All Your Eggs in One Basket

Damn blogspot. If you shift arrow to select, and release your fingers in just the wrong order, it deletes your freaking post.

So I’m catching up with my reading, and reading an article in Marie Claire magazine about the fertility industry, and it’s ability now to extract and freeze eggs. Or extract, fertilize and freeze eggs. The author, a 36 year old woman in a committed relationship (albeit not married) is freaking out about her dwindling fertility. She writes about her experience attending an industry sponsored seminar, and her other conversations with doctors and other specialists. The fertility industry, being the big money maker that it is, has made leaps and bounds in their “success rates” in the last ten years. The cost of an average procedure? Hormone shots, extraction, fertilization (if you chose) and the initial freeze? Pretty pricey – between 13 and 14K. Plus a monthly storage fee that averages about $400. Hm. Who can afford this? Only affluent women…just like only affluent women can afford IVF.

So the author is whining about how she frets about her clock and her dwindling fertility. She’s thinking about “us”, she and her partner, and spending some time together and actually making an “us”. I understand and sympathize, really I do.

Modern medicine makes it possible for a woman to extend her child bearing years well into her mid forties, and eventually into her fifties. So…a woman can have a child at 45. When the child is 20, mom will be sixty five. And what about dad? So…the mother might be in menopause by the time the child is five. And when the child is ten, or twelve, and still wants to play...what happens when the parents can’t? Does mom say “sweetie, I can’t play with you because now I’m too old. And when I was younger I spent my days “figuring out who I was” and traveling to Thailand or Sydney or wherethefuckever to do so?”

Perhaps the author is not whining. Perhaps this choice is right for her. I hear this constantly from other people “I’m/We’re not ready to have kids” year after year, until they are staring down the barrel of their late thirties and trying desperately to conceive. There will never be a right time. You could spend a lifetime with someone and never have an “us”. You could spend years with someone and never know them, or they you. So why not seize the moment? Have a child. Everything will work itself out. You’ll never have enough money, or a reduced amount of debt, or finish that degree, or get that awesome job.

Our youth obsessed culture promotes selfishness, I think. While we strive and strive to stay young “Sixty is the new Twenty Five”!!!! What legacy are we leaving for our children? Nothing you do will ever be good enough unless you remain youthful looking until you die? Will one day it be acceptable for our bodies, upon death, to rapidly age to our true age? What does our quest for perfection tell our sons and daughters? You are nothing unless you are beautiful, or handsome, or the best, or the brightest or the fastest. What does waiting until you are…well, old, to have a child say to your children? It says that your life was more important than theirs, I think. That you loved yourself more, loved yourself so much that you put off a major event in life. How would you feel as that eleven year old girl whose parents couldn’t play with her in the yard?