A valuable frontline story of interest to anyone considering intended parenthood.
A soul-baring story of the emotional aspects of being an intended parent in a surrogate pregnancy.
Fibroids, and the surgery to remove them, left Rapley infertile, with a scarred uterus and fallopian tubes. Things looked grim, writes Rapley in unadorned prose that gives her circumstance a particularly vulnerable quality, until her brother’s wife, Victoria, volunteers to be the “oven” for Rapley’s fertilized eggs. While Rapley acknowledges that a surrogate pregnancy is difficult for everyone involved, she discovers that while there are plenty of stories told from the surrogate’s perspective, there is little information on what it is like to spend nine months as an intended parent. Understandably, Rapley is flooded with concern: Since she can’t actually feel the growth of her boys within her, she experiences an overwhelming desire to be by Victoria’s side each day. To her abiding credit, she gives Victoria room to breathe (and to vomit for weeks on end as she suffers pre-term labor). Despite the distance that separates the two women–Rapley lives in New Jersey and Victoria lives in California–Rapley flies back and forth for doctor’s visits and tests that seem designed to scare her to death. Each week she details the whirlwind of emotions she feels and the difficulty of not being with the fetuses. Rapley might well have been pregnant herself; her roller coaster emotions are not unlike those triggered by the hormonal imbalance of pregnancy. What a pleasure it is, then, when she is presented with her twin boys. Now she can really start worrying.
A valuable frontline story of interest to anyone considering intended parenthood.Pub Date: July 22, 2005
ISBN: 0-595-35528-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
In traditional Jewish ritual, men are usually the primary subjects or objects: They are circumcised, they take a woman in marriage, they say kaddish over the death of a loved one. Recently, Jewish women have been plumbing the tradition in an attempt to become the subjects of their own ritual lives. Bat mitzvahs were only the beginning: In recent years, Jewish women have created new, or revised, ceremonies to mark all the joyous, and sad, transitions in their lives, from birth to becoming a parent to aging. Here, Rabbi Orenstein, who teaches at the Univ. of Judaism, provides a compendium of these rituals. Rabbi Einat Ramon explains how she and her husband, also a rabbi, wrote an egalitarian ketubbah, or marriage contract. Rabbi Amy Eilberg adapts traditional mourning ceremonies to mark the grief of a miscarriage. Barbara D. Holender offers a ceremony on turning 65. A useful resource for the paradoxically ever-evolving tradition of Judaism.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-879045-14-1
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Jewish Lights
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
Still, American moms of the post-Kennedy era will recognize—and even admire—themselves here.
A memoir of a woman in progress, this volume describes the 20 years spent raising two sons to be sensitive, responsible, independent—and, hopefully, to pick up their socks.
"Do you mistake me for June Cleaver?'' says Blakely (Wake Me When It's Over, 1989) with heavy irony to a member of the adolescent male pack that moved in and out of her house chomping on Oreos as her sons were growing up. Not a chance. In these reflections, Blakely often mirrors the experiences of middle-class women who were reinventing themselves and their roles during the feminist wave of the 1970s and '80s. Married, working first simply to bring in money and then to build a career (as a writer and lecturer), divorced, strategizing as a single mother (never kite checks on the grocer, advised a more experienced friend), Blakely early on refuses to accept the burden that mothers are solely responsible for the behavior of their children. "Even if I had managed to prevent my sons' exposure to sexist or violent images at home, I could not have prevented encounters [in]...locker rooms...movies...newsstands that displayed women as cheesecake every day,'' she says. Among the best chapters is the dramatic recounting of Blakely's own mother's metaphorical shock treatments at the hands of the psychiatric establishment as she sought help for her manic-depressive son, Blakely's brother. Also thought-provoking are telling discussions of the economic and societal obstacles facing single (or would-be-single) mothers and surprisingly empathetic observations about the surge of physical power in the adolescent male. Yet Blakely frequently refers to her sons as "jocks,'' to many, a term as derogatory as "airheads'' would be for daughters. Parallel to that, she seems to regard sports as a male prerogative—a serious lapse of the feminist consciousness she eloquently espouses.
Still, American moms of the post-Kennedy era will recognize—and even admire—themselves here.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-56512-052-3
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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