Authors: Elisabeth Rohm
We can all rewrite the script that says we are less because we have a medical problem. We can say, “We are not less. We can be more, by lending a hand to everyone else who feels like less.” By telling the secret.
Not only can we gain courage and strength from each other, but we can spread the word that science can
help you
if you can't have a baby, and that in turn can help science make even greater strides, get more funding, achieve more in the best interests of human life. There are ways to get your body to respond. I'm so grateful for the medical advancements that allowed me to have Easton that now, I'm finally ready to scream it from the rooftops: “Medical advancements gave me a miracle baby! Thank you, God!”
But I can't be the only one screaming; not if we really want the situation to change, so that infertility isn't a secret anymore and every woman knows exactly what her options are if she's having trouble having a baby. And I have a solution.
I believe women in Hollywood can lead the charge because we are the classic example of women with demanding careers who often wait until later to have our babies.
Consider the women in Hollywood and beyond who have become mothers at thirty-five or older: Nicole Kidman, Halle Berry, Julia Roberts, Helena Bonham Carter, Mariah Carey, Salma Hayek, Jennifer Connelly, Toni Collette, Felicity Huffman, Penelope Cruz, Meryl Streep, Angela Bassett, Elisabeth Banks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Emma Thompson, Annette Bening, Alyssa Milano, Selma Blair, Victoria Beckham, Christina Applegate, Jane Seymour, Naomi Watts, Helen Hunt, Lisa Marie Presley, Julianna Margulies, Marcia Cross, Diana Krall, Brooke Shields, Jennifer Lopez, Mariska Hargitay, Holly
Hunter, Courteney Cox, Geena Davis, Julianne Moore, Mimi Rogers, Marcia Gay Harden, Madonna, Jerry Hall, Susan Sarandon, Gillian Anderson, and the list goes on. And they aren't just actresses and musicians. TV journalist Nancy Grace, former Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies, choreographer Arlene Phillips, supermodels Iman and Cheryl Tiegs, authors J. K. Rowling and Helen Fielding. It's an impressive list, and there are many others I haven't mentioned.
I like that women can have babies later in life. I believe we can have it all and should have it all, and I believe we deserve to have the time for all those experiences. I believe we have the right to wait for Mr. or Ms. Right, not Mr. or Ms. Right Now. We should be able to have our great adventures, climb our mountains, find true love, refuse to settle on anything other than a marriage that is deep and true and lasting. But we need time to do and discover and figure out all these things. We need time to grow up enough to feel like we can do a good job at being somebody's mother. For many women, more now than ever in history, it just makes sense to have a baby a little bit later.
We are also part of a different generation of women than our mothers were. It's not just that we are too busy to have a baby until thirty-eight or forty or forty-two because we are too busy accomplishing other things. It's also that we are a generation who no longer
has
to get married to be financially solvent. We know for a fact that we don't have to get married to have value. We value
ourselves.
This is a big part of why women wait to get married. We believe in
love.
We believe we deserve love, and we believe we can be defined by the insistence on a truer love than any created by society for social acceptance. It's not just that we were all so busy having our fabulous careers. We were busy having
lives.
Unfortunately, fertility declines precipitously after age thirty-five. How do I know this? Because my doctor told me so. Women (and men) have knocked around the phrase “The clock is ticking!” for
decades, and it's a clever little statement, but what does it mean? When people say this, they are usually talking about the longing for a baby. Even when they say “biological clock,” they usually mean the woman wants to get married and be a mother. We don't often think about the biological reality of that metaphorical clock: that with every period, your eggs are washing away, whether you consciously consider that it's time to have a baby or not. Tick, tick, tick. If you wait, you're probably going to have some issues. It's just how nature works. You're born with all the eggs you're ever going to have, so the older you are, the older your eggs are, and if you spend a couple of decades making movies, or climbing mountains, or slaying dragons, or finding the one who deserves you, well, your eggs aren't getting any younger. They are diminishing with every hour, every day, every year. And that is so unfair.
