So when I saw the coyotes, my civilized conscious mind took the day off and I had a total out-of-body experience. My dogs were in the house, so my momma bear pack-leader mentality eclipsed any sanity I had on deck. I snatched some deer antlers that my dogs play with off the floor, ran outside, and swung the antler around, flailing toward them. My phrase of choice to yell? “How dare you!” with a weird Katharine Hepburn type of accent.
“Howww dahhhh you?!” I kept yelling. The coyotes just stared at me, unfazed. They looked more embarrassed for me than anything. I was two feet away from them before they actually fled, and from the way they ran off, it seemed like they were doing it just to make me feel better. To this day I still hear the coyotes up in the hills howling, and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t sound exactly like mocking laughter.
So that’s how I usually handle conflict with packs, but in the case of the Vegas tools, while my primal brain knew these heathens could kill me, my conscious brain figured they were so lathered up with self-tanner and cologne that their skin was very slippery, therefore I could probably slide away pretty easily if I had to. Amidst whatever yelling we were doing at each other, the guy with curly hair who worked very hard for his hair not to be curly said, “Why don’t you shut the fuck up?” When I heard this, I did indeed shut the fuck up. It got very quiet in the hallway. Fireball! I walked up to him, as shut the fuck up as one can be, and got close enough to get a whiff of his Cool Water. I leaned in, almost close enough to get rug burn from his impossibly coarse stubble, and delivered a line that haunts me to this day.
“I would like to see you try.”
Uh, what?
It got even quieter. The guys looked very confused. I also looked very confused, but I knew I had to be intimidating, so I raised my eyebrows, narrowed my eyes, and cracked a slight smile because that’s what I’ve seen gangsters to do in movies.
One of the guys told me to shut up; then I told him to “try.”
To what? To shut me up? Nobody knew what I meant, including me. Whenever I say something stupid, I have this Darwinian reaction to double down and believe in myself even more. Maybe it’s a natural animal instinct to avoid showing any weakness, because in that moment I was very much losing the fight as well as embarrassing my entire gender.
I don’t remember exactly what happened after that, but I did hear one of them yell the word bitch in my direction. Now, the word bitch actually doesn’t bug me that much, mostly because of how unoriginal it is. It’s borderline played out at this point. If you’re still running around calling a woman a bitch, you might as well be on Friendster.
To be clear, I absolutely am a bitch, but these guys had no way of really knowing that yet. They could have maybe deduced that I was nervous, unhinged, reckless, and a sartorial train wreck, but I wasn’t quite acting like a bitch yet. If you’ve known me a couple months, you can call me a bitch and chances are I’ll agree with you, but if you don’t even know me, I’d rather hear a fresh take. Like, if I were this guy, seeing a girl storm out of her room in pajamas and stomp toward five giant drunk men, yelling “I would like to see you try!” like a mobster from the forties, I wouldn’t dismiss her as a bitch. I’d say something like “Ma’am, you seem mentally unstable. Can I help you find your medication?”
Since bitch has become the go-to insult for any female who expresses an emotion and since for the most part it signifies that the insulter has run out of jabs, the tension deflated and I was snapped out of my adrenaline response. Once such a boring insult was employed, my amygdala realized I no longer needed its services because for me bitch is like the chloroform of words.
Hearing bitch also calmed me down because whenever a guy calls me that in an argument, it’s usually because he’s losing or is all out of interesting angles. In a moment of clarity, I realized that I wasn’t in a televised political debate. I didn’t have to keep arguing with these animals. I could just calmly call security and have them removed. I always want to give people the courtesy of telling them I’m calling security so they can at least get their shit together and have a fair chance of leaving with some dignity. These guys probably had duffel bags full of Axe body spray and toupee glue to gather up, and I wouldn’t want them to forget anything on their way back to (probably) Miami. I calmly said, “Anyway, guys, sorry about all this. I’m gonna go call security.”
I had taken no more than two steps when I heard one of them yell, “You know what you need? Some dick!”
