Childless in her early forties, time was running out for Arnelle Kendall to have the baby she desperately wanted. Her work as a public relations executive required that she travel internationally much of the year, leaving little time for romance. In this memoir, Arnelle describes the long and often painful path to her daughter's birth-a path she says that was strewn with more obstacles than a mountain road after an avalanche. A Tale of Two Continents describes the many hurdles that Arnelle overcame to be a mother. A health scare added urgency to her wish and narrowed the timetable, and a life-threatening illness from twenty years earlier made pregnancy hazardous. Defying the danger, she decided to have a baby through in vitro fertilization. What followed was a heroic, painful, and numbingly discouraging ordeal that involved a series of trips from her home in South Florida to her native Johannesburg, South Africa, to become impregnated. Tragedy struck along the way, but Arnelle finally prevailed; she is now the mother of a bright, little girl. A story of perseverance, A Tale of Two Continents shows the extraordinary efforts of one woman's quest to have a child.
A Tale of Two Continents
Jetting Across the Globe to Have a BabyBy Arnelle KendalliUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 Arnelle Kendall
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4502-6253-8Contents
Preface....................................................ixChapter 1 Saying Goodbye...................................1Chapter 2 In The Spotlight.................................7Chapter 3 Heading Off Death................................17Chapter 4 Starting Over In America.........................29Chapter 5 The Big Decision.................................43Chapter 6 Crisscrossing the Continents.....................55Chapter 7 Devastated.......................................67Chapter 8 A New Life.......................................81Epilogue Postpartum Delight................................95
Chapter One
Saying Goodbye
A youngster who not long ago was on all fours is coaxing my old piano, an upright, out of retirement. The irony is striking, even if the harmony is muddled.
The little one is my daughter. She's been giving the Hoffman keyboard quite a workout since graduating from the crawling level to the curiosity stage.
That piano, situated in the living room of my home in Boca Raton, Florida, has come a long way, baby—and the baby, now a toddler, has come just as far. Both the keyboard and my precious little daughter paradoxically symbolize a break from, and connection with, the past.
Not that it was a bad past. To convert literal distance into the metaphorical: far from it. I was born Dec. 19, 1962, in the Republic of South Africa. Bordered by the Atlantic Ocean on the west and the Indian Ocean on the east, it is the southernmost country on the continent. South Africa is blessed with the most pleasant climate imaginable a wonderfully variegated landscape that ranges from grassland to lush subtropical to mountainous. Leaving it was enormously difficult—likely the hardest thing I've ever done, for two reasons.
First was a fear of the unknown that loomed on the other side of the world. It was akin to facing death. That prospect was perhaps mitigated by a previous encounter I'd had with the real Great Beyond as a young woman (more on that later). Even more emotionally wrenching—the part that broke my heart—was saying goodbye to my dear friends and the homeland that I loved.
Nonetheless, there were issues that drove home the realization I could no longer stay. My vision of a bright future in America proved prescient, because that move gave me a new lease on life. Actually, forget the lease. It gave me a new life—literally. Her name is Shaelah.
The path to her birth was strewn with more obstacles than a mountain road after an avalanche. That was partly because, in the interest of having the baby, I never completely severed the umbilical cord linking me with my beloved South Africa. Yet, despite the anguishing complications caused by that lingering connection, it turned out for the best. Shaelah's debut on planet Earth is a tale of two continents. She has roots in both, and was a world traveler before she was even born.
I made the decision to move to America in 1997. On August 9 of that year, my two best friends, Margit Pilz and Tommy Schmidt, both of whom I'd worked with many years in the travel industry, picked me up and drove me to Johannesburg International Airport. On the way, I cried my eyes out, because I never had imagined that I'd live anywhere else. I felt as though my world were coming to an end. It was like a nightmare in which I was outside my body.
I boarded a flight for Miami, and it's a good thing I didn't make the trip on an ocean liner, because my tears would have sunk it. Okay, that's a bit of a stretch. But I must have used up half the plane's supply of Kleenex. I was crying so much that the crew gave me tea bags for my eyes. From Miami, I drove to Boca Raton to join my mother, who had settled in the upscale South Florida city after leaving Johannesburg three years earlier. She, too, had spent all of her life there.
Chapter Two
In The Spotlight
Johannesburg is a bustling, cosmopolitan city the size of, say, San Francisco, or Memphis. Like South Africa in general, it is socially progressive, ethnically diverse and culturally vibrant. The family I grew up in took full advantage of that culture.
I was raised by my mother, Heather, and my maternal grandparents, Jack and Phyllis Smith, and had a wonderful childhood. My mother and father divorced when I was eighteen months old, at a time when it was unheard of in South Africa to get divorced. That willingness to flout convention took a lot of courage for her. I think she passed that independent streak on to me, because in having my baby, I also chose an unorthodox route.
