* * *
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WE RECORDED THE first episode in Kate’s converted garage office space. “Hey, welcome to Forever35, a podcast about the things we do to take care of ourselves,” Kate said to kick things off. “I’m Kate Spencer.”
“And I’m Doree Shafrir,” I said.
“And we’re not experts, we’re just two friends who love to talk about serums,” Kate said.
After much discussion, this was the tagline we’d landed on that we felt perfectly reflected who we were and what the podcast was. Just a few years ago, I would have scoffed at the idea of doing a podcast about self-care. Taking care of myself was something that I never consciously thought about. I was too wrapped up in worrying what other people thought about me to look inward and care about myself. But now, I didn’t even mind that the term self-care had itself become a ubiquitous chimera, at once everywhere but always just out of reach. There was a Goop-y version of self-care, one that said you could only be taking care of yourself if you spent a lot of money and had access to exclusive things, like $400 facials and $75 candles. Instead, our version of self-care—which posited that paying off your student loans was just as much self-care as the ideal night cream—felt more down-to-earth and accessible. And along those lines, we wanted to make it clear that we weren’t approaching beauty and skin care topics from an expert point of view—we’d never been beauty editors or worked at women’s magazines; we weren’t even skin care “influencers.” We were just two women aging out of marketers’ target demographic who needed an outlet to discuss whether eye creams were a scam, and we wanted to let our listeners know that it was okay for them to discuss these topics, too.
It seemed appropriate to have Jane Marie on as our first guest—she had coined the podcast’s name, after all—and we recorded the episode, our second, at her studio. As we sat around the table, the conversation flowed. Jane was funny. We were good at this! Kate had never hosted a podcast before, but she was a natural.
The podcast was a success in a way we hadn’t really anticipated. We thought our conversations would strike a chord with women our age, but we hadn’t realized how many women like us had felt that they weren’t really being seen—by the media, by their friends, by their partners. Suddenly we were inundated with emails and voicemails from women grateful to be listening in on our conversations. They asked us for advice not just about night creams and serums and lip gloss, but also about whether they should break up with their boyfriends and girlfriends, how to deal with a mean boss, what to do when all your friends were pregnant and you weren’t, how to find a therapist. They wanted to know which books they should read and which TV shows they should watch. They told us we felt like their big sisters and their best friends.
We were thrilled with how the podcast had so quickly found an audience, of course, but it was also a bit overwhelming. On top of my job at BuzzFeed, Kate and I were prepping the shows, booking the guests, editing the episodes (our producer, Samee, did the actual editing, but we sent notes), and of course, recording the episodes, which we were doing at night, usually in Kate’s converted garage office space. It was a lot of work, but I was invigorated in a way I hadn’t been in years. Even before the show had launched, we had signed our first advertiser, a website that helped people book vacation homes. I’d never sold ads before, but I sort of knew how they worked thanks to Eggcellent Adventure, and I decided that I could wing it, at least at first—and it would save us the commission that an ad network would charge us.
“I think you’ll be able to quit your job soon,” Matt said one day.
“No way,” I said. The podcast still felt like a side hustle to me. If we brought in some extra cash because of it, great, but it didn’t feel like it could be our full-time jobs.
“I think you’ll be making your BuzzFeed salary by August,” he maintained.
I wanted to believe him, and I desperately wanted to quit my job, but I was scared to be leaving a job that offered (relative) stability and health insurance, and even more scared to be doing it at forty. I had a feeling that if I left BuzzFeed, I might never have a full-time job again, at least not in media. I thought about all those meetings I’d been in over the years. There were never any women in their forties and fifties, just dudes. It seemed like just another way that older women were put out to pasture—certainly taking a hiatus from full-time work might not be the best idea from a career standpoint. And I knew countless freelancers who would have killed for a staff position, which are increasingly fewer and farther between. It seemed foolhardy to just give it up. I also needed to admit to myself that I had been holding on to the BuzzFeed job in part because of the promise of twenty weeks of paid maternity leave—a benefit that I wouldn’t get if I were freelancing. But I’d already put the car before the baby, as it were. And with no pregnancy in sight, it was starting to seem quixotic to hang on to the job any longer than I needed to. In fact, staying at BuzzFeed to get paid maternity leave was starting to just throw the fact that I wasn’t pregnant into even greater and sharper relief.
