The world is passing by without me. My grandmother Puggy died. My mother has been complaining that the MacDougal Street house is too big for her; my little sister, Rebecca, is getting married; my little brother is about to get engaged; and I am just standing on the sidelines watching the world roll past me.
Wanting a baby broke up Javi and me, and the gates are nearly closed on having a biological child. So that’s why, without telling anyone—not my therapist, not even Kara—I go to a fertility doctor to see about freezing my eggs. I’m forty-one years old, and while I want a baby, I’m certain I don’t want to raise one alone. When my hands are filled with grocery bags, I ask myself, Could I manage this with a baby? When I have a cold, when I’m depressed, when I’m taking a shower, when I’m grumpy and overwhelmed, I stop and imagine a baby in the mix.
I’m afraid if I tell my friends, I’ll allow myself to be talked into doing something I’ll regret. I just want to freeze my eggs so that I can take more time. Maybe one day I’ll feel ready to raise a child on my own, but I know that time is not right now.
What I want is for the fertility people to tell me I have plenty of time, not to worry, and to return in nine years, when I’m fifty. I fill out the requisite paperwork, all nine thousand pages of intake about my pathetic loser life without a partner or children, not even a dog, pretending not to notice I’m the only woman here alone.
I’m led down the hall and into a back office so cold I wonder if they’re freezing the eggs inside us right now. I put my gloves back on. The fertility doctor has no identifying facial features, as if his face has been seen by too many people and just wore off. He hasn’t even sat down at his desk and he’s already midway through a monologue, reciting statistics about age and options, and his eyes look programmed: fervent and disconnected from reality.
“You’re forty-one. You’ve got no time to waste. I understand you want to freeze your eggs, but it’s too late, you don’t have time for that. If it’s a child you want, there is no point in freezing your eggs. You’re much too old. IVF must start now! The statistics don’t lie.”
A pressure I didn’t expect begins to close around my throat. I do want a child, I think, but I also want a career, and a partner. If I freeze my eggs, I can have a baby when I’m ready, which isn’t now. I have no money to even freeze my eggs, so what would I raise my baby on, the barter system? His urgency sets off a cascade of doubt in me. This is not matching my fantasy scenario where he tells me to return in nine years.
He pulls out a chart and starts pointing to the downward curving lines, citing statistics and averages. I cannot concentrate on the words coming out of his mouth, although I know I’m supposed to be absorbing everything and that statistically speaking, 95 percent of women between the ages of thirty-four and thirty-nine who come here panicked about their fertility wind up doing 100 percent of what he says. My fingers are numb, and my toes are cold. We wound down so many hallways to get here that if I race out of his office like I want to, I’ll never find my way out. I’ll probably end up in the IVF room, where he’ll restrain me and force-feed me his sperm. Or however IVF works.
“I don’t think I want kids right away,” I say. “I really just want to freeze my eggs.”
He stands. “I look forward to adding your baby’s photo to my wall of fertility successes,” he says, looking over my shoulder as if he hasn’t heard a word I’ve said. I turn and see hundreds of photos of infants, families, even a few teenagers, along with Christmas cards and birthday cards. The cards are insidious reminders of my failure. Here are some pictures where something is missing. Everywhere I go, I can point to the spaces where I am missing.
“No time to wait!” he says and ushers me down the hall to a different office. “Carol will set you up with a California Cryobank account and make your follow-up appointment.”
At the door of an empty office, he shakes my hand, tells me to wait for Carol, and gives me a stack of papers to bring to billing when I’m done. I should take a few days to think and call when I’m ready to start the IVF process.
“All right.” I know I will never see him again.
“We don’t want you to regret not having children.”
Instead of waiting for Carol, I bolt down the hall, lost in the maze, but anonymous since no one’s chasing me. When I finally get home, I shut my bedroom door, climb into bed, and pull the covers over my head so no one can find me: not the creepy doctor, not Carol. Not billing.
When will I ever feel like I have a place in the world, like I’m not some defective game piece that people never use?
I’m forty-one years old, but my roots are still in my childhood home on MacDougal Street. Even when members of my family move, the house stays the same. It’s never left me. I pull myself out of bed and head to MacDougal Street. My mom’s not there, but I eat the leftover pasta in the refrigerator, watch some TV, and call Kara.
I tell her what I did, and what happened, and she suggests that I do try to have a baby. Maybe even with a friend. Even though I specifically avoided telling her, worrying she was going to say something just like this, when she says it, it seems less terrifying. She suggests a few books on single motherhood and I order them. I think of male friends to have babies with and rule each one out, wishing I could order them online also.
Who needs Carol? I sign up for California Cryobank, which my single-mother friends all used, and then scan the hundreds of thousands of sperm donors with the ease of the seasoned OkCupid user I am. You can’t see what the men look like, but the filters let you add donors to your cart based on critically important factors, like which movie star would play your sperm in a movie. I add Mark Ruffalo to the cart. Ryan Gosling. John Cusack. I try to find Dominic West. No luck. Still, my cart runneth over with impersonator sperm.
The books on single motherhood arrive and as I read them, old memories jar loose of conversations with my new mom friends who bemoan the mind-numbing boredom of newborns. I think about how many doctor appointments I make for myself, and how annoying it is when I have to interrupt my writing day to go tend to my own body. What would it mean to add in another person’s doctor appointments until there’s no writing time left? I don’t see how I could possibly do both. My worries are pushing their way up like acid reflux. What if I give birth to myself and screw myself up even more?
Maybe I’ll find a different place that will let me freeze my eggs. Then I can have a baby whenever I want, because what’s the urgency? I know plenty of forty-two-year-old single moms. Forty-two is the new Thursday. Right now, my brain wants me to have a baby, but all my friends who chose to do this on their own wanted a baby with their bodies. They were driven by a profound need to make it happen, and I don’t feel that need. I felt that need for a dog, and I got the dog, and look what happened.
Maybe I’ll feel the profound need at forty-two, when I’ll be more confident and self-assured. But what if my store is entirely closed at forty-two? If I have the baby now, the issue will be off the table, and I can focus on finding the right partner without putting pressure on this person to have a baby, because I’ll already have the baby! But wait—how am I supposed to meet anyone if I have an infant? I’ll never be able to leave my house. I also know that when I have the baby and people ask about my writing, anxiety will surf through me, because having a baby was a good decision for my heart, but bad for my career, and now it’s too late to do anything about it except feel, without wanting to, resentment at how the baby hampers my life, which will make me feel trapped, and I’ll spiral into a suicidal despair, unable to get out of bed, and they’ll have no choice but to lift me out of my apartment by crane. No, I cannot have a baby on my own. Next year. Next year, I’ll do it.
I log out of California Cryobank and on to OkCupid. I spend hours looking at human faces, but I’m not quite ready to go back out there. Life would be so much more convenient, though, if they just lumped these two websites together. Then I could add baby and man to cart, click free shipping, proceed to checkout, and expect my family to be delivered in three to five business days.