Jack and Phyllis cared for me while my mother worked as an accountant. We had a great life together. The whole family was so vibrant. We weren't poor, but we weren't rich. My mother cherishes the memories, as do I, and loves to tell about one of her fondest:
"My father became Arnelle's father figure. She was crazy about him, and every night she used to stand on the apartment balcony waiting for him to come home from work. But she was too short to see over the balcony, so she would stand on a little doll stool and lean on the balcony. As soon as he would pull up, she would scream, `Jackie boy! What did you bring me?' And he loved it. All the neighbors loved it, too. Because she was this little thing, about three years old."
Among my most precious memories as a little girl were the Saturdays when my mother and her mother's side of the family would go to the horse races. They were all involved in horseracing—as breeders, jockeys and trainers. My uncle and aunt owned stables, and they would look after me as they tended the horses and I walked around the stables with them, until my mother would pick me up at the end of the day. So I was brought up in this horseracing fraternity, and yet I never learned to ride. It's hard to believe.
My grandfather was a skilled craftsman and had a flair for mathematics. My grandmother was quite a good amateur singer and entertainer, and had a passion for the arts and theater. My mother was steeped in dance. They passed those genes onto me, and I used them to forge an early, professional career on the stage and as a model. I learned a lot from all three of them.
My aspiration early on was to dance. My mother had me dancing when I was three. I started in ballet, then went on to American jazz, and eventually became schooled in tap and Spanish—flamenco. At age 13, I turned professional in dancing. But I was also active in the theater department at my school, winning lots of acting and singing awards, and I decided this was the way to go—to make a career in the theater.
That beautiful walnut piano, probably about seventy years old, in my home played a key (pun unintended) role in the development of my talents. It belonged to my grandparents, and my grandmother left it to me when she died of Alzheimer's disease. She would accompany me on it when I sang and danced in preparation for auditions to perform in shows. After a full day of school, I would perform in the shows at night. I was in my early teens, and lied about my age to get the jobs because South African law forbade children from working before age seventeen. My earliest show-biz experience was working in the Circus Osler, a children's circus.
Probably the highlight of those wonderful early-teen times when I strutted and fretted my hour upon the stage was my involvement in a British musical called The Boyfriend, a throwback to the 1920s flapper era of boy-meets-girl musicals. It was written in the 1950s and last performed in England by the Oxford Operatic Society in 1980. It turned out to be a harbinger of the kind of life I would later yearn for, but never realize. One song was particularly telling: It's Never Too Late to Fall in Love. I played Maisie, one of the girls— an inveterate teaser—in the Madame Dubonnet finishing school. It turned out to be a fitting role for me, because it presaged my matriculation in a real finishing school a couple of years later. The show was chock-full of songs popular in the Roaring Twenties, along with scintillating choreography, including some strictly acrobatic dance maneuvers that I executed as Maisie.
It was a great show and received great reviews, and I was offered a bursary, or scholarship, to study at Oxford University in London. But I couldn't accept it because I had lied about my age. You had to be sixteen, and I was only fourteen.
While I was singing and dancing to the downbeat, my dad was being a classic deadbeat. He paid no child support. My mother paid for everything—my dance lessons, ballet shoes, Spanish dance shoes, tap shoes—the whole works. Later on, as I progressed, I paid for my own dance lessons and studied several years in the school of Martha Graham, who was famous in South Africa as well as America. But in the meantime, my dad had abandoned me, never coming to visit, or even acknowledging my birthdays or contacting me on holidays. My mother remembers those years well, so I'll let her do the talking here:
"When Arnelle was about fourteen, she was in all the newspapers because of the shows she performed in. Her father no doubt was reading all of these glowing things written about her, so he phoned up. `I'm calling to see how my baby is,' he said. And I said, `There are no babies here.' And that was it. We never heard from him again."
So I think it was out of a desire to atone for her son's shortcomings that my paternal grandmother asked me to come and live with her in Australia when I was sixteen so she could put me through finishing school. I enrolled in the June Dally Watkins School of Modeling in Sydney, and studied modeling, fashion, continuity (learning to speak on television), elocution, makeup, etiquette, and deportment. You learned how to be lady.
As time wore on, it became increasingly difficult for my family members and me to be apart from each other. Fax machines and the Internet with its e-mail were still in the pioneering stages, so communicating was by phone, which was awfully expensive, or telex. My mother and I would talk on the phone and she would cry, telling me how much she and my grandparents missed me. And I was missing them, too. Remember The Brady Bunch? We were The Boo Hoo Bunch—not much like the TV family, but a bit unconventional, nonetheless. So, after a year in Australia, I returned to my home in Johannesburg.
