Tiny White Dresses

Memoirist Amy Sayers was working as a doula when she realized that she wanted to get pregnant.

“I remember thinking, ‘If I see one more woman giving birth and don’t get pregnant, I don’t know what I’ll do!’” As a labor coach, Sayers was constantly experiencing the miracle of birth, but not a mother herself.

“I got married late in life. I was 42 when I married Gavin and I had never been pregnant,” says Amy. The frustrating, complicated and magical journey of how their family came together – mom, dad, and daughter, is the story of Amy’s upcoming book, Tiny White Dresses.

A “DES daughter,” Amy tells the harrowing story of years of infertility treatments that would end up futile. DES was a synthetic estrogen that was prescribed to pregnant women in the late 1930s through 1970s. The drug was intended to prevent miscarriage, but has been found, to not only cause a rare form of cervical cancer, but to also increase the chance for breast cancer and reproductive deformities in women who were exposed to it in the womb, women like Amy. “We spent thousands of dollars on drugs and surgery – and it never should have happened. They took DES off the market in the mid-70s, but there are DES daughters that have gotten pregnant who have had trouble with cancer and physical anomalies in their offspring due
to this terrible drug.”

After finally being told that even if the IVF treatments were successful, her womb would not be able to hold a child, Amy and her husband started looking into adoption. “We were older, we were unconventional, we didn’t belong to a church,” says Amy. “The protocol for adopting through an agency, is about being in a certain economic group, church-going, much more conventional than we were, but we found a way.”

“I feel very fortunate. I just think she’s a miracle,” says Amy. “The bond that I feel with her is like two old souls coming together.” Amy is speaking of her adopted daughter, Marika, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed young woman, now a working actor in LA.. “I had visions, I had affirmations, I saw this child’s face in my meditations and images that came to me that I believe are all part of the seen and unseen worlds we live in. And I had to go with that trust.”

This book is a long time coming for Amy, but she says it was all part of her healing process. “I was diagnosed with breast cancer about a year after I had finished the first version of the manuscript. The cancer and the treatment pulled me back.” After recovering, Amy started painting and completed a second Pilates teacher training, two things that helped her reconnect to her body and spirit after years of being in and out of the medical system.

“Going through infertility usurped my sense of power, my sense of wholeness. It was a time of feeling broken and being in a position of longing for something outside myself instead of accessing my deeper resources,” says Amy. “The name of the book is Tiny White Dresses because while going through IVF, I started collecting vintage baby dresses. There is magic in the way that my daughter, Marika, came to us, there were visions and allies and the vintage dress collection was part of that manifestation.”

Amy hopes that the book will inspire and support women who are going through the infertility and adoption process. “One thing I would advise, she says, “that I think is crucial to survival, psychologically and emotionally, is writing as a daily practice. Do something creative to call in your soul.”

That may sound strange, Amy says, but “With all the focus on healing and creativity and meditation in these times through people like Jennifer Pastiloff and Elizabeth Gilbert – it’s a thing that isn’t so foreign to people right now as it was back when I was going through it.”

And for people who are having some trouble coming to terms with adopting and not passing on their genes? “There are different things that people want to pass on when they think about having a biological child,” says Sayers. “I have to say, Marika is one of the most creative beings I have ever met. Something got called in and it’s just a match. I couldn’t have had a more perfect child. But I didn’t know that then. It was through reading, journaling and writing down my dreams that I knew I was ready to go in that direction. So I would advise others to keep a journal, to write down dreams, poetry, fragments—pay attention to those inner worlds and the timing will become clear. The path will become clear.”

From the grittiest lows to magical highs, this book delivers a tale of redemptive love, readers of
transformational memoirs will devour.

TINY WHITE DRESSES is Amy Sayers first book. She is currently at work on a novel about the rise of fascism in the USA against fascism in WW2.