By freezing my eggs, I had stuck my toe into the world of competitive female biology. Women who had plenty of eggs retrieved (but still within the realm of reason) confessed something like pride in their number. They flaunted their results under the guise of relief. I want to distinguish myself from them. I was not so lucky as I looked, I explained. My big payout had come at a high cost. Mo’ eggs, mo’ problems. After the procedure, I was treated to a panoply of medical complications including a Tales from the Crypt–style syndrome in which one’s abdominal region retains multiple liters of water in ten hours. For me, this also resulted in a bonus surgery. Boy, had I been through the wringer!
I listened to myself recite all this, trying to fend off judgment. Was it really necessary for me to drag out stories of additional specialists in order to justify telling the truth? I won the lottery but my dog exploded, so, you know.
But even the complications couldn’t get me out of jail. When I told a friend who’d always been dyspeptic about having kids, she was unable to hide her disgust.
“See?” she said, assured of her own choices. “This is why it’s not worth it.”
Which is a bit like critiquing someone’s e-mail to their ex after they’ve sent it.
When I told one mother of three, she replied with: “Well, now you know what it feels like to be pregnant.” Not quite. Being pregnant is a natural occurrence. You don’t become six months pregnant over ten excruciating hours. It is my understanding that you also get a baby out of it. Now whose turn was it to be offended?
This was getting ugly.
The thing is, even if I had produced two eggs, I like to believe I would have been forthright about it. It’s impossible to say. But I know for certain that focusing on the math as the defining moment of one’s life only perpetuates the idea of fertility as identity. This isn’t the seventeenth century. Nor is it the dystopian future. There doesn’t have to be social meaning. There only has to be personal meaning. Tell everyone, tell no one. Read the articles, don’t read the articles, find kinship or alienation in them, it doesn’t matter. By virtue of them being written by someone else, none of them are prescribed for you and you alone. When it comes to your own life, there is only one location in the world where the right decisions are being kept. Which, come to think of it, is the kind of thing I would tell an actual child.
* * *
The children are coming, the children are coming. I would have sent that intuitor his tip if I hadn’t just broken the bank proving him right. My transcendental Paul Revere had succeeded where a magic wand had failed. But his prophecy felt less ominous now. The children are en route, okay, but they could always change their minds. My eggs are frozen in a cryobank in Midtown—they don’t have any travel plans. For months after the procedure, I would get automated updates from the cryobank using language that made me feel as if I’d arranged to freeze my head.
Then one day I was walking up my apartment stairs, flipping through junk mail, when I came across an envelope with the cryobank’s logo. My eggs had never sent me actual mail before. Camp is fun. We are cold. The letter explained that enclosed was “a representative photomicrograph of your oocytes frozen during the cryopreservation cycle.” I mean, they really go out of their way to make it sound like you’re freezing your head. I moved the letter aside to reveal a piece of paper with a black-and-white photograph of my eggs. They looked like the marks that would appear if you pressed a pen cap into your skin sixty-seven times. Or craters on the surface of some very distant moon.
They are just floating fractions of an idea. I know that. But I had never seen a part of my body exist outside my body before. I felt such gratitude. My eggs had held up their end of the bargain. They had saved me from having to think about them, which, for the first time in my life, made me want to think about them. This doesn’t mean I know what will become of them. Maybe I have a baby. Maybe none. Maybe eight. Maybe I sell them all on the black market, buy a townhouse and forget this whole thing ever happened. But sometimes when I’m alone, I run my fingers over the photo, even though it doesn’t feel like anything. I focus on one egg at random, imagining this will be the one my body uses to make a person, a person that grows up and reads this, and I think—Oh girl, I hope you set the world on fire.
Note
Cinema of the Confined
1. I would apologize, but it’s definitely going to happen again.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Jay Mandel, Sean McDonald, Jonathan Galassi, Jeff Seroy, Kimberly Burns, Sarah Scire, and everyone at FSG. And to my friends and family, whose love is a steady reminder that this life is the very best one I’ll ever have.
BY SLOANE CROSLEY
FICTION
The Clasp
NONFICTION
Look Alive Out There
How Did You Get This Number
I Was Told There’d Be Cake
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sloane Crosley is the author of the novel The Clasp and two New York Times–bestselling books of personal essays: I Was Told There’d Be Cake, a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor, and How Did You Get This Number. A contributing editor at Vanity Fair, she lives in Manhattan. You can sign up for email updates here.
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