Secret Daughter: A Novel

Secret Daughter: A Novel

She slips into the hallway, but rather than stopping at the bathroom, she keeps walking right through the front door, getting tangled in the blue balloons as she runs past them and down the driveway. She sits down on the street curb. She cannot face it all again. She can’t go through the baby food tasting contest, or the “guess how big Gabi’s tummy is” game. She can’t watch every one oohing and ahhing over each darling little outfit. She can’t listen to the women discussing stretch marks and labor pains as rites of passage. Everyone acts as if being a woman and a mother are inextricably intertwined. A fair assumption, since she made it herself. Only now does she know it’s an enormous lie.

And then Somer realizes that there has been a line drawn. For her, it was the miscarriage that she had suffered. A moment where she and her husband Krishnan had realized that life may not play the way they thought it would.

Now, sitting alone on a suburban sidewalk instead of drinking blue punch, Somer knows that day, three years ago, has become the dividing line of her life. Before that miscarriage, she remembers being happy – with her work, the house with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, the friends they saw on weekends. It seemed enough. But since that day, she has felt as if something is missing, something so immense and powerful that it overwhelms everything else. With each passing year and every negative pregnancy test, that void in their lives has grown until it has become an unwelcome member of their family, wedging itself between her and Krishnan.

Sometimes she wishes she could return to the naïve happiness of their earlier life. But mostly, she aches to go forward, to a place her body doesn’t seem willing to take her.

I was a huge fan of this book. The infertility and adoption mixed with cultural aspects of life abroad (India) kept me reading cover-to-cover. If you are dealing with intense infertility, this might be a bit too painful for you to deal with right now.