I joined a modeling agency called Penny Bowden Elite, which was part of the Johnny Casablancas Modeling and Career Centers, an international agency that was based in the United States and remains very much alive and thriving. I continued my studies there and was recruited for jobs in modeling and television commercials, and for dancing parts in shows. The opportunities were bountiful, and I took full advantage of them, covering the gamut of roles embraced by that field. As time went on and I became increasingly independent, my mother began to think about remarrying. She had decided to wait until I was twenty-one to do so because she wanted to see me grown up and completely able to make my way on my own. And I wanted my mom to have a happy life. As a little girl, I would go to bed every night and pray, "Dear God, let my mother meet somebody nice. I want my mother to be happy." After I turned twenty-one, my prayers were answered as she carried out her plan and married Ivor Marsden, the national accountant for a big supermarket chain in South Africa. So my mother changed her moniker again, becoming Heather Marsden in a family with more names than a character in a Russian novel. She went from Smith to Ossendryver to Marsden, and I, without even marrying, went from Arnelle Ossendryver to Arnelle Kendall Ossendryver. How did the Kendall come about? My grandmother had decided that Ossendryver, a Dutch-Jewish name, was too long and cumbersome for a person in show business, and gave me a middle name, Kendall, after English actress Kay Kendall, who had herself changed her real name of McCarthy to that of her maternal grandmother. I use Ossendryver for legal purposes, but people know me as Kendall.
The life of performing and modeling that I was leading during those teenage years and into my early twenties was strenuous, with hectic schedules and intense pressures, but the work was sporadic. Sometimes I was so busy that I hardly had time to eat and sleep. Nonetheless, I found it highly rewarding, although there were periods of inactivity, which left one feeling less than secure financially. Show biz is tough, and unless you're a big star, you have to supplement your career with other kinds of work in order to make ends meet. So I enrolled in college courses in public relations and marketing, while working in sales and marketing for a small hotel group during the day. It all worked okay for several years—until, when I was twenty-three, it all came apart.
Chapter Three
Heading Off Death
It was the start of the Easter weekend and I was in Johannesburg, giving a presentation about the hotel group to a large assemblage of executive secretaries, when I felt a burst in my brain. It felt like pins and needles in my left side and in my arm. And all at once I felt this gush, and there were colors—green, blue, orange, yellow—around me. Some of the women told me later that they could see the blood had drained from my face and I was white as a ghost. In fact, I was closer to entering the spirit world than any of them realized at the time. I felt this bile forming in my mouth, and I was awfully nauseated. So I said, "Excuse me," and ran out of the room. But after a few minutes I felt better, and returned. I apologized to the group of women and carried on with the lecture. But afterward I felt sick again, so I quickly went to see a doctor.
He said, "You know, you're under a lot of stress, and it's probably a bad migraine headache." And I told him, "Well, I may be under stress, but I handle all these different stresses. I thrive under stress."
That was on a Thursday. The following day was Good Friday of Easter weekend, and I had planned to have some people over for brunch at my mother's house, where I was staying with my grandparents and their dogs while my mother and stepfather were in Australia, opening a big supermarket. My cousin Darene came first, and I told her I felt really ill. She insisted on taking me to see the doctor, who checked me out and again said nothing was wrong—that I must have had a migraine. From there we went to the hospital, where an X-ray of my head was taken, and nothing was found. I guess my head was empty—like that of baseball legend Dizzy Dean, who, after having X-rays for possible trauma from getting beaned with a ball, told reporters, "They X-rayed my head and found nothing." So I went home and made brunch for all these people, dragging my leg from kitchen to dining room.
The next night, Saturday, I had a date and was so excited. But it was the worst, because the guy must have thought I was out of it. My foot was dragging, and I could hardly focus on him. I had a drink of soda water and lime juice, but could hardly hold the glass. The guy probably wondered, "What is she on?" All day Sunday, I lay in bed, ill. My grandfather, Jack Smith, applied heat to my left side, where I was feeling pins and needles. The next day was Easter Monday, a religious holiday in South Africa, but I planned to go to my office in the city and work. I got in my car, but climbed back out because my vision was so bad. So my uncle, Courtney, took me to see ophthalmologist Jonathan Levine, who took one look and said, "There's something not right. It's more than the eyes." He phoned Dr. Les Cohen, a neurologist, who booked me straight into the hospital and took a brain scan and did a spinal tap. I remember negotiating with him: "If you don't hurt me, you can have two nights at the Inyati safari lodge." And it wasn't bad, so I kept my word. When the results came back, he said, "We are seeing something behind the optic nerve, and it looks like a tumor, and it's not good. It's not good. It's in a very dangerous part of the brain."
My Aunt Olivia returned on the Blue Train from a trip to Capetown and came to the hospital. I told her, "Don't tell my mom, because I don't want her to panic." But after talking to Dr. Cohen, she phoned my mother in Australia and told her she needed to come back at once. My mother flew home, and by then my condition worsened, so I was transferred to another hospital for more tests, including an angiogram. Something went wrong with the procedure and I ended up in the intensive care unit for a few days. Finally, the diagnosis was a tumor. Further, I was bleeding in the brain. We all met, and the doctors said surgery would be necessary. Otherwise, I would live only three weeks because the tumor was growing rapidly. And I'm my mother's only child, and she was devastated. She said, "No, I want another opinion."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Tale of Two Continentsby Arnelle Kendall Copyright © 2011 by Arnelle Kendall. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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