No more children

I don't know why my great-grandmother Leta had only two children and only with her first husband, particularly as she was a person with an obviously strong sexual appetite. During the 1920s and 30s, while she was in her twenties and thirties, she had four husbands and a number of trysts. Never becoming pregnant is quite surprising. The family myth is that she barely took care of the two she had, although my research into that history has proved that belief to be somewhat of a fallacy. Perhaps her own physiology decided that two were sufficient. Perhaps she did become pregnant and terminated the pregnancy. Perhaps she was quite skilled at practicing the “rhythm method” of birth control, by paying the strictest attention to her cycle and abstaining when her chances of becoming pregnant were at their peak.

I am most surprised that she did not have any children with her second husband Albert Mohr. First, he seemed very compatible to her. After all, by divorcing her first husband in 1922, she took a tremendous life-risk for a woman with children. Then, only three weeks after the divorce married Albert. She must have been crazy in love with him. And I may be making this up, but I find it hard to accept that they didn’t want children together. She was only 28 and he 37 when they married. Plus, he had no children of his own. Yet they didn’t. Perhaps they were trying, and he was murdered before they conceived.

As noted in a previous blog, there are many reasons that women can be infertile, so I have considered that perhaps she acquired Chlamydia from one of her sexual experiences. However, there are more serious repercussions of this illness than infertility, and this was before the common use of penicillin to treat STDs. To my knowledge, she never suffered from any of the corresponding health difficulties.

I do know that her daughter/my grandmother Vivian struggled with childbearing. She had complications delivering her first child—my dad—in 1939. Although he was breech, she did not have him Caesarean section. After he was born, she had several miscarriages and eventually believed she would no longer conceive. However, 12 years after the birth of my father, she had another child, and two years later a third. Becoming pregnant with my uncle was a huge surprise, but there he was. She was 37 years old.

However, Leta had only the two children in her first marriage.

As I fictionally re-create her life, this leaves me in a little bit of a quandary. First, I wonder if her lack of pregnancy is even an issue? Do I need to bring it into the story at all?

On the other hand, I am very attached to the notion of her wanting to conceive with Albert, her second husband. Such a complication helps focus her personality and the choices she made over the following, barfly years.

Second, do I need to provide any detail about it? Can’t she just live her life, enjoying or not, such as it was, as a sexually active woman who simply never got pregnant again and never much noticed that she didn’t?

It seems to me that I still need to research this one. It would be easier if her sexual liberation occurred after 1960, when the Pill became the primary form of birth control for women. But we’re talking the 1920s and 30s here, so that option is out.

And so I’ll continue puzzling it out until the right answer presents itself.