by Jen Glantz
“Mom.” I take a Lamaze-like deep breath, attempting to remain calm. “Why are you talking about my female reproductive organs and their potential expiration date at the gym?”
“He just asked me about your marital status,” she goes on, casually, as if she’d been talking about me to Great Aunt Rita or Rabbi Solomon, not a stranger as he bench-pressed a hundred pounds. “He asked about your dating life, and I told him it could use some work.”
That was a nice way of describing it. If my dating track record had a FICO score, it would be in the 500 range. Lenders would view me as high risk, which is also how I viewed most of my dating prospects.
I tend to date guys who are traffic signs. Yield: I have commitment issues. Stop: I’ll never be able to love you as much as you love me. Caution: There’s a dead-end up ahead, baby. The Mr. Wrong Ways, Slow Downs, Do Not Enters.
Initially it didn’t occur to me that this is a problem; after all, I’m just a girl in her late twenties, casually dating and trying to figure out how to tap into her 401(k) to pay off her pesky American Express bills. It wasn’t until a support group of my married, almost-married, and want-to-be-married-ASAP friends started analyzing my dating techniques and making me aware of my biological clock that I started to think, Why do my life plans look like scribbled directions on a used Starbucks napkin?
“You have a type, you know?” my three-months-pregnant, two-kids-deep friend said to me one evening while we were setting up her tub for bath time. “Unemployed.” She stuck up one finger, preparing to tick off a whole list of issues. “Introverted. Doesn’t know where he’ll be in six months.”
I fumbled around with a rubber ducky dressed in a St. Patty’s Day outfit, making him zoom across the foamy bathtub water. I wanted to object, deny her ludicrous claims, tell her she was wrong, that you can’t group people into buckets based on shared traits when it comes to matters of the heart. But I knew she was right. She was able to summarize my last three flings with three blunt—and true—observations.
I surrendered peacefully, sticking both suds-soaked hands up in the air. “So?”
“Maybe it’s time to catch up to the rest of us and break your mold. Date someone different?” She rubbed her hands in a circle around her belly, her own genie in a bottle of sorts. “Date like you have a plan.”
I rolled my eyes, mumbling under my breath, “I’ll date because I still can.”
I tried dating like that before, like I have a five-year game plan in my back pocket and I’m looking for someone, on date 1, to go along with it. Want to know how those dates always end? Poorly. I find myself wondering if I would be absolutely content waking up next to them in sixty-five years, and this is before the appetizers even show up.
“What am I supposed to ask these guys on date 1?” I asked, imagining myself in front of them, sipping my happy-hour-priced wine. “ ‘Where do you see yourself in say ten to fifteen years?’ ‘Do you want your kids to grow up religious?’ ‘How do you feel about retiring in Boca Raton?’ ” All I really want to ask, right off the bat, is where his last adventure was and if he’d like to be a little reckless with me and go skydiving next month in India.
“No,” she said, rolling her eyes and wiping the bubbles off her rose-gold wedding band with an Aladdin-themed towel. “But you can at least ask them if this is going to be a giant waste of your time.”
There’ll come a day when you’ll notice that your Facebook newsfeed has become a game of “Who’s Who?” None of your friends have the same last name as they did when you knew them in kindergarten or high school, let alone five years ago in college, and it doesn’t help that their profile pictures are no longer of them taking a duck-faced selfie; those pictures have been replaced by their diapered child wearing a onesie that says “Potty Like a Rock Star.” The days of scrolling through your newsfeed and laughing out loud at photos that your friends posted at 4:00 a.m. from a cash-only bar on the Lower East Side are over. Eyes half open, hands in the air on the dance floor, strobe lights, crushed beer cans—that’s all been replaced by videos of their babies burping up applesauce and status updates about how little Gemma Jane took her first poo-poo in the big girl’s toilet.