At the same time that Forever35 was taking off, my job at BuzzFeed became even more challenging. I worked for a few weeks on a profile of the diversity officer at a startup in San Francisco, but when I sat down to write the story, it felt trite and superficial. I turned in a draft to my editor, who responded that she thought it needed a lot of work, and as I tried to revise it, I felt the motivation leaching out of my body. I realized that despite the stability that my job offered, I didn’t want to be doing this anymore. I didn’t want to be working for someone else, making money for someone else, following someone else’s rules about what I could and couldn’t say on social media or where I donated money.
I was also keenly aware that if I had been forty and single, without the support and financial safety net of a partner—and the ability to get on Matt’s health insurance—I probably wouldn’t be able to quit, or at least, it would have been a lot harder. It felt so unfair that so many self-help books just breezily advise you to take that leap of faith! Quit your job! Start your company! The rest of your life starts NOW! The truth is, so many of the people who are able to do that are already in positions of privilege. I wasn’t blind to the privileges that I had that allowed me to even consider taking that leap of faith, to be a rat in a maze and finally see the way out.
* * *
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STILL, I WAS scared shitless when, just a few months shy of my forty-first birthday in 2018, I called my editor, Ellen, to tell her I was leaving. I liked Ellen a lot—she was a great editor, supersmart, and around ten years younger than me.
“You know…I had a feeling you might say that,” she said.
“Really?” I said.
“I was going to talk to you about it at your review,” she said. Oh right, I thought—I was supposed to have my review the following week. So, in other words, I’d just made Ellen’s life easier because she didn’t have to have an awkward conversation with me about whether I really wanted this job, which as everyone knows is just code for your manager trying to get you to quit so they don’t have to fire you.
When I told Ben, he seemed surprised that I was leaving for a podcast. “Huh,” he said, in the way he said “huh” when he didn’t really understand why you were doing what you were doing. “Well, I’m going to miss you,” he said.
“I’ll miss you, too,” I said, and I meant it, but I also wasn’t going to miss BuzzFeed, or working for Ben, because it was time to move on.
The last time I’d left a job without something else lined up had been when I was laid off from the Observer, and now that it was done, I started to question my decision. What if the podcast didn’t work out? What if, after a few months, I wasn’t making any money and I had to start looking for a new job and now suddenly I was old and out of the loop, and no one was returning my calls? Then what? I’d been turning around these “what if” scenarios in my m
ind so many times that I worried they’d become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But instead of seeing it as a leap into the big, deep, scary unknown, I needed to see it as taking charge of my own career destiny. After six years at BuzzFeed and more than fifteen years working for other people, I could define my own lane. In my forties, it was time to start working for myself—and being myself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Around the same time that I quit my job, we did another egg retrieval—our fourth. The meds and injections now felt routine; it hardly even seemed noteworthy that we were doing another round of IVF, except that Matt was working eighty-hour weeks, including a weekly trip to New York. He’d been hired to be the host of After Trek, the aftershow for the new Star Trek: Discovery, and it shot live on Sunday nights in New York. So on Friday night after he left work—he was now a writer on the sitcom The Goldbergs—he got on a plane, then came back on the six a.m. flight on Monday morning and went straight to work. We recorded Eggcellent Adventure on Wednesday mornings because it was the only time during the week that he was guaranteed to be around. It was a grueling schedule, and even though he loved the work, he was miserable.
“I’m too stressed,” he said. “I just don’t think it’s a good time to do a retrieval.”
“I’m forty,” I said. “We’re running out of time.” We only had one normal frozen embryo left, and I was worried that if we transferred it and it didn’t work, then the window when I could potentially make more normal embryos was rapidly closing.
So we went ahead with it, but it felt like one of those decisions where neither of us was totally happy. I was annoyed that Matt wasn’t fully on board, that he had taken on so much work that it was literally draining us. It felt like we were on a road trip that had gone on too long, and we were bickering about finding a gas station, and I wanted to stop for the night and he wanted to keep going, and finally we pulled into a crappy motel on the side of the freeway where I wasn’t able to sleep anyway because we could hear the couple next door having sex. Except we weren’t on a road trip—we were talking about possibly creating another human life.
The day of the retrieval, having pumped myself full of meds for the previous two weeks, I was wheeled into the operating room, while Matt walked into what he referred to as the clinic’s “jerk-off room” to collect the sperm that we’d need to fertilize my eggs.
The jerk