People | Bodies

“I need more time”: Weighing the Option of Egg Freezing

I’ll go through the egg-freezing procedure that will give me the chance of maybe, one day, having a child.

It’s a fertility clinic, but I’m not here to be fertilized. I’m here because I’ll be thirty-five in forty-two days, a real adult by any normal person’s standards, though I couldn’t feel farther from it because, in my mind, real adulthood has always been defined by the transition from child to parent, and that’s certainly not happening to me any time soon.

other

She’s trying to reassure me that no one really knows what they’re doing, but I can’t help but wonder why it never just kind of happened to me.

TIME

sleepbeTeen MagazineYM

The Matrix

He has PowerPoint slides to back himself up. He continues like this and I nod, excessively. I don’t understand why he’s doing this, why he’s telling me how hard it is for women like me when I’m the one paying hundreds of dollars to sit in this miserable wooden chair and listen to him. I’m embarrassed for him, so I try to look extra eager and interested: I lean forward, make direct eye contact, make sure he feels heard as he explains my needs to me, because making men comfortable is annoyingly reflexive. I forget what I want to say or ask because I’m distracted by the challenge of responding to his pushy presentation in a way that makes our situation feel more normal.

scale

not

I try and imagine what it’s like to inhabit the mind and body of someone who knows the difference between the two.

real