I have no idea how I became the super-single friend. It’s as if I woke up in an alternative universe one day, looked around, and realized everyone else had moved on. I’m the one who gets dating advice spoon-fed to me by married friends who, eight years ago, believed marriage was for boring people. How did all of my friends turn into these family-oriented adults before their twenty-seventh birthday while I was still off living in my third state, working on my fourth job, and dating my fifth Mr. Wrong since graduation? The Venn diagram of our lives is shrinking in the center, and the only way to make sure there’s still some overlap is for me to be okay with living my life and to stay involved in theirs—as a friend and as an occasional babysitter (for fifteen dollars an hour, thank you very much.)
• • •
I put all the ingredients to make my kale cookies on the checkout counter and tell my mom to put the topic of egg freezing back on the shelf. She virtually pinky-promises me she’ll make an effort to stop discussing my dating life—or the time left on my biological clock—with people at the gym.
But I have a feeling it’ll come up again—just not the very next morning, at 7:00 a.m., while I’m brushing my teeth and watching The Today Show. There it is, a banner flashing across my TV screen: “Buying peace of mind,” more young women save up for egg freezing.
Matt Lauer is telling me—and every other girl who can’t hear the chime of wedding bells in the near future—that it might be smart for me to put my goods in a cooler.
Listen here, Matt: the only thing us single gals want to hear this early on a Wednesday morning is some comforting half-lie, like how coffee is good at preventing wrinkles or how chocolate helps us lose weight.
Welcome to my biological clock dream team, I say out loud to Mr. Lauer. Make room, mom’s friend at the gym and fertile married friends.
I have two and a half years left before I’ll be blowing out thirty candles on top of a Carvel Fudgie the Whale ice cream cake. Even if I go on eighteen Tinder dates a week and make goo-goo eyes at the man of my dreams, I’m not so sure that I’m prepared, right now, for marriage and kids. I want all of that eventually, when I’m ready—not when the world or, unfortunately, my reproductive parts, tell me I have to be ready. I have a feeling I’ll need to be steered onto that path, slowly, as one is led into a haunted house: with baby steps and maybe a blindfold.
All of a sudden, before I’m even able to properly caffeinate myself, I feel a suffocating amount of pressure to change my dating ways and explore the option of freezing my future babies. Everything around me starts to get blurry.
“Kerri?” I cry out, desperate for backup. Because what are roommates for if not to be there for you when you’re about to pass out on the bathroom floor because your life is literally spinning faster than you can catch up with it? But she’s still asleep, wisely avoiding eye-opener hour with Matt Lauer.
I’m going to pass out, I start whispering out loud, grabbing onto the edges of the bathroom sink, breathing heavily into a roll of bargain toilet paper I ordered off Amazon for ninety-nine cents per roll. I’m going to pass out. I’m going to . . .
When I wake up, I see Matt’s eyes shining right into mine from the now-muted TV screen, blinking and winking as if he and I both know what I should do. I pick up my phone and call for help.
“Siri,” I say, knowing she’ll be there to listen to my latest quarter-life crisis; she always is. “Where does one go to freeze their eggs in New York City?”
I immediately try to cancel that request. I want to start over. I want to be more specific, because I don’t have health insurance or the kind of disposable income that makes me privy to luxuries like seeing a Broadway show, shopping at Bergdorf Goodman, or freezing my eggs. “Siri, is there a Groupon deal for egg freezing in New York City?”
Later
, after getting nowhere with Siri, I decide to take a stroll over to the fertility clinic and chat with someone in person. I have a lot of questions, like how many eggs they freeze. And where they freeze them. And what happens if the place goes out of business in five years. Do I get my eggs back from them, and if so, do I put them in my freezer next to the pot roast and rugelach? How unromantic would it be if, let’s say, five years from now, I have a nice guy over for dinner and he pulls out a Tupperware from the freezer and asks if he should warm it up as a side dish? I would have to say, “No, sweetheart. Those are not pork dumplings; those are eggs. From my ovaries. Extracted through my you-know-what.”
I don’t plan ahead for anything, so maybe everyone around me is right. Maybe since marriage and kids aren’t on my immediate to-do list, I should go ahead and keep a little something stored away for a rainy day—or, say, when I finally decide I’m ready and my body decides that I’m not.
