This is a Mother’s Day tale about four incredibly close mothers who for years were terrified they might never receive a Mother’s Day card.
Let’s start with Nancy Brown of Stow.
In the 1990s, Nancy was living what appeared to be a charmed life: She was healthy, bright and pretty, ran her own business, had a solid marriage and a nice house in Stow.
But the thing she wanted more than anything else in the world was eluding her. She had tried for nine years to have a baby, attempting every medical technique known to modern science. And those repeated failures were casting a dark shadow over everything else she did.
There are millions of Nancy Browns out there. Our Nancy encountered some of them on the Internet, where she went in search of advice and solace. She hooked up electronically with people all over the world.
One day in 1996, after entering a news group called “alt.infertility,” she saw a lament from “Ursula in Ohio.” So “Nancy in Ohio” typed back immediately, asked Ursula where in Ohio she lived, and discovered that Ursula was sitting at a keyboard 3 miles from Nancy’s house.
They met for coffee and quickly became partners in misery. Nancy took Ursula to a local support group, where she met others in the same straits.
Just a couple of generations ago, these women could have done little more than commiserate. But in 1978, in England, the first “test-tube baby” was born. Three years later, another was born in the United States. Today, that technique — and a number of other fertility approaches — are in wide use in Northeast Ohio, with dramatically higher success rates than when these women first met.
Today, a female under 40 reportedly has a 40 percent chance of conceiving on the first attempt at in vitro fertilization. IVF is expensive, though — about $12,000 per attempt — and is rarely covered fully by insurance.
Another method, combining fertility drugs with artificial insemination, or IUI, costs about $500 to $1,000 per cycle, but its monthly success rate is only 12 to 15 percent.
Half of our foursome used IVF, half used IUI.
But this is not a story about science or medicine. It’s a love story, one first told by your favorite columnist in a Beacon Magazine article in May 2000 — and ripe for an update.
Kids are thriving
Nancy, Ursula Apaestegui and the two other women, Marianne Marusiak of Cuyahoga Falls and Suzanne Raber of Seville, all succeeded. Did they ever: During a 21-month period near the end of the millennium — after a collective 22 years of infertility — they gave birth to 10 children.
Four of those kids are graduating from high school this spring.
Their lives, and their mothers’, have been quite normal. The kids have done well in school, earned driver’s licenses, chosen colleges, gathered plenty of friends.
But the pain of long-term infertility still haunts the moms, and each year the approach of Mother’s Day reminds them how much they used to dread the second Sunday in May.
They struggled with the contrast between their lives and most of the rest of society. Suzanne noticed it in church, where “everything is about children.”
Nancy so disliked the tone of TV commercials that she would record her favorite shows and fast-forward through the commercials “because everything is sold with babies. I wanted to go to advertisers and say, ‘Don’t you realize people without children buy peanut butter and insurance and tires?’
“It made me feel like the message was, ‘You aren’t part of society. There’s something wrong with you.’ ”
But get a load of this: Just as they did when I interviewed them 16 years ago, these women insist that, even if their quest for kids had failed, their suffering would have been worth it because their troubled journeys led them to each other.
For almost two decades, Nancy, Ursula, Suzanne and Marianne have cried together, prayed together and, for most of the last 18 years, rejoiced together.
Although they don’t get together as often — “I still feel the same connection as before, but we can’t make it happen because life is too busy,” says Ursula — they remain tighter than a rusted bolt, which was evident when the four gathered Monday evening in the lobby of a Fairlawn hotel.
“We’re sisters,” says Nancy. “I still share things with them I don’t share with anybody.”
There are inside jokes about somebody’s socks still being in somebody else’s night stand, about somebody using somebody else’s lipstick. The laughter comes quickly and in gales. They finish each other’s sentences.
Big changes
Since the women first met, both Nancy and Suzanne have divorced and remarried. Marianne, a financial analyst in Hudson, is celebrating her 21st anniversary this year, and Ursula, a middle-school Spanish and French teacher in Orange, her 25th.
Three of the women had additional kids without taking special measures — as Nancy puts it, they did it “the fun, easy, cheap way.”
No, it wasn’t an issue of them finally “relaxing.” That’s an urban myth. Experts say natural conceptions usually happen because of physical changes that occur during a first pregnancy.
The only woman who didn’t have an unassisted second pregnancy, Marianne, chimes in with this: “Luckily, I had a ‘buy one, get one free’ with the twins.”
Being overprotective
They can joke about it now. But the effects of their ordeals live on. Predictably, given their difficulty in conceiving, all but one of them fight an ongoing battle against being overprotective.
Suzanne, a teacher at Cloverleaf, quickly fesses up: “I was very overprotective, and I’m slightly worse now, because I have teenagers. I worry a lot about the driving, the going to college next year … .”
Says Marianne, laughing: “I guess I’ve been a helicopter mom. My son told me yesterday that he’s not 4 and he doesn’t have to tell me what he ate for lunch.”
As the others immediately note, Marianne was shunned after making a rookie mistake during her daughter’s freshman year at Cuyahoga Falls High. Abby, now 17, is a majorette in the marching band. On a hot day, Mom went dashing out onto the field with a bottle of cold water.
“I didn’t even understand what I was doing wrong until later that evening, when she wasn’t talking to me,” Marianne says as the others howl with laughter.
Get this foursome talking about post-child Mother’s Days and you’ll witness both laughter and misty eyes, the latter triggered by sentimental joy and talk of how quickly the years pass.
You’ll hear tales of sincere but misguided Mother’s Day breakfasts (a plate of Hershey’s Kisses atop dollops of whipped cream, drizzled with chocolate syrup), cute homemade cards and puppet shows staged at the foot of the bed.
Passing it on
“One year my mom had died,” says Nancy, who runs her own dog-sitting business, Double Dog Day Care in Stow. “When she was sick and in the hospital, I got her a stuffed lamb. She held that all the time.
“Later, when we went to visit her grave, I got this other little lamb and put it there. Carter was 4, and he wanted to keep the little lamb. I said, ‘Well you have to ask Grandma if it’s OK.’ So he gets on his hands and knees [and yells into the ground], GRAND-MA! CAN I HAVE THIS LAMB?’ And he turns his head and says, ‘She says yes.’
“So I had this lamb she’d had and this little baby lamb, and on Mother’s Day, Brady [then 3] gets the big lamb and the little lamb and says (pretending to be the lamb), ‘Hi! I’m here to remind you of your mother on Mother’s Day.’ ”
The generations roll on. The history and the love spill across the years.
If you’re lucky.
Not every family is. About 10 to 12 percent of U.S. couples trying to conceive encounter trouble. Sometimes you have to go to Plan B, and Plan C, and Plan D. And sometimes it just doesn’t happen.
These four women combined relentless determination with luck. And now they have experienced “the surprising depth of emotion you feel [for your child],” as Ursula says. “That goes for any parent, whether you’ve struggled to get pregnant or not. I think it kind of knocks you over.”
Yes, it does. And on a day like this, those of us who have felt that amazing force should remind ourselves to never take it for granted.
Bob Dyer can be reached at 330-996-3580 or bdyer@thebeaconjournal.com. He also is on Facebook at www.facebook.com/bob.dyer.31