Motherhood, Rescheduled: The New Frontier of Egg Freezing and the Women Who Tried It by Richards Sarah Elizabeth

Author:Richards, Sarah Elizabeth [Richards, Sarah Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2013-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

6. Time

Monica

On a chilly February morning after Adam left for work, Monica moved her belongings out of his yellow bungalow. She tucked the wedding rings they had ordered a year earlier into his nightstand drawer and threw away the semen collection cup her doctor had given her for getting a test sample from him. She was surprised she didn’t cry when she carried the last box past the two big flowerpots on the porch to her car.

When the raw grief emerged a few days later, Monica tried to comfort herself by creating a tidy narrative: She had given the relationship her best effort and could walk away without regret. She had enjoyed her years with Adam and was proud of the skills she had learned in therapy. She would learn from her mistakes: she wouldn’t move in with someone until she was engaged; she would approach relationships more slowly. Although Adam’s declaration that he didn’t love her enough stung her to her core, she felt an enormous relief to stop working so hard on something that wasn’t working.

A few months later, she decided to begin dating again and reactivated her account on Yahoo! Personals. A man she had been corresponding with before she met Adam contacted her and took her on a couple of dates. Monica liked Tony but felt weird kissing him. She and Adam had shared such a powerful physical connection that she found it strange having to get to know someone else’s body again. Tony’s stories weren’t as entertaining as Adam’s. His sense of humor wasn’t as sharp. Getting to know him just made her miss Adam more.

Meanwhile her fortieth birthday awaited. Monica told herself it was just another birthday, but she couldn’t ignore the significance of the milestone. It was a marker that her life was half over, a measure of what she had achieved and a reminder of what she hadn’t. She thought it was strange that she had felt so differently about her thirtieth birthday a short decade ago. She had just finished her MBA, but she hadn’t known what job she would take. She hadn’t known whom she would marry and when she would have children. She had assumed it was only a matter of time before the details were revealed.

As people take longer than in previous generations to finish their education, find a marriage partner, and become financially stable, there is increased social acceptance of an expanded period of so-called young adulthood. But if it’s true that “forty is the new thirty,” there doesn’t seem to be much tolerance for pushing it any further. Simply put, social representations of still unestablished, still unattached forty-year-olds become markedly less kind once they hit the milestone. Forty is a clear deadline not only in terms of fertility but also, it seems, in life.

Monica at least took comfort in the fact she didn’t look forty and had always been tickled when people feigned shock at her age, exclaiming, “You look so young!” But on some mornings, she couldn’t help noticing heavy bags under her eyes that made her look tired.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.