: How was it? What did you think? Did you like him? Why wouldn't you go out with him again? There was so much pressure. It became a job." Online dating has, if anything, made the search for a partner more callous and mystifying than ever; disappearing has become so easy. "I imagine one day when I get to heaven there will be a whole room full of missing socks and men :)," Karyn once wrote to me in an e-mail message. "I hope the men will be wearing the socks."
Now, as we sat outside, she said: "There's nothing I'd like more in life than to have the whole picture and to share it all. To have the baby, to have the miniwagon, to have the husband, morning soccer games and P.T.A. — he's out manning the grill, and I'm mixing the margaritas. But I think if I had to choose today between becoming a mom or finding the perfect man and I could only have one today, I would choose becoming a mom. And hope that I have my lifetime to find the other."
Discussion of single motherhood nearly always leads to talk of divorce. More than a third of American marriages end that way; often there are children involved, and often the mothers end up caring for those children mostly on their own, saddled with ex-spouses, custody wrangles and nagging in-laws. Considered this way, single motherhood would seem to have a clean, almost thrilling logic — more than a third of the time, these women will have circumvented a lot of pain and unpleasantness and cut straight to being mothers on their own.
Last October, when I visited the Manhattan apartment of Daniela, a 38-year-old German advertising executive who had recently been inseminated with the sperm of a male friend, her guest room was peppered with toys belonging to the young son of a visiting friend who had broken up with the boy's father by the time he was born. "They got a child out of love, and the parents couldn't deal with one another," Daniela, who asked that I use only her first name, told me. "And now she lives in Germany; he lives here. He doesn't pay any money if he doesn't see the child. So there's a constant battle over it. The child is torn in between. She has to deal with the father. I won't have to deal with the father."
Daniela's apartment is neat and spare, with hardwood floors, a basket of colorful slippers by the front door for guests and an entire wall devoted to pictures of her family in Germany. (She also has a married sister with three children who lives in New Jersey.) A 6-foot-1 blonde who speaks with disarming frankness, she came to America 10 years ago with the man she would later marry, only to find that he didn't want children. After their divorce, she was engaged to another man who kept postponing their wedding — she still has a set of "Save the Date" cards in her closet. Having always wanted passionately to be a mother, she decided to use a "known donor," a close gay friend, also German, to help her conceive. Known donors have some big advantages over anonymous ones: they can contribute fresh sperm, which is more motile and long-lived than frozen. (As much as half of a man's sperm dies during freezing, which is why sperm-bank donors need to have extremely high sperm counts.) With a known donor, there is a theoretically endless supply, and it's free, whereas "washed" sperm, cleared of debris for an intrauterine insemination, or IUI (recommended for women using frozen sperm because the sperm is placed directly into the uterus and doesn't have to swim past the cervix), generally costs between $200 and $400 a vial, plus $100 for shipping, not to mention another $100 if the donor is "open."
The big disadvantage to using a known donor, as Daniela learned when she posted a query on a Listserv of Single Mothers by Choice (she had been avoiding the meetings, finding them too full of "personalities"), is that in most states the donor will always have full parental rights, regardless of whatever deal he and the mother might have worked out in advance. This didn't worry Daniela; she wanted her child to have a father, even a partial one. "His parents are ecstatic about it," she said of her donor friend as we sat drinking tea at her dining table. "He's smart; he has a great character; he's a friendly person. I said, You don't have to pay for the child, but if you want to have it with you or you want to participate, you're more than welcome."
An unforeseen hitch emerged at the reproductive endocrinologist's office, where Daniela and her friend were posing as an engaged couple to avoid having to quarantine his sperm, as required by federal and New York State regulations before a woman can be inseminated by a man who isn't already her sexual partner: he had an extremely low sperm count. The doctor "spun" the sperm to concentrate it before placing it in Daniela's uterus, and she and her friend had already tried three inseminations, the last one a few days before my visit. She was now in the middle of what is known in fertility parlance as the "two-week wait" to find out if she was pregnant. She wasn't optimistic. In vitro fertilization might be more successful, but she has a stressful job and was leery of the intense hormone treatments.
