On the excruciating pain of eggs.
Over the course of 48 hours, the first boy I fall in love with posts a picture of his brand new baby on the internet and the last boy I fall in love with informs me that he’s getting a vasectomy. A million people text me about the former and I text no one about the latter. I purchase an online fertility test that comes in a millennial pink box as I bleed through the first pair of designer jeans I bought when I was 17, which only fit me now, almost twenty years later, because I have discovered that intermittent fasting allows me to continue a lifetime of disordered eating under the guise of self care. On the profile, I lie about how often I smoke cigarettes and shave four pounds off today's weight, my lowest adult weight. Four pounds. This is what I am concerned about when I remember that maybe I want to be a mother.
364 days prior to learning about the baby and the vasectomy and that an FSA covers at home fertility testing, I sign a mortgage on what was my grandparents home and is now my house. It is a house that stretches my financial well-being, is far too big for my emotional wellbeing and is the perfect size for my inability to make good decisions. Two days before I officially own this house/home/something in between, my divorce is finalized. The timing is not by design but is tragically poetic. As I emerge from the haze of an eleven year marriage marked by my ability to convince myself of all the things I did not want, I am met with the stark reality that though I still have a few good years of social desirability, my eggs do not.
40 days after I officially own this house/home/something in between, the world goes into lockdown and the construction - transforming my grandparents home to my house - halts. Isolation has gives me the space for clarity which is not at all comfortable. When I finally, months later, move into my new house/home/whatever it is I realise I’m not sure I have the energy to turn this recently purchased house back into a home, as it existed when it belonged to my grandparents. All of a sudden I care about marking the end of the week with care and community. I never engaged much with the formalities of Shabbat until the exponential distractions of a Friday night ceased. Now I cry during the progressive zoom services at the beauty of existential tradition. Like clockwork on Wednesdays, I throw out half of the Challah from the previous Friday. I never get to it and berate myself for lack of willpower if I do. I stop caring about all the things I used to care about and now care only about what happens if I never meet a person who wants to dance with me in the kitchen on a Friday night while candles melt behind us.
All I know is vague codependence. I marry at 22 knowing in real time what a bad decision I’m making and immediately suppress my desire to have children because the man I marry will make a terrible father and I know it and he knows it from the beginning. But I measure my worth by the men who love me, a terrible tick that I have had since my father leaves my mother for a tall blonde woman with tall blonde children, who I believe he loves more than me, for a time at least. A cliched trauma, but a trauma nonetheless.
In college I write an essay about how feminism gives me the option of being a housewife. This angers my first wave feminist professor and empowers my cavalier post adolescent petulance. A year later, still in college, I marry this handsome man who will make a terrible father and begin a decade long suppression of my maternal yearnings in order to carry with me the emotional upper hand of having someone who cares to legally share my bed.
The man who I marry at 22 and tells me he is having a vasectomy at 34 and I accidentally almost have a child twice. We think better of it once and I cry while the demo version of “Our House” cycles through my mind and the pretty doctor with the tiny waist and icy blue eyes deep cleans my body of any cells that might turn into a baby. The universe thinks better of it the second time though not without consequence and yet again I find my legs spread and my insides pulled apart, this time punctuated by the implantation of a small hormonal device, one that I still don’t quite understand the workings of, to ensure that this doesn’t happen again. Its implantation marks 6 months of excruciating pain. For me, not him. Always. When he tells me he is having a vasectomy, I tell him I am considering freezing my eggs. The pain is excruciating for me, not him, always.