It's unfair that having the journey we want and need to have does not correspond mathematically or biologically with our bodies. It's unfair to discover, like the woman I met the other day in the waiting room at the gynecologist, that it's already too late. This woman overheard me telling a friend that I was writing this book, and she said, “Oh God, I wish someone had done that before I waited to discover I was infertile at thirty-nine and that it would be practically impossible for me to have a baby naturally. It never crossed my mind that I was running out of time. Nobody ever even suggested this to me. And now it's too late.”
I had dinner the other night with an older actress who admitted to me that by the time she got around to thinking about kids in her early forties, it was too late. She missed her opportunity because she was so busy traveling the world and doing all the things she wanted to do that she ran out of time. “I never even thought about it,” she said. Now, at sixty, she looks back wistfully on what might have been.
But
. . . what about all those actresses who
did
have a baby later in life? Considering how many of them had twins or had babies when they were over forty years old, I'm sorry but you cannot tell me that they all did it naturally, without IVF or artificial insemination or egg donors or the use of a surrogate. It defies the odds. I don't care how healthy you are or how gorgeous and young you look. You can't fool nature, and even if you look twenty-three on the outside, if you are forty-three on the inside, your eggs are forty-three, too. I'm not pointing any fingers, but I know for a fact that many, many more women in Hollywood are doing IVF than are admitting it to the public. The truth is that the clock is always ticking. A human body is a human body, and the fact that you've been in a movie or that you are a rock star cannot change that. Being famous doesn't imbue you with any magical powers of fertility.
So why aren't more of these women talking? Infertility, especially in Hollywood, is definitely a dirty little secret, but withholding only the inconvenient parts of your story is a lie. When a woman in the public eye flaunts her pregnant belly in the dailies like she's a paragon of womanhood, when she goes on talk shows in chic maternity garb and talks all about how much she loves being pregnant or parades around with her perfect new baby and leaves out the major detail that she did not in fact conceive naturally but had to do IVF, I believe that is a sin of omission. It is a lie, and it hurts women.
The reason I believe most people hide the fact that they have trouble conceiving is very simple: it suggests you are getting older. There is a cult of youth in Hollywood, and many actresses are unwilling to let it be known that they are no longer in their twenties. I think this is also the reason why so many people in Hollywood are secretive about all the little procedures we do to stay looking as young as possible. People get their lips plumped and their cellulite sucked and they pop
pills to lose weight faster. Then they walk around like they were born that way. Pretending you are younger than you are can feel like a necessary career move, and part of that pretending involves those clandestine rendezvous with the Botox needle or the surgical knife as well as the fertility doctor.
People tend to think this is all about vanity, but it's actually career oriented. There is a large group of actresses in Hollywood who are eternally thirty because that makes them available for a certain kind of role. Looking young can be a business decision. Turning forty can be sexy and cool, and so can turning fifty, but once you do it, there is no going back. As an actress in Hollywood, how long you can stay eternally thirty will determine certain aspects of your artistic career. It can increase your professional longevity, so that when you turn fifty, you still look forty.
This is the reality, and those of us in the business have to work with it. If being a working artist gives you happiness, then what's wrong with doing what you need to do to keep that going for as long as you can? Nothing, I say. When I was in my twenties and early thirties, it wasn't an issue. I looked young, and I didn't give it a thought. But as I've gotten older, I've come to understand that the journey we take as actresses has its time limit. Movies that feature older women, like
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
and
The Last Station,
wonderful as they are, are few and far between. So there comes a time when you ask yourself,
Should I just be me and roll with it because I'm a good artist, or should I sustain a period in my life during which there will be more opportunities?
