“You look okay,” she said, “but you might want to consider freezing your eggs.”
I promised her I would think about it, intending to drop the idea into my vast bucket of denial.
In the elevator, I received a “What are you up to?” text from my boyfriend. I had not told him about this appointment, not because he would get squeamish but because he wouldn’t. My main purveyor of external pressure—the opposite sex—had temporarily, perhaps permanently, closed for business. Here was a man who was open with his emotions, receptive to mine, and initiated casual discussions about the future. It was extremely disorienting. I wasn’t sure I knew how to have an opinion about this without blaming everyone else for making me have it.
“At doctor’s appt,” I texted.
“Because you’re totally knocked up?” he wrote back.
I smacked straight into the elevator doors before they had opened, like a bird who hasn’t figured out how to get out of its cage.
* * *
In addition to being a questionably necessary procedure—contrary to popular belief, one’s uterus does not spontaneously turn into a bag of stale tortilla chips at age forty—freezing your eggs costs a fortune. The cost is so high, I hesitate to state it here because I have worked hard to suppress the pain. You can easily find out for yourself by reading one of the many articles I refused to read. The best way I can describe the financial impact is this: I had a friend in college who had two hundred CDs stolen from his dorm room during our freshman year. He had learned to accept this loss but each time he heard a song he’d forgotten he once owned, he’d crumble into a depressed lump. For years, he basically couldn’t go anywhere music might be played. This is exactly how I feel about the egg-freezing bill.
What egg freezing does is give you the illusion of a plan. An expensive illusion. I’ve paid far less to eat mushrooms and stare at a bedspread for an hour. But the women with the resources to pony up the cash are buying themselves time, which is, arguably, the most valuable commodity on the planet. Waylaying the inevitable doesn’t come cheap. For me, time was the side dish. The entrée was brain space, the ability to release the pressure of making a decision that would impact the rest of my life and, potentially, the life of an additional human. When I looked at it this way, it almost seemed like a bargain.
Before you embark on the egg-freezing process, you have to take a class. The class is mandatory but you have to pay for it, which is a bit of a boondoggle. We arrived in the order of what kind of parent we would be. Women who got there early and sat up front would be the kind of moms who put notes in their children’s lunch boxes. Women who sat in the second row would remember it was Purple Shirt Day the night before and do a stealth load of laundry. Women who sat in the back would let their kids drink in the basement. I consoled myself that at least I was not the very last person to arrive. I was the second to last. But then I had to borrow a pen from my neighbor, which set me back.
We were each given flesh-colored cushions reminiscent of ergonomic mouse pads. We had to practice pinching them as if they were our own skin, and injecting them with empty vials of medication. All the cushions were Caucasian. I don’t know the exact statistics regarding the racial profile of women who get their eggs frozen but I can guess. I suppose there’s an argument to be made, albeit a weak one, that it’s easier for beginners to practice on something pale, to see the contrast of the needle on a mound of white-girl pseudo-flesh. But since such a creature does not exist in nature, I don’t see the harm in manufacturing them all in violet or mint green.
The women in my class were advanced fertility chess players. I couldn’t understand how they knew so much already. They were eight moves ahead, their hands flying skyward as they asked questions about dosages and hormone levels and how soon they could pop their frozen eggs back from whence they came. One lady asked if it was okay to have sex during the process, which is just showing off. Overwhelmed by the naked want they all shared, I stress-pinched my flesh wad. My heart raced from peer pressure. In the weeks to come, as I laid out needles like a mad scientist, consulting YouTube videos for each injection, experiencing foul moods that dripped down to my heart like black syrup, I would amuse myself by saying, “The real bitch of this whole thing is that they made us take that fucking class.”
The only useful tidbit I learned is that the female reproductive system is just as dog-eat-dog as a man’s. Every month, all the eggs vie to be the power egg. This queen-bee egg forces the other eggs to sulk in the corner, presumably with such bad self-esteem issues you wouldn’t want one of them as your kid anyway. I had no idea that eggs were competitive like sperm. This is something we should toss into middle school health curriculums, if only for the sociological implications. My entire life, I have assumed that eggs were passive creatures, inert trophies to be earned by ambitious sperm. I blame Woody Allen.
The first step in egg freezing is to hormonally democratize this dictatorship. You inject vials of drugs into your abdomen to persuade that one egg to let everyone have a chance. At the end of two weeks, you are briefly knocked out while your eggs are popped in a freezer. And that’s that … with one tiny snag. Whatever symptoms of PMS a woman has when she normally gets her period exist in proportion to that one egg. One egg’s worth