Daniela also found anonymous donors deeply unappealing. "These people don't do that because they want to help the population, let's face it," she said. "They're doing it for the money and because they maybe want to populate the earth. A) you're going to have a lot of siblings out there. B) I question what kind of personality these people can be. You read characteristics like height and ethnicity, what kind of education — it's the information that you don't get that is much more important. I'm thinking about happiness or moods, these kind of things."
Sperm banks do try to address the amorphous question of character; many include psychological studies of donors as well as "staff impressions." Some offer audiotaped interviews in addition to the lengthy written questionnaires, but Daniela said she felt that these materials would only confuse her. She did have a few ideas of what she might look for: she wanted a man of her same blood type, O positive. Because she herself is so tall, she preferred a medium height. (Short donors don't exist; because most women seek out tall ones, most banks don't accept men under 5-foot-9.) She was also attracted by the idea of a donor of another race. "I believe in multiculturalism," she said. "I would probably choose somebody with a darker skin color so I don't have to slather sunblock on my kid all the time. I want it to be a healthy mix. You know how mixed dogs are always the nicest and the friendliest and the healthiest? If you get a clear race, they have all the problems. Mutts are always the friendly ones, the intelligent ones, the ones who don't bark and have a good character. I want a mutt." Her African-American friends questioned this strategy, suggesting that her child's life would be harder if he or she was perceived as nonwhite, but Daniela said: "If that's what I believe, I have to go by that. And it might help the world also if more people are doing it that way."
While many single mothers look for donors whose features and coloring resemble their own, Daniela's attraction to a diverse gene pool isn't so unusual. A 40-year-old African-American woman I spoke with wanted a Latino donor so that her child would have lighter skin and nonkinky hair. "I'm the African-American," she told me. "The child will get that from me." Q., a 43-year-old health-care manager who attended a yeshiva from kindergarten through high school (she asked that I use only one of her initials), first sought out a Jewish donor. "Everybody either had glasses, they're balding or their grandmother was diabetic and had heart disease — typical Jewish population," she told me. Her solution: a 6-foot-2 Catholic, German stock on both sides, with curly blond hair and blue eyes. "He really was the typical Aryan perfect human being," she said, laughing. "He was a bodybuilder. He played the guitar and the drums, and he sang. He was captain of the rugby team in college. When I had the in vitro process done, the embryologist said: 'This is some of the best sperm I've ever seen. It just about jumped out of the test tubes."' Q.'s golden-curled, blue-eyed daughter has just turned 2.
For the moment, though, Daniela was still hoping that this recent insemination with her friend's sperm would take. She dreamed of a little girl. And like virtually all of the prospective single mothers I spoke with, she had every intention of finding a mate after the child was born. "Taking this whole 'I have to find the father of my child' out of the equation might make it a lot more relaxed and easier," she said. "The guys are smelling it, and they run." And even if the guy held still, he might not be the one you'd pick — or even consider — if you weren't desperate for kids. "I see so many women who are in unhealthy relationships, where they really just try to get married and then have a child and break it off," Daniela said. "If they would consider this as an option, I think they would be happier, and the children would be happier."
I went to a special meeting of the New York chapter of Single Mothers by Choice a few weeks later, in mid-November. It had been arranged for members willing to have a reporter present. We met on the Upper West Side, in a long rectangular rented room whose high ceiling magnified the yelps and stomping feet of toddlers who had come with their mothers. Women contemplating single motherhood or trying to get pregnant ("thinkers" and "tryers") arrived an hour later, Karyn among them. It was her third meeting.
The mothers' discussion was mostly practical: a pretty blonde in a black T-shirt that read "Sweet and Toxic" had noticed a sign in her health club forbidding children over the age of 3 to change in opposite-sex bathrooms: what would she do in a year when her son was 3? She also wondered about teaching him how to urinate into the toilet bowl; a friend had suggested throwing Cheerios in for him to aim at. (A mother of a 4-year-old boy discouraged this practice; it might tempt him to throw other things into the toilet.) A woman trying to arrange a domestic adoption asked about nannies versus day care.
