TAPING WAS ABOUT TO BEGIN IN THE New York City studios of the Sally Jessy Raphael show and, as usual, everyone was on edge—the audience fidgeting in their seats, staffers fussing with the set, technicians adjusting their lights and cameras. For guests Barbara Shulgold, 49, and Lynne Sipiora, 37, who were sequestered in separate rooms backstage, the waiting was sweet torture. For years they had known one another only through intimate letters about their common struggle with infertility and their longings to have a baby. Now they were about to meet.

When the two women were finally escorted onto the set, there were hugs, tears, an exchange of gifts—but for once words, which had served them so well, were no match for their feelings. "Finding Barbara was—I don't want to say a miracle—but it was a special thing," says Lynne. Barbara could barely manage more than a whisper: "I feel she's part of my family and I'm part of hers now."

The show (which will be broadcast Oct. 15) was merely the latest chapter in the lives of two extraordinary women. Their story is told in a new book, Dear Barbara, Dear Lynne—a collection of letters chronicling their growing friendship as they struggled on the path to motherhood. They shared everything—their jealousy of women who had babies, their anger at the expense and indignity of infertility treatments, their frustration and grid during the harrowing, mazelike adoption process, their episodes of marital strife. Holding hands in spirit, they saw each other through to the ineffable joy of motherhood as Barbara adopted two daughters, and Lynne adopted a son—before giving birth to another. "Few [books] arc as deeply personal or as moving as this," said Publishers Weekly. "Infertile couples will draw comfort and inspiration from Shulgold and Sipiora's hope, courage and sheer determination."

Their story began one fall morning in 1984, when Barbara awoke before dawn and began crying; her menstrual cycle had begun, which meant that a second round of injections of the fertility drug Pergonal had failed to produce a pregnancy. The San Francisco resident and elementary school teacher had endured three years of infertility treatments since marrying Rich Albert, now 48, a technical editor at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in 1982. They had tried to conceive for eight months before a doctor found that she did not ovulate regularly.

Barbara had wanted a daughter for as long as she could remember—at 7, she had already picked a name, Miriam—and was now so desperate she developed psychosomatic pains in her upper arms, where she longed to cradle a child. "Rich was out of town that morning," she says. "I had never felt so alone in my life. I thought, if only there was someone who would hold me." Seeking solace, she leafed through a copy of Resolve, a Massachusetts-based newsletter for infertile couples. She then wrote a heartfelt letter, hoping, she says, that someone would understand the profound ache of her "baby lust."

Barbara received numerous replies, but none touched her as deeply as the one from Lynne, whose anguish and yearnings seemed to echo her own. A Philadelphia native, Lynne had married Ken Sipiora, an insurance broker, in 1984. Both were divorced (Ken had a daughter, Ann, then 9), and Lynne knew from her first marriage that she had a fertility problem. Despite nearly a year of treatment, she could hardly bring herself to talk about it. "I cultivated an image of always being in control, and I feared people feeling sorry for me," she says. "It was a way of self-preservation." That changed the day she read Barbara's letter in her gynecologist's office in January 1985. "There's something about a woman who starts off a letter saying, 'I don't know if I'm going to mail this,' " says Lynne. "I thought, Here was a woman who doesn't BS."

When their correspondence began, Barbara had already decided to pursue adoption, but Lynne couldn't even consider it. "You have to grieve for the child that may have looked like you and get to the point where you want to be a mother more than you want to be pregnant." she says. "And you've got to deal with the rage and hostility." Still, Lynne came to depend on Barbara's Idlers—on her experience, her knowledge and her unflagging support.

Barbara, too, look strength and comfort from Lynne's letters, which she couldn't bear to throw away. (It was Barbara who thought of compiling them into a book and later showed them to an editor in Berkeley.) "I needed someone to whom I could say what I fell so desperately, without any inhibitions or concern that I was overloading her." says Barbara. "In a way I was a guide, a mentor. But I was surprised how much of my pain was healed by helping Lynne.

Neither could have imagined the trials ahead. In January 1986, after arranging a private adoption, Barbara and Rich came home with a beautiful baby girl; five days later the birth mother took her back. That September, when Barbara finally found her Miriam—a blue-eyed newborn from Indiana—Lynne was consumed by jealousy and the fear of being left behind. "I thought Barbara would disappear in motherland and I'd never hear from her again," she says. "But she stayed with me. That's one of the reasons I love her."

At this point the letters were such an important part of both women's lives that they had agreed not to make phone contact until both of them had children. But Lynne broke that promise the night a 2-day-old baby she had arranged to adopt privately died in an Albuquerque hospital. "Strangely, that first phone call was a blur," says Lynne. "I had had too much wine and I was grief-stricken." But Barbara helped her rally, writing Lynne daily and calling several times a week. Two other birth mothers reneged on their adoption agreements at the last moment before Lynne was finally able to adopt baby Kenny in July 1988.

Their time and their hands joyously full, the two women slopped writing altogether and took up the telephone. They spoke once or twice a month and discussed the possibility of meeting, Barbara says, "but we had children, and they kept us really busy." There has always been plenty to talk about as the women and their husbands plunged into parenthood. "I thought I would make a good father, and I am," says Rich. He and Barbara adopted a second daughter, Leah, in December 1989. They were able to complete the adoptions for only $6,000 a child—far below the expense most adoptive parents face, since they did not go through an agency and hospital costs for the birth mothers in Indiana and Oklahoma were relatively low. Still, Rich believes some form of subsidy should be available so that private adoptions "aren't just the property of the upper-middle class."

Lynne and Ken, 41, are also counting their blessings: Six months ago Lynne gave birth to Daniel after undergoing a special procedure in which an egg and sperm were joined in her fallopian tubes. "Nothing," says Lynne, "could have been more of a surprise." Or a better tonic for their marriage, says Ken. "There were times when the tension just tore us apart and I thought, 'Gee, I wish I had my wife back.' I missed her."

After Lynne and Barbara finished taping the Sally Jessy show, the two still seemed a little dazed. "I was afraid that all we had in common was adoption struggles and that if we ever got together we wouldn't have anything to say," says Lynne. That was hardly the case. After all, they have been the most intimate of friends who have seen each other at their best and worst. Do they find it embarrassing that others will share their deepest thoughts? "It is for me," says Lynne, who shudders at the thought of coworkers reading the book. "They'd never believed I was at the office performing and then going home to cry." Barbara feels differently. "I'm not proud of the fact that I struggled with jealousy" and other dark emotions, she says, "but that's not me anymore."

PAULA CHIN
BONNIE BELL in Indianapolis, ELIZABETH FERNANDEZ in San Francisco and MARY HUZINEC in New York City