The guys exploded in laughter.
Now, this was a situation I had not yet had the privilege of being in. Did these people really think that a penis was going to solve this conflict? Frankly, the last thing I needed was an anonymous dick anywhere near me. Look, I’m a big fan of dicks, but I have yet to come across a problem a dick can actually solve besides wanting to become a mother. Even most men I know would agree that their own dick is the source of most of their problems, so adding a miscellaneous dick to the equation would just further complicate things.
Look, dicks are great. I think we can all agree on that. They’re very awesome for, like, an hour at a time, but there are some drawbacks. Sometimes that awesome hour is accompanied by a bummer aftermath like a UTI or a visit to Planned Parenthood. Dicks also have the ability to give me a baby, which is the most stressful thing I can think of. But even without these side effects, dick was not going to get me out of this pickle.
I’ve never been trying to sleep with noisy people in the hallway and thought, “You know what this situation needs? A dick.” I mean, maybe if I can use your dick as an earplug? If each of them put a dick in their mouths so they’d stop being able to yell? Or maybe they could put all their flaccid dicks under the door so I couldn’t hear the racket from the hallway? Or if they used the most impressive dick of the bunch to cajole the women at the front desk to get me a later checkout so I can sleep in? Maybe if their dicks shot out sleeping pills so I could actually fall asleep? I’m genuinely trying to figure out why guys think dicks are these magical wands that contain the panacea for all stress. Unless they’re covered in Xanax and Nutella, in the long run most dicks cause me way more anxiety than they alleviate.
This weird night in Vegas haunts me to this day. I’m always trying to own my part in situations because that’s the only way for me to feel some power, especially in a case where I specifically feel powerless. Ultimately I think I could have handled this one with more grace and class, and likely should have just called security first, but my fear of “wasting time” usually prohibits me from asking someone to help me with something because I figure it’ll just be faster if I do it myself, a belief that has yet to yield a single positive result.
Now I’m not trying to solve sexism with this chapter. I can’t do that. I can hardly write about it as comprehensively as I would like to, much less solve it. Sometimes I can’t even see or feel sexism, but I’m going to try and do my part in trying to deconstruct it. Maybe cultural conditioning is to blame, maybe primal neurology, misguided parenting, the media. Or maybe it’s a tight knot of all of these things that needs to be delicately untied.
I lose a lot of sleep at night thinking about why some men need to be dismissive to women. When I look back at those guys in the Vegas hallway, I don’t feel anger, just overwhelming sadness for them. After learning that anger is just pain all dressed up in a scary yet cheap Halloween costume, I feel we’re somehow doing our men wrong. After all, “hurt people hurt people.” Maybe our men aren’t being seen or heard, or maybe they’re not growing up with role models that treat women with respect so they have no blueprint. Maybe nobody’s given them the tools to solve problem without their dicks. I’m not a sociologist, so I’ll let someone else more qualified dig into all that pathos, but I want to do my part in illuminating my experience because hearing other people share theirs is what gave me the courage to come to terms with mine.
Anyway, I hope this chapter doesn’t make you feel sorry for me
or anything because I’m obviously fine.
THE EGG FREEZING CHAPTER
“Good for you!”
This is a phrase you really need to get used to hearing if you decide to freeze your eggs. But if you decide not to freeze your eggs, good for you!
My egg-freezing journey started a long time ago. Specifically, thirty-four years ago when I was endowed with two X chromosomes. My fate was sealed when I grew up listening to Dolly Parton sing about working “nine to five” and watching Roseanne, who imprinted on my brain when I was twelve that children are an irksome financial drain. Roseanne also crystallized my worst nightmare about having a family: the presence of a hideous brown plaid couch in your living room with a crocheted blanket on it that can’t actually keep anyone warm.