When the general meeting began, each woman in the largely white group introduced herself. Two were pregnant; another had twins; one had adopted a daughter from Haiti. One had not been able to conceive and planned to become a foster parent. Anyone walking into the room would have assumed that the women with kids had husbands or partners at home, but in three hours of discussion, the only men who were mentioned were donors, anonymous and known. These women's independence of male partners in their family-making often brings a corollary reliance on one another — for sympathy and information, for companionship (Single Mothers by Choice sponsors vacations every year for single mothers and their kids) and the chance to show their children other families like their own. At times, the relationships can become even more enmeshed: one mother I spoke with, whose twin sons were conceived using both donor eggs and donor sperm, gave her leftover frozen embryos to a friend who was having fertility problems. The friend is now pregnant with a child who will be this mother's own sons' full sibling.
While nearly every woman I spoke with had her own history of romantic near misses and crushing disappointments, most also saw advantages to proceeding on their own. "This baby will be my baby, only my baby," Karyn told me that night at Caliente Cab. "The thing I'm afraid of is that after doing this, I might not want to get married. It seems like a lot of hard work, a lot of compromise. Someone ends up short, and usually it's the mom, because by the time you get to the child and your husband and the dog, there's not much left."
After introductions, the group broke into smaller discussion groups, mothers and pregnant women at one end of the room, thinkers and tryers at the other. Among the thinkers, two women were holding off on making a decision while they looked for work — something I heard a lot. Such delays put these women in a bind, though; each month is precious in terms of fertility. "I can't stress enough how much money worries me in this process," I was told by a 35-year-old Canadian woman who will soon begin trying to get pregnant. "I'm alone; there's no safety net. If you picture it like the scales, on the one side there's my money and on the other are the years left to have children."
Karyn had moved from the thinkers group into the tryers since her last meeting. She had brought a bag of pretzels, which she shared with the others, most of whom were slightly older than she — slightly in real terms, but through the telescopic lens of a woman's fertility, the difference was vast. "Trying to get pregnant at age 41 is nothing like trying to get pregnant at age 38," a 41-year-old grimly remarked when Karyn asked if she had begun trying. "My gynecologist wouldn't even do any of the tests. She said because of my age, just go to deal with infertility, don't waste any time."
Because many single women have waited years, hoping the right man would come along, and because the majority use sperm that has been frozen, they are disproportionately at risk for fertility problems when they finally decide to have children. Many report being stunned that their fertility was so fragile. "I thought I could have kids until my period ended, and menopause is 50, right?" said another woman I met at a Single Mothers by Choice meeting in Washington, who began trying to conceive at 44. The sense of not having been informed, of being too late, is so often expressed by would-be single mothers in their 40's that it has doubtless spurred some younger women in the Single Mothers by Choice network to act more precipitously. (I interviewed two women who conceived while still in their 20's.) Still, the near-miraculous success of some older mothers can give hope — often unrealistic — to those still fighting the odds. Most doctors refused to take the 44-year-old Washington woman except as an egg-donor patient, but one did — and she became pregnant with a girl who is now almost 4. Another woman in the D.C. group went through 16 attempts and a miscarriage, using both IUI and I.V.F., before her son was finally born.
At 39, Karyn was still on the right side of this equation, but just barely. "I'm waiting for my next period to start the beginning of December," she told the older woman. "I'm about to start trying, either before or after Christmas Day."
But it didn't work out like that. A few days before Christmas, after receiving a string of e-mail messages from Karyn chronicling her march toward insemination, I found one with the subject line, "Do you believe in signs?" She had written: "Sit down, ready for this one? I arrived home from work again at 11:30 last night to be greeted by my doormen telling me how very sorry they were — a steam pipe explosion blew right through my apartment with a flood.. . .My apartment is destroyed and needs to be gutted.. . .I am taking all of the events as a sign that this is not the right month to get pregnant."
She planned to wait three months, at which point she would be weeks away from her 40th birthday.
In November, I met Daniela in her Midtown office, which has a modern industrial design and faces east into what that afternoon was a bleak gray day. As she had feared, the last insemination with her donor friend hadn't worked, and she had resigned herself to the idea of using an anonymous donor instead. She had even found two that appealed to her, both from a small Manhattan sperm bank where she would save money on shipping by picking up the samples herself and carrying them to her doctor's office. As I sat across her desk, she pulled up the donors' descriptions on her computer. One was Indian: "He's got black straight hair," she told me, "brown eyes, he's six feet but he only weighs 150. Which is good. If I have a girl, she wants to be skinny, and if she can eat what she wants, that's perfect. You don't have to get in fights about food." The Indian donor's complexion was described as "medium/dark," and he had proven fertility. He had a master's degree in business. He was bilingual, Hindu, single and liked traveling and music. His family-health history looked good.