I find myself in an intense staring contest with the glass doors of a midtown Manhattan fertility clinic, pacing back and forth outside, twisting the door open and shut, and shutting and opening it again before I’m finally ready to take a couple of steps and go inside.
“Well, hello there, sweet peach,” the receptionist drawls. She has thick, boomerang-shaped eyebrows and hair that almost touches the ceiling. I practically crawl toward her.
“Go ahead and tell me your name, age, and health insurance provider.”
Her questions give me something to focus on—and alleviate the urge to run right back outside.
“I’m Jen, I’m twenty-seven, and I don’t have health insurance.”
“No problem, honey bear,” she says, her southern accent making my heart feel like mush, like I’m the most special person who has ever walked through these doors. “We have quite a few payment plan options for you.”
Slow down, lady. I snap out of the cradle of her kindness and southern charm and realize I’m probably going to have to stop at Bank of America and apply for a loan on behalf of my neglected love life.
“Fill out this paperwork, baby girl, take a seat, and the doctor will see you in about four minutes.”
She hands me a packet of paperwork, and I take a seat in a white velvet chair trimmed with green thread. Everything is happening so fast. I needed a moment to settle in, look at the soothing watercolor paintings on the wall, flip through a parenting magazine, and unwrap a hard candy or two. I figured I would swing by, get a tour of the joint, and come back eventually—not fill out paperwork and make the hard decisions now.
“Actually, I’m not here to do anything today,” I say, getting up and handing her back the blank paperwork. I’m terrified they’re going to stick me on an operating table the second I sign on the dotted line. I’m not ready for all of this. Not now.
“Don’t worry, sugar cube. Today we’re only chatting,” she says. I wonder if she keeps an Excel spreadsheet of ridiculous yet soothing names to call prospective patients who walk through the door with their knees knocking together in pure and utter fear.
She leads me down a bright hallway into a room with black and white photos of the beach on the wall. I wonder what it would be like to be a hermit crab or an abalone snail; they both stay fertile for life. They’re in no rush to find their mate. They are my spirit animals.
The room I’m sitting in is sterile and stark, as if it was painted over with a coat of Wite-Out. There’s a circular table in the middle of the room with one box of Kleenex on top. I stuff a few in my purse, because tissues are expensive.
From my previous life experience, I know that when there’s a table with nothing else on it but a half-empty box of tissues, that means there’s a good chance someone is going to cry. And I know it isn’t going to be me.
The doctor walks in and shakes my hand. He has a thin mustache and thick glasses, his shirt buttoned to the top. He starts off our conversation with a question I wish I thought about before I walked into the clinic.
“Why are you here?”
“Matt Lauer told me to come,” I answer automatically.
He tilts his head and narrows his eyes. “The guy on TV?” he asks, wondering if maybe Matt and I are related. Perhaps he’s my uncle, or I’m his distant cousin.
“Well, I’m twenty-seven,” I say, jumping right into the reason for our cryptic exchange on a Wednesday afternoon.
“You’re only twenty-seven?” he asks, scanning the paperwork I never filled out. “Then why are you here?”
I look at him, reminding him of my previous answer before going on. “People,” I start to say, raising my eyebrows and lowering my voice, as if those people are in this room with us. If he hasn’t deemed me crazy already, I’m sure he’s marking that box on my chart right now.
“People say that since I’m almost thirty and not on the fast path toward marriage, that I should consider sticking my babies in the freezer.” I point down toward my pelvis.
He leans back in his chair, removes his glasses, and nibbles on one of the stems, probably thinking that what he thought would be a quick ten-minute consultation about egg fertility is now going to turn into a thirty-minute therapy session.
“You’re only twenty-seven,” he says, this time more slowly, in case I missed it the first time. “You have years, years, and years before you should start thinking about doing this. People do it to have as an insurance plan, but I think you’re a little too young for this option.”