That's why so many celebrities look the way they do. The stakes are high, and I understand why plastic surgery becomes part of the arsenal. I just think it doesn't have to be a secret. Everybody's clock is ticking and everybody with years of career experience behind them is getting older, so what are we talking about here? People in Hollywood
get nipped and tucked and sliced up and rearranged all the time. If you look at a movie star or a pop singer or a supermodel with beautiful, firm, taut breasts and a tiny waist and thighs without a dimple on them, and you feel less good about yourself because your breasts and waist and thighs don't look like that, don't be fooled, please. She's making strategic career decisions in constructing her body to look like that. Or she's just really youngâbut she won't be young forever.
I get it. I feel the pressure, too. For example, people always talk about my “beautiful” skin, and while some of that is a matter of good genetics and sunscreen, Botox helps, and I don't hesitate to use it. I'm not totally comfortable with the idea of plastic surgery (although I reserve the right to change my mind someday), but Botox seems a lot less invasive to me, so why the heck not? If someone came up to me and said, “Hey, Lis, you've got a few wrinkles going on there on your forehead,” I'd be like, “Hey, thanks! I'll be right back!”
I'm not in my twenties anymore, and I don't pretend to be. That's not why I've done Botox. I want to look good, and I want to keep working, so this is one of the things I do, along with working out and eating healthy food.
I am a firm believer that there is
nothing wrong
with having work done on yourself, if that's important to you. Hey, your body is your temple. It's your business what you do with it. When the time is right, I may get a knee lift or a butt lift or an ego boost or whatever it takes. I'm not sure I will, but as an actress, I have to think about how long I want to look thirty, and so do we all. So I understand the hesitation to admit things like Botox and not to mention things like IVF. Although I was younger when I had my fertility issues, many women are well into their thirties or even their forties, and they don't necessarily want that broadcast around town.
But the problem is that people look up to celebrities and sometimes base major life decisions on what their favorite movie or TV
stars, musicians, writers, or other public figures doâor what they think they do. They don't think about how women keep their beauty and fertility secrets to maintain their careers. Many people take what they hear at face value. They don't realize that those in the public eye tend to pick and choose what they tell. Instead, the public tends to hang on to bits of information like they contain the key to all happiness. They hang on to a photograph of two movie stars going to dinner and they stare at it and show their friends and get all excited about how this might be the greatest love story in the world. They hang pictures of great bodies and perfect hair and youthful faces on their refrigerators to inspire them. They want something to aspire to, and that's great, but my point is that it takes two to tango. Celebrities may suggest the lie, but their fans are eager to believe it. I'm not immune on either count. I project an image, sometimes in spite of myself, and I find myself believing the images that the people I admire project, too.
It's fun to believe in perfection. There's nothing wrong with that. But people in the public eye may forget the ramifications of perpetuating the myth of their fairy tale existenceâthe steamy romance, the beautiful wedding, the handsome couple, the cherubic babies, and a long distinguished career full of movies with power and a message. When everything looks perfect, you feel blessed. You feel blessed to have that body, that face, that husband, that baby, that career, those fans, so you tell the good stuff. You encourage people to believe in the good stuff. Of course you do.
But that leads to
not
telling the bad stuff. There are celebrities out there who are at their most famous while they are going bankrupt. There are prominent public figures who publish photos from their fairy-tale weddings who are already filing for divorce. There are stars who have the most radiant smiles and are suffering from depression. And there are women with babies in their bellies or beautiful toddlers
in their arms who paid tens of thousands of dollars to get them, and who don't want you to know it. Trust me, it's all happening. What you read in the magazines or see on the entertainment networks is far from the whole truth.
The fine print is that when the fairy tale hurts people, it goes too far. If you are over thirty-five and you are pregnant and you did IVF or some other fertility treatment, and people actually believe you are having your baby naturally and without effort, that misinformation is powerfulâmaybe even more powerful than you realize. Women in Hollywood don't roll out of bed looking dewy and coiffed and eternally youthful, I'm sorry to say (oh that it were so!), and women in Hollywood don't stay fertile until menopause, either. The more we pretend to have achieved perfection, the more people will suffer the slings and arrows of the fantasy.