The second donor was a mix of Chinese, Peruvian and Italian. He was olive-skinned, 5-foot-9 and weighed 169. "Thick hair, which is also nice," she said, "because if I happen to get a son, I don't like bald guys. He's Catholic, which I would obviously like, because I am. He has a very interesting book collection: he likes Hesse, Henry James, Lorca. Excellent vision. His parents are pretty boring professionally, so I was a little concerned about that. But when they started their businesses, they probably didn't have all that many chances, the father being Peruvian and the mother being Chinese-Italian." She especially liked the fact that he was a full-time student in theater. "He has creative aspirations," she said. "Those things are hereditary."
Mostly from a sense of obligation, she Googled "sperm" and began scanning lists of donors at other banks, using O-positive blood type as her first criterion. "This one is a Hispanic fair," she mused. "But Hispanics can still be very, very fair. Then we have a Dominican-Honduran, black straight hair, olive skin — he is really too heavy, 220, are you kidding me? Now here we have a Caucasian. Research assistant in psychology — no. You don't study that if you haven't touched upon it somewhere."
At the California Cryobank site, the donors numbered in the hundreds. "All those Germans," Daniela murmured, scrolling down. "How am I proving my healthiness if I do the same race again? Black African, they do have three of them. Look how tall they are. And see how heavy the two O-positives are?"
Eventually she happened on a search engine that listed donors from all of the banks without revealing which bank they were from without payment. Visibly weary as she scanned the list, she reflected: "I still like my Chinese-Peruvian-Italian. He seems a little bit more special somehow. From this little bank . . . it's like a little country. There he is. There he is! Chinese-Peruvian-Italian, full-time student!"
The sheer familiarity of the Chinese-Peruvian-Italian made him leap from the haze of anonymous data like an old friend. And that feeling counts for a lot. It's no wonder that a number of single mothers I spoke with used the phrase "I felt a connection" in explaining their choice of donors. Despite the obvious parallels between shopping for sperm and dating online, there is finally no comparing them — a sperm donor is providing half the DNA for your child, and whether or not you choose to think about it, he'll be there forever in the child's tastes and choices and personality. No one wants a decision like that to feel arbitrary.
Daniela had other news: she had met a man she was interested in. It happened during a business trip the week before; he was meeting friends in the bar of her hotel. "He was so good with his friend's kid," she said. "I'm, like, 'Oh, you must have three kids.' He said, 'No, just nieces and nephews."' They struck up a conversation, and she ended up joining his group for dinner. She was honest with him about her plans to get pregnant, but the news may not have sunk in; he had been calling ever since, eager to see her again. He was in his 40's, African-American, and had his own business. "It's nice to know that just because you have these plans, you're not unattractive or undesirable," Daniela said. She felt more at ease with this man than she had with other men in recent years and attributed this to her decision to move ahead with motherhood. "It was a completely different feeling," she said. "It empowers one, because you're not relying on somebody else. You don't have to bring up the big life conversations."
While many women, like Karyn, relish their emancipation from the grind of dating and pursue motherhood with a single mind, others are intrigued by what romance could mean, absent the imperative of finding a father for their children. One woman, a 40-year-old graduate student in biology in the Midwest, told me shortly after her first insemination: "One of the things that was so powerful about deciding to have a baby on my own was saying, I'm taking charge of this piece of it; I'm not going to wait around for a guy to give it to me. And my feelings about what I want from men right now are really changed. I don't actually want a big relationship. Now I want occasional companionship and sex."