“Well, I’m not in a serious relationship.” I clear my throat, holding back that misty feeling I get before tears fall. “I’m not in any kind of relationship, so I don’t see myself married with kids or pregnant anytime soon, I guess.”
“How do you know?” If only he knew. Clearly no one sent him the file on Jen Glantz’s botched dating attempts.
“I guess I don’t know. I guess I have no idea.”
He puts his glasses back on. “There’s a lot of talk in the media and online about egg freezing, and how it’s better if you do it younger. But I don’t think that’s true.” He clasps his hands together on the table. “It’s a slippery slope. Are people going to start doing it when they turn eighteen? Is this going to be the new sweet sixteen gift?”
My eyes bulge at his honesty. Shouldn’t he be trying to convince me why I should go home and cash in one of my savings bonds or investment CDs for some pricey procedure?
“There’s no right age, Ms. Glantz. There’s not even a guarantee that this works.” I exhale a load of pressure and inhale the smell of hand sanitizer. “I can tell you that I think you’re too young, but if you find yourself in the same position you’re in now at, say, thirty-four, then come back and we’ll chat.”
I look confused, disappointed, like I’m being pulled in two different directions by competing schools of advice that my body doesn’t want to subscribe to either way. The world is telling me to freeze my eggs, and the guy with the freezing power is telling me to get back on JDate and live my life.
I get up from the chair and head for the door to leave. He asks me to sit back down. Maybe he’s changed his mind; maybe someone just buzzed him with a file on my hopeless rom-com of a love life.
“My daughter is a few years older than you,” he says, taking off his doctor jacket and putting on his invisible dad baseball cap. “And the other night, over dinner, I asked her about freezing her eggs.”
I let out a nervous laugh. “I bet that dinner didn’t end well.”
“She still won’t talk to me,” he says, laughing and shaking his head. “But all I meant by it was, ‘You’ve been married for a few years. Have you thought about having babies?’ But I didn’t know how to say that directly. Sometimes people don’t always know how to say in the right way what they mean.”
I don’t know why, but in that moment, I start crying, unraveling those stolen tissues from my purse like a magician pulling scarves out of his sleeve.
“So your married friends, your parents, and this Matt Lauer guy, what they’re really trying to say is, ‘Do yo
u want to have babies eventually?’ They care about you and want to make sure you think about that before it’s too late. If you don’t, you’ll really have to spend a lot of money to get other people to help you think about it.”
I smile at him, completely reassured. He opens the door and hands me the box of tissues.
“Keep them. And Jen,” he says, as if we’re longtime pals, as if we often have conversations around circular tables about my reproductive organs. “Enjoy every moment of your plan A, and don’t feel so rushed to find your plan B.”
To me, there’s never been an age limit on finding love or starting a family of my own. It happens whenever it happens, and when it happens for me, whether it’s at age thirty-one or forty-five, I’ll figure out the details then.
I walk by the receptionist’s desk one last time.
“Call us when you’re ready, cutie pie.” She hands me the doctor’s business card, and I clutch it close to my body for a couple of minutes before sticking it in the bottom of my purse to live, for maybe years, beside the expired Bed Bath & Beyond coupons, loose Tic-Tacs, and uncapped pens.
“When I’m ready,” I say, exiting the doors and realizing I’m in no rush to figure out when that will be.
chapter twenty-one
DTW to AWOL
It’s 3:00 a.m. and I’m at the airport, alone, in Detroit, a city that I’ve never been to before, looking at the reflection of a person who faintly resembles an exhausted version of myself in the bathroom mirror. I haven’t closed my eyes in twenty-three hours. It’s been a while since I’ve stayed up that long, but I’ve been stuck; I’ve had no other place to go.
I lean forward, my lips tingling centimeters away from the smooth surface of the glass. The face I see has more lines on it than I remember, my forehead is beginning to look like the staff on a piece of sheet music, and though my acne has packed up its bags and skipped town years ago, it has left its mark on me like an ex-boyfriend. My eyes are drooping into cartoonish teardrops, like a supersad puppy.