I just read Peggy Orenstein’s essay in this Sunday’s, The Way We Live Now section of The New York Times magazine called, “Stress Test, Why Americans want to believe that our mental states can control our physical maladies.”
Orenstein says, “I suspect women today may be particularly vulnerable to placing the locus of illness in their heads rather than their bodies. In part that’s because the causes of the ailments we’re prone to-reproductive cancers, arthritis, fibromyalgia-are often mysterious in origin. But it may also be an artifact of our rapid and and successful social progress. We of the postfeminist generation grew up being told we could do anything, be anything, if we just put our minds to it. Yet, if we have the power to create our own fates, wouldn’t the corollary be that we’re also responsible for our own misfortunes?”
Those few lines stopped me in my tracks. Yes Peggy, I wanted to ask…all these years I’ve wondered what I’d done wrong to make my body attack itself, to wage a war on my own cells and stop my pancreas from producing insulin. My dad was a big follower of the mind-body connection and used to tell me to imagine my white blood cells as polar bears fighting off the sickness. There were no cold medications in our house, no tylenol or advil, no prescription drugs, and when my mother got sick, she retreated to the couch and was, “fighting something” as if she had the ability to simply will her cold away. Like a child of divorce, I wondered all these years what I had done to cause the damage in my body, what had I done to make my body stop working? Because when someone asked me how and why I got diabetes, I still have no clear answers.
I remember one afternoon when I was pregnant with my first son and working in retail an older woman came up to me to admire my pregnant belly. She was shopping for shoes and we chatted while she browsed. She eventually told me she never had any children of her own.
“It wasn’t meant to be,” she said. “I wasn’t meant to be a mother.” She went on to explain that she had tried to get pregnant and was never successful and with an unblinking stare, that it was simply not meant to be.
When she walked away I was overflowing with fury. Not meant to be had nothing to do with it! If I had followed that advice, I would never have gotten pregnant. I took fertility treatments to get pregnant with my oldest son, and a team of doctors to lead me through the nine months of pregnancy. I stood there silent, knowing there was nothing I could say, she was a customer after all, and they were always right.
I realized later that this older woman must have talked herself into believing in the mind-body connection to explain away her infertility during a time when infertility treatments were not what they are today. She was not of the postfeminst generation who was raised believing she could do anything, so in the end, she stopped trying to be a mother. I am a woman who was raised to believe I could do anything even after I was diagnosed with a chronic illness. With a chronic illness, I was taught to believe that I could do anything I set my mind to, including motherhood.
And even though there are still no concrete answers about where my disease came from, I’ll agree with Peggy’s answer, it was just bad luck.