On a recent date, between inseminations, this woman noticed the difference. "It was one of these dates where the guy's just telling you his sad story and his complicated relationship with his mother. In my previous dating life, I would have been, like, I'm not going to get seriously involved with a man like this. I'm going to get rid of him. This time I was, like, I think he's hot, so if I just keep listening, maybe eventually we'll have sex. And we had great sex. It was really hot." At one point, she had sex with two different men in the same weekend (both times using condoms) not long after an insemination. Observing her own behavior, she said: "Maybe in six months or a year I'll have more insight about it, but something radical is going on in my brain about my relationships with men. O.K., so I'm not going to keep trying to have this picket-fence-y life. I'm waving the white flag. And now I have permission to directly pursue what I want. It's a very curious and ambivalent liberation, because I would rather not be single. It's not my first choice."
Daniela told me that regardless of what happened with the new man, she was certain of one thing: she would go ahead with her plan to inseminate. "I've done the mistake of putting this on hold several times, and I cannot afford it," she said. We looked together at her November calendar on her office computer; sandwiched among coming trips and meetings were her expected days of menstruation and ovulation, noted in German. She planned to inseminate in December, so she would have to pick the donor by the end of the month. Meanwhile, the new man had proposed coming to New York in mid-December, which happened to be the time when she thought she would be ovulating. Daniela said she wouldn't feel comfortable using protection with him while she was going to a doctor's office to be inseminated. "That would be weird," she said. "But leave it up to destiny? That's a possibility, I think."
I was astonished. Had she thought through the implications of having this man's child? I asked. What if the relationship didn't last? What if she turned out not to like him at all? Daniela countered that his parents were happily married, and he had good relationships with his siblings, but what I heard in her voice was confusion. Then I recalled something she had told me in a previous conversation: "I have this big fear in my life that I never will be pregnant. You see these pregnant women on the street, and you're, like, How does it feel? What's going on in your mind, in your heart? I want to feel it!" Remembering this helped me to understand: it is hard to want something so badly and to try to prevent it.
As it turned out, he didn't visit in December. Daniela didn't inseminate, either. Her Indian donor was out of stock, and the Chinese-Peruvian-Italian's sperm was in quarantine until early January. Meanwhile, she had learned that her health insurance had a $2,000 annual cap on fertility treatments that she had already exhausted on the inseminations with her gay friend.
So it was early January when I finally met Daniela at 8 a.m. outside the Empire State Building, where her sperm bank is located, to pick up two vials of sperm from her Chinese-Peruvian-Italian donor. She had hardly slept the night before from excitement, she told me. At the bank, a nondescript lab, Daniela paid $450 and was given an 18-pound white canister with an orange "Biohazard" sticker on it. She had been there once before; her donor friend had had to go out of town and left frozen sperm for her. "You walk out on the street, and you've got the container in your hand," she said, "and then there's all these containers on two legs."
One such two-legged container was in the elevator when we got on: a workman surrounded by tools. "You're unbuttoned, you know that," Daniela said, looking at his fly.
The guy's fair skin turned crimson, and he buttoned up, grinning but avoiding her eyes.
She explained, "I think it's better that I tell you now, so you don't go through the day like that."
"If they notice, they shouldn't be looking there," he said in a strong Irish accent, smiling right at her now.
Daniela smiled back. "Are you Irish?" she asked. "I'm German. That's why I don't understand a word you're saying."
This was flirtation, right? I was still asking myself that question as we left the elevator, but I wasn't sure: what does flirtation even mean in the context of a woman hauling a canister of sperm to a doctor's office so he can inseminate her? Or, to put it another way, what's the point?
"He was a sweet kid," Daniela said briskly as we left the building and stepped onto the dusty, bacon-smelling street.
At the doctor's office, we repaired to an examining room, where Daniela's doctor, an avuncular man in wire-rimmed glasses, took a sonogram of her ovaries and uterus. "The lining looks very good," he said. "It's the proper time to do this. We'll thaw out the specimen."
In a different room, he removed a "straw" of frozen sperm from the canister of nitrogen and placed it into a tub of warm water to thaw. Most sperm banks use plastic vials nowadays, but this particular bank had stuck with an old system. The doctor left the room while the sperm was thawing, and Daniela filled me in on the new man. They hadn't seen each other since that first meeting two months ago; trips had been arranged and fallen through, often because he was short of money. Still, they were in close touch. Three days ago, she told him on the phone about the planned insemination, and his response was wary. "How do you react to dating a person that would be pregnant with somebody else?" Daniela said, paraphrasing his reaction. "Just like I am feeling completely weird carrying that bucket, it must be the same feeling for him when he meets a person like me." Yet she was hopeful that things might still work out. "If we're going to be great together," she said, laughing, "we're going to be great together with that Eurasian child."