My indifference toward motherhood was solidified by my extremely hardworking mother who had an all-consuming job. She worked in fashion, and it was very glamorous to me because when I was ten, going the mall was the epitome of glamour. The ladies spraying perfume testers! The generic, monotonous music blaring from Macy’s! The toe ring kiosks!
I would go to my mom’s office every day after school and wait for her to finish work. When I wasn’t busy shoplifting, I’d sit at her desk and play with her colored paper clips and acrylic stapler, dreaming about the day when I’d have my own office supplies. This seems like a silly dream, but back then, office work was much more charming because people used cute pens, notepads, and colored paper clips. Flash-forward to my office life now, which mostly consists of forgetting my passwords and constantly reinstalling Adobe Acrobat Reader.
The point is, the women I was influenced by either didn’t have kids, had kids and regretted it, or refused to be slowed down by the ones they (probably accidentally) had. I just wasn’t exposed to a paradigm that glorified having children. That may not be totally true. I did religiously watch Small Wonder, but it didn’t make me want kids, it made me want to be a robot, which I think I actually accomplished for a couple years in my twenties.
As a child I didn’t play with baby dolls or even Barbies. For whatever reason, I had the maternal instincts of a fire hydrant, so I felt it was a cruel joke when at seventeen, I got pregnant.
I used to get benign cysts on my ovaries when I was a teenager due to a steady diet of caffeine and adrenaline. One day I was getting them checked with some sort of internal camera-type thing that goes up your most valuable crevice and the doctor said, “Well, we got rid of the cysts but not the pregnancy.” He directed me downstairs to a doctor who would “terminate” said pregnancy. It was said with such nonchalance that it didn’t even occur to me that it was a thing. It felt more like another chore: Do math homework, pick up Vidal Sassoon hot oil, get a mani, terminate pregnancy.
In this other doctor’s office, who in retrospect I really hope was a gynecologist, I was given a clipboard with a comical number of papers on it to read and sign. One of them had a list of side effects of the vacuum aspiration procedure (of course I just had to Google that, since “vacuum thing” felt slightly insensitive and crass). One of the warnings was that the procedure could “possibly cause infertility.” My heart puked. Even though I had absolutely no ostensible proof that motherhood was fun, I guess my primal instincts took over. I may not have dreamed of being a mom, but I wasn’t ready to shut my uterus down before I knew who I was and what I wanted out of life. My imagination got the best of me, recoiling at how brutal a procedure must be to render a woman barren. I didn’t have enough life experience yet to know that the chances of something going wrong were tiny and that the procedure’s totally safe, but this was pre-WebMD, folks. I refused to sign it.
• • •
The doctor came in, and when he asked for my paperwork, I tried to speak, but ended up making erratic breathy grunts in an attempt to explain that I was too scared to do it. He seemed delighted to offer me an alternative solution. He told me he was working on an experimental procedure I should try: a cancer treatment in the form of a suppository that had a side effect of killing fetal cells. It had a 75 percent chance of working, and if I was scared of the invasive method, I should try this instead. I was too obtuse to understand what he was actually saying, but it seemed to make more sense at the time to my naive, completely uneducated brain. I uttered another primal noise that rhymed with “okay.”
I went home, and once my mom was asleep I jammed the suppository thing into myself and hoped for the best. For the next five days I was tired and dizzy, which I remember feeling like I deserved. I wasn’t particularly scared or crestfallen about the whole thing, maybe because I hadn’t told anyone, which would have made it all real. A week later, I put on my best Urban Outfitters tank top and went back to the doctor. I remember this tank top well. It was purple with lace around the top and had a little rose bow on it. I used to think it was my “good top,” but looking back, it’s hardly appropriate to wear as an undershirt. After I sat in the waiting room for an hour, the doctor called me in, gave me a sonogram, and casually told me the medication didn’t take.
The doc explained that I’d have to populate my undercarriage with the capsule yet again. He said something about the fetal cells growing. Growing? Excuse me? Growing? For whatever reason, that’s the word that made me realize what was actually happening. “Growing” triggered an emotional avalanche of seemingly endless tears and snot.
