A Dream Denied : They wanted it all. Now some women are finding they’ve lost something precious --motherhood.

Another generation of women might have just sighed and moved on.

But today, women in their late 30s and 40s are often stunned when they run up against the prospect of not having it all. When their lives are finally in order and they are ready to start a family but learn they cannot give birth, it is a shock, some say, they will never get over.

Some believe the women’s movement encouraged them to postpone motherhood for careers or personal exploration without pointing out that they could wait too long. Others blame modern science for sucking them into a whirlpool of exorbitant but unsuccessful fertility treatments. Some cite unbearable social pressures fostered by the “family values” wave of the past decade.

“We have this unique thing: By the time we’re ready to have a kid, we’re ready to enter menopause. We’re getting sandwiched,” said Marilyn Shenker, 44, who experienced baby lust in her early 30s but never found the “right relationship,” even during a brief marriage in her late 30s. After dating for several years in her late 30s, Shenker had to choose between a “wonderful man” who didn’t want any more children and continuing the search for someone who did. She chose the man in hand. Now a therapist intern, she runs support groups in Sherman Oaks and Brentwood for midlife, childless women.

Age is only one of many factors that reduce fertility. But for those who have waited too long, even adoption may not resolve the anger, hurt and frustration, Shenker said. Some childless women, she said, grieve years later over an earlier abortion or miscarriage.

Likewise, Anne Taylor Fleming, 44, a magazine writer and commentator from Los Angeles, deferred pregnancy with her husband, journalist Karl Fleming, a man 20 years her senior, until she was in her mid 30s. She spent seven years and their savings account to treat her infertility, which she called “the most emotional and painful experience of my life.”

To understand why she and others of her generation ignored for so long what she called an “animal-like” biological urge, she wrote a 256-page book, “Motherhood Deferred” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994), tracing her attraction to the women’s movement and the “mixed and complicated messages we’ve been given.”

“One reason so many women like me were not ready to make that commitment, we were adamant about redressing the lives of our mothers, the desire to be somebody, have work that mattered, to have our own money. To make good on that rhetoric, as incendiary as it was, was huge,” Fleming said in an interview.

While she has no regrets and does not blame the women’s movement, she said she still grieves. The writing exercise brought little relief. “The resolution for me is one of irresolution. I don’t think I will ever be done with it. When I’m 60 or 70, I will always feel lonesome for the child I didn’t have,” she said.

When women today find the door to motherhood not only shut, but locked and bolted, they feel panic most of all, said Linda Hammer Burns, the chairman of the American Fertility Society’s psychological interest group. “They think, ‘This can’t be happening.’

“Other generations said there’s nothing that could be done and that was the end of it,” Burns said. But women today, she said, have grown up thinking, “ ‘I can choose parenthood, I can choose it when I want it.’ But no one said, ‘Choose it when you’re most fertile because it’s a time-limited thing.’ ”

In 1988, the most recent rates available from the National Center for Health Statistics, 21.4% of women 35 to 44 experienced some form of impaired fecundity, compared with 13.4% of those 25 to 34 and 4.1% of those 15 to 24.

“In the early days of infertility, you used to feel like, if only these people had more choices. Now it seems with more choices, it’s only worse,” Burns said. “Now women have a great sense of guilt if they don’t pursue in-vitro fertilization” or pregnancy with a donor egg, she said.

“Ellen,” a 52-year-old Los Angeles television producer, said it wasn’t until she was found to have cancer nine months ago that she began to seriously consider stopping infertility treatments. “Before I thought, ‘I should go through with it.’ It’s never 100% final. I kept reading about women 60 years old who did it.”

When she was in her 20s and 30s, she thought it was important to fulfill her destiny professionally. “If I wasn’t a real person, how could I have a child to perpetuate another non-person?”

In her 40s, she believed it was important to get pregnant. “It’s like feeling you’re not a woman. You can’t do the most basic thing that every little girl is doing without thinking about it. You cannot be a fulfilled human being. . . .

“There is always a little something. You never know when it’s going to hit you. It used to be physical. I would feel it in the pit of my stomach. I’d see a pregnant woman, or a movie, or put into a situation where somebody’s talking about children. Or you see a child and have this yearning. You want to hug it. You have all those maternal nurturing feelings that you feel you aren’t utilizing. You feel empty.”

Despite a troubled marriage, she kept on with fertility treatments until “it was embarrassing to still keep doing anything.”

To many, the possibility of egg donation suggests that they may never have to give up.

Infertility counselors said it’s not uncommon to find women who have spent $100,000 over 10 years trying to get pregnant using laboratory techniques.