The doctor came back and placed the straw of clear, yellowish sperm in a slim glass cylinder and removed a drop to look at under a microscope. "We have very good motility," he said. "This is a good specimen."
Daniela looked, too. "I see lots of them," she said, excited. "Last time I had to look for four."
The doctor left so Daniela could change into a gown and lie down. When he came back, he drew the yellow liquid into an oversize syringe that tapered into a skinny tube. It is hard to say what Daniela's chances of becoming pregnant would be; statistics on the success rates of IUI using frozen sperm suggest that they are between 8 and 15 percent in a given cycle. Daniela would return the next morning for a second insemination; many doctors believe that consecutive inseminations increase the chances.
Wearing a small miner's light around his head, the doctor went to work. He was done in three minutes. Daniela lifted her hand, fingers crossed, as he left the room.
A week into Daniela's two-week wait, I heard from Karyn again. She had been living in a friend's apartment for weeks while the various insurance companies haggled about how much to pay out for the damage to her apartment. Her computer had been destroyed, along with many of her possessions, including her file of medical records and donor materials. "That's one thing that made me cry," she said. "Just to see all the papers with his information and history and his picture. . .seeing it all soaked."
She had resigned from her job — the brutal hours were wearing her down — and said she believed she had other good prospects. Meanwhile, she had decided to go ahead with her insemination plan. The big day came two weeks later, in late January. Her mother went with her, and Karyn called me a few hours after, elated. The next day I received an e-mail message whose subject line read, "I think I already feel a kick :)."
Over thanksgiving vacation, I took the train to Darien, Conn., to meet Shelby Siems and her 2-year-old son, Christopher, who had driven down from their home in Marblehead, Mass. Shelby, 44, grew up in Darien and had come to visit cousins and friends over the holiday weekend. She is part of a rising number of single mothers who are having second children; when we met in Connecticut, she was four months pregnant with a second son by the same donor who sired her first. She and Christopher picked me up at the train station, and we drove to a nearby pizza restaurant that was still quiet at that midmorning hour. Shelby is fair, with long blond hair and pale blue eyes that are prone to tears. Christopher is also pale, a watchful, intelligent child with wispy reddish hair. At lunch, he said "please" and "thank you" and rolled a small green train engine over the laminated tabletop while Shelby and I talked. For a 2-year-old he was remarkably patient, but occasionally he cried, "Mama, Mama, I want to hold you."
"I'm right here," Shelby said.
Once a journalist for The Christian Science Monitor, Shelby was finishing up an M.F.A. in nonfiction. Her thesis project is a book about her experience as a single mother, an experience that has been more grueling than Daniela's or Karyn's will most likely be because Shelby has no immediate family; she was an only child of older parents who died by the time she reached her early 30's. She inherited money that has allowed her to go back to school and to support Christopher, but she is alone in the world. In Christopher's first weeks of life, there were periods of many days when they saw no one but each other.
Shelby does have a boyfriend: a 52-year-old bachelor who works at a pharmaceutical company, whom she met at a party when Christopher was a month old. "He's been a great person in my life and Christopher's life, but he's not going to marry me," she explained over the phone when we first spoke. "Some people just don't want to do that, and he's one of those people."
The fact that Shelby is in a relationship at all is unusual; the majority of mothers I spoke with — even those with older children — had remained single. Many expressed a willingness to date if the opportunity were to come along, but they work long hours to support their kids, and when they're not working, they want to see them. For all the comparisons between being divorced with children and having them alone, there are critical differences: an ex-husband who spends any time at all with his kids frees up pockets of time when a woman could potentially see someone new. Even minimal child-support payments would reduce the financial burden on her, and substantial ones could allow her to work less. Perhaps most important, a child with only one parent is immensely dependent on that parent, and the mother of such a child tends to feel her responsibility acutely. It can be painful — and expensive — to leave your child with a baby sitter after a whole day away, just to go out on a date.