The next time I used the medication, it “worked.” I put that word in quotes because I don’t consider sitting in a bathtub crying and bleeding to be a feasible solution to one of the most complicated emotional issues a teenager could ever face. It might be an ideal solution to waking up in Mexico and discovering you’re missing a kidney, but not this.
I don’t know if the FDA ever approved this medication, and if it didn’t, I don’t think I want to know why, although it might explain a couple weird rashes and random eye-twitching I’ve had over the years.
I find regret to be an immense waste of time and energy, but I did learn a lot from that fiasco. Notably, shame sucks. I was too ashamed to ask questions or ask for help from someone who had terminated a pregnancy, so I ended up putting my health and trust into the hands of a mercenary, callous doctor who made me a guinea pig for his new product. I decided that from now on I would take responsibility for my body. I mean, that wouldn’t be the last weird, emotionally damaging thing that ended up inside me, but certainly it was the last unapproved medical suppository.
Fast-forward to me thirteen years later in yet another gynecologist’s office, this time without a life-changing, emotionally overwhelming predicament on my hands. She was poking around and suggested I get my fertility checked. She was staring right down the barrel of my orifice, so I’m really hoping the sight of it wasn’t what reminded her about my waning fertility. I like to tell myself she probably saw how gorgeous and unused it was, hence assumed I wasn’t out there in them streets getting sprayed with a deluge of sperm every night, thus I clearly needed to put some huevos on ice for when I did decide to hand-pick from my throng of enamored suitors. Yeah, let’s go with that.
It didn’t seem right. Why do I have to freeze my eggs when guys can have kids well into their sixties? I was so outraged by the biological injustice that I refused to make the appointment for two years. I made childish proclamations to justify my stubbornness: “I can have a kid whenever I want. I mean, I eat kale!” and “I’ll just adopt. So many kids need homes. At this point having your own kid is basically like buying a dog from a breeder.”
To be fair, some of my excuses may actually be true, but my motives for making them were coming from a deep denial of reality. The truth is, biology simply has not evolved fast enough to catch up with feminism. It will take a long time for our bodies to evolve to accommodate this whole ladies-having-dreams thing, which makes me want to punch Darwin in the face.
Worse, admitting I had to freeze my eggs made me feel like a failure. I failed to manage my time properly, I failed at taking
care of my health therefore my ovaries broke, I failed at figuring out how to want to marry someone, I failed at being a woman, I failed at being lovable. The only thing worse than feeling like I wasn’t loved was that it ultimately just made me feel old. Old people freeze their eggs, I thought. That’s what women do when they’re desperate, lonely, wrinkly. In my head, freezing your eggs basically came with a walker and a free set of cats.
My brain made up all sorts of conspiracy theories to justify my stubbornness. It was a scam, a pyramid scheme, a misogynistic racket, just another bullshit lie to keep women scared. The fact that egg freezing isn’t covered by insurance is outrageous, but in America neither is a lot of birth control, so I don’t even know where to direct my fury at this point. The two things that would postpone women’s having children aren’t covered by insurance. So in America, it’s literally cheaper to just have a kid before you’re ready.
After a big breakup with a guy I thought I’d marry (don’t ask), I finally lost enough hope for my future to be motivated enough to make an appointment with a fertility specialist. It was what I like to call a “fear-mality.” A fear-mality is something I like to pretend is a casual formality, but the undercurrent is paralyzing fear. Also filed under fear-mality: laser hair removal, dating, stretching, voting.
I explicitly remember not knowing what to wear to my fertility check. My instinct was to overcompensate and look super fertile. Like, maybe wear pink or something, since that’s always the color of ovaries in textbooks and educational posters. While searching for something perfectly pink, I realized I’d have to get naked for the exam, so I decided to just go with plaid pajama pants. And that decision basically sums up the theme of turning thirty: My laziness finally eclipsed my desperation.
I'm Fine...And Other Lies Page 10