But even for them, hope is slim. Data from 1991 show that the live-birth rate ranges from 15.2% for in-vitro fertilization to 25.6% for donor eggs and 26.5% for GIFT (Gamete Intra-Fallopian Transfer).

In a Yale University study of couples told that it was time to consider ending infertility treatments, the news was a relief for about a third. Another third said they would think about it. But a hard-core third rejected the advice, said Dorothy Greenfeld, director of psychological services at Yale’s Center for Reproductive Medicine. They moved to another clinic.

“Those are the couples who cannot stop, who are so caught up in that determination and fury of it all, who can’t stop and even consider, ‘OK, what would it be like to not get pregnant, not to have a kid?’ What they say is, ‘I can’t imagine how to stop this,’ ” Greenfeld said.

Fleming agreed that fertility “does loom as something larger and larger as it’s thwarted.”

Ellen blamed infertility specialists for engendering false hope in their patients: “If you’re in for a penny, you’re in for a pound. You’ve put so much effort into it. You just get deeper and deeper into it.”

On the other hand, counselors said some women are obsessed with their own mortality; others, such as children of Holocaust survivors, with perpetuating their genetic lineage. Some indeed fit the stereotype of the yuppie obsessed with having a “trophy child.”

“Too often they look at parenthood as a state an achievement, an achieved state, when in reality, parenthood is a relationship,” Burns said. “They have a blind side to the actuarial odds, that people are less healthy after age 70. They say, ‘These aren’t facts I like, so I don’t want them.’ ”

In fact, she said, motherhood sometimes looks different once accomplished.

Burns, who became pregnant twice despite an infertility problem, said she was shocked to discover that about two years after her youngest child was born, she realized that she hated being home all the time. “I had made this pact with God that I’d be the world’s greatest mother, if allowed to. I meant staying home 100% of the time, taking them to swimming lessons.”

Her restlessness was also a function of her oldest child’s overactive personality. So she went back to school and got a job.

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When infertility begins to take over a couple’s life, Greenfeld said it’s time for them to move on.

Some counselors lead the couples through a complex grieving process for the death of the fantasy child they never would have. Some also suggest support groups or getting involved with nieces, nephews or other children through Big Brother or Sister programs.

Those who have no interest in other people’s children may find satisfaction in work, travel or pets.

Burns said she encourages women to review their lives, in an effort to show them how their own choices helped close the door. “Like the woman who marries a man 30 years older, who already has six children and had a vasectomy when they got married. If the absolute intent was to have a child, they wouldn’t marry someone like that. That’s OK. It helps to come to grips with this.”

Ellen said she has nearly resolved her anguish. Having cancer made her realize it was more important to her to survive than to have a child survive her.

She likens her situation to being a tourist in Paris. “People say if you haven’t seen the Eiffel Tower, you haven’t seen Paris. I think you could really see Paris and have a wonderful time and not see the Eiffel Tower.

“That’s the realization I’m coming to. Life is to be lived and after all, it’s my life.”

But some never do recover.

“Some couples who are so bitter from the infertility experience, by the time they finish, feel they’re too old to make other choices. . . . They feel like war-torn victims,” said Carol Lieber Wilkins, a Los Angeles counselor specializing in infertility, adoption and third-party reproduction.

Both men and women can experience marital conflict and a loss of self-esteem, not to mention financial stress as a result, she said.

The anguish of infertility can be as painful for men as it is for women, experts said. But Wilkins and others agreed that in their experience, men often seem to adjust faster than women.

“Many men say they could live the rest of their lives without being a father and be OK with that. Most women can’t say that,” Wilkins said. “(Men) don’t grow up picturing themselves as daddies the way women picture themselves as moms. . . . There’s a much greater sense of isolation for a woman who’s not a mother.”

Nevertheless, childless women in their 70s and 80s said that at this point, they often feel grateful they don’t have the problems they hear about in their friends’ families. “I’m kind of glad, with all the trouble kids have nowadays,” one woman said.

“My husband says, ‘Show me a family and I’ll show you a problem,’ ” said another.

One woman admitted to feeling left out when her friends’ conversation invariably turns to children and grandchildren. Nieces and nephews help but are no substitute, she said. “You have family, but you really don’t.”

But most said they had long since accepted what life gave them and had no regrets. They advised today’s women to let go, to get on with their lives and find completeness in some other way, as they did.

Burns believes the anguish of childless baby boomers will not become a trend. “I think the next generation will be a bit more astute knowing how to fit in all the things. They will advise their daughters to start earlier. There will be more awareness this just doesn’t happen.”

Fleming thinks that maybe older generations did feel as bereft; they just didn’t talk about it as much. Nevertheless, she said she is clearly a product of her time and has a message for the next generation of women. “I want to say to young women: If you want (motherhood) to be a part of your destiny, pay attention.”