Despite her age — Shelby was 42 when Christopher was born — she was determined that her son have a sibling. "He has even less of a family than I do, because he doesn't have his whole father's side of the family," she told me. "The only person he has is me." She wanted to use the same donor again and put the matter to her boyfriend, who made it clear that he wasn't interested in fatherhood. She began stocking up on the donor's sperm (most banks keep a reserve supply of each donor's sperm for women who want second children) when Christopher was still an infant. "I want my son to have a full sibling," she said. "I want to feel like he has one person in the world who is a complete blood relative after I'm gone. I did not want my son to feel deprived, that the other sibling had a father and he didn't." To be sure that there was no chance the child would be his, Shelby and her boyfriend were celibate for the year it took her to conceive, which she finally did at 43, after eight tries, using I.V.F.
The fact that a child born of an anonymous donor knows only half his biological family concerns single mothers with more robust families than Shelby's, too. The Donor Sibling Registry, a Web site where families can register children conceived by donor insemination in hopes of being matched with half-siblings or even the donor himself, has proved a boon for many single mothers. The site's founder, Wendy Kramer, estimates that the majority of the 7,400 registered members are single. Recent publicity has prompted a jump in the registry's membership and matches — more than 1,500 have been made so far, not just among half-siblings but also among sperm (and egg) donors, 320 of whom are registered on the site, and their progeny.
Q., the former yeshiva student who ended up choosing the 6-foot-2 German rugby player as her donor, developed severe hypertension during her pregnancy and had to be hospitalized several times. Her symptoms lingered even after her daughter was born, and she became preoccupied with what would happen to the baby girl if she were to die. Her brother and a sister are selfish, she says, and her mother is elderly. Last fall, she went to the Donor Sibling Registry and got a shock: the Aryan bodybuilder with the leaping sperm has fathered 21 children (and counting — he is still an active donor), including four sets of twins. These children are all 3 and under, and their families — four lesbian couples, three heterosexual couples and six single mothers — have formed their own Listserv, where photographs of the children (all blond, with a strong familial resemblance) are posted, and daily e-mail messages are exchanged about birthdays, toilet training and the like. They are planning a group vacation in 2007. "I was elated," Q. told me. "To quote the granny on 'The Beverly Hillbillies,' I wanted her to have kin. Now here's kin that look like her; that're in her same age range. I even thought that if I get to know somebody really well from this group, maybe I would pick one of these other mothers, if they would be interested, to be designated as a guardian for my daughter."
Q. is one of several people in the group with a keen desire to meet her donor one day. And they aren't sitting idle; one woman had magnified his baby picture, in which the donor is blowing out candles on his birthday cake, to the point at which a first name may be legible. Another mother has a hunch about the donor's provenance based on the way he pronounced certain words on his audiotape. At the Washington Single Mothers by Choice meeting, I met a woman who had easily identified the donor for her 9-month-old son using Google. "The person left specific enough information for me to just type in those words and click," she told the group. "But what to do with that information? I'm bound to keep him anonymous as per the contract, but what about when my son says: 'What do you know? Tell me anything about my dad."'
When we'd finished our pizza and salad, Shelby drove to a playground. The brightly colored equipment was empty in the frigid cold, but Christopher bounced in his car seat. "Slides!" he cried.
He bounded out of the car, refusing mittens, and commenced to climb, panting plumes of steam. Whenever he was in earshot, Shelby spelled out the word D-A-D; lately Christopher had become fixated on the idea of a daddy. "He goes to a day care, and he's the only child of a single mother in his class. I think they spend a lot of time talking about Daddy," she told me. Christopher had referred to a neighbor as Daddy, as well as Regis Philbin. "Interestingly, he doesn't call my boyfriend Daddy; he's 'mamma's friend.' The other day, I said, 'Someone special's coming to see you today — do you know who it is?' I expected him to say [her boyfriend's name]. But he said, 'Daddy?"' The single mothers by choice I spoke with generally hold that the story of their children's origins should be told to them from the time of birth, long before the child is old enough to understand it. But Shelby feels that at 2, Christopher is too young to hear that he doesn't have a father.
Shelby's son is part of a population of kids that is only now beginning to be studied, though a 1992 survey of teenagers raised by single mothers found that they experienced markedly fewer adolescent problems than children of divorce. A continuing study of a group of children in England, now 2, who were conceived by single women using donor sperm concludes that so far they are healthy and well adjusted. But the long-term questions of how these children will fare or about the different experiences of girls and boys have yet to be answered.
As we watched Christopher tear around the playground, Shelby reflected on her occasional frustration at the distance her boyfriend maintains from her family. Over Christmas, he would be leaving town for two weeks to visit his family, and Shelby and Christopher would spend the holiday alone. They had no plans, and Shelby felt pressure to make Christmas festive for her son. "On the other hand," she said of her boyfriend, "he's still attracted to me physically through all my body changes, and he and Christopher are so fond of each other. They have a very sweet relationship." Her boyfriend usually visits on Sunday mornings. "A huge wave of relief comes over me," Shelby said. She can relax or do dishes or take a nap. "I feel, like, Wow, this must be what it's like to have a husband every day of the year. I can do my own thing, but I love to just stand across the room and watch them together."
When I next spoke to Daniela, in late January at the end of her two-week wait, she was on a business trip. Her voice sounded weak and tired. She had just gotten her period. And the new man had finally made it to New York, but the visit had been a disaster. "I guess it has to do with the fact that I'm going through this," she said. "You kind of protect yourself. He was saying he was one of these what he calls old-fashioned guys: if his wife is going to have a child, he's going to be in the waiting room until the child is delivered and washed. I'm, like, wait a second. Don't you think you should go through this together? He said, 'No, I'm going to faint, and I'm going to throw up."'
His visit to New York was supposedly a business trip, but in the end he didn't have much to do. "He's not cut out to be a provider, to be a protector or to be a patriarch," Daniela said. "He can't be there when the child is born; he can't make the living for the family. Maybe what bothered him is that he couldn't offer what he would like to offer. So he made it, like, taste bad."
I had never heard her so low. "Everything is so hard, and it's so degrading," she said. "You always think that you'd go through this with somebody that would support you. You don't think about having all the problems, let alone doing it on your own."
I was humbled by the grueling ordeals many women had undergone on their paths to single motherhood: years of trying to conceive, hormone treatments, hospitalizations, miscarriages, untold thousands of dollars spent — all without a partner to buffer the strains and disappointments. And being a single parent is no easier: whether it's a matter of trying to get a photo taken of you with your child or finding a way to shower without worrying that you won't hear your baby cry or accommodating a difficult work schedule, being a single parent can require compromises and jury-rigging that might awe a person with a partner. A longtime employee of New Jersey Transit spent a year working the 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. shift, which meant waking her daughter at 4 and walking her across the street in her pajamas to a neighbor's house. Her daughter slept on the sofa until the neighbor woke her and took her to school with her own children. "It's probably harder than you ever think it's going to be," this mother told me. After a moment, she added, "My only regret is that I didn't do it sooner." It is a measure of how deep the pull toward motherhood can be that thousands of women from many different walks of life are making this choice, using reproductive and communications technology in ways that not only break with tradition but also make it seem obsolete.
Daniela did another insemination in early February, this time mingling the sperm of her Chinese-Peruvian-Italian with another donor from the same bank who had proven fertility. It didn't work. Neither did Karyn's first try. When I spoke with her early this month, she was preparing to move back into her apartment, whose renovation would soon be complete. There was still one last chance to become pregnant before her 40th birthday in April. "In a perfect world, I'll get pregnant this cycle," she told me. "I'll start working the first week of April before I'm officially really pregnant, and we'll live happily ever after."
When I spoke to Daniela a couple of weeks ago, she had recovered from her disappointments and had just been inseminated again with the sperm of a French-English-German-Scandinavian attorney with proven fertility. She had also struck up an e-mail correspondence with another woman on the Single Mothers by Choice Listserv. They had met for a drink and hit it off, and Daniela planned to go with her to a Single Mothers by Choice meeting. She seemed reconciled to the fact that it might take a while to become pregnant, but she was no less determined. Her fellow would-be single mother is 36, Daniela told me, but her situation is complicated by a boyfriend who has children.
"Why don't you tell him you've got some kids, too?" Daniela recalled suggesting to her friend. "They're just not born yet."
Jennifer Egan last wrote for the magazine about online dating. Her new novel, "The Keep," will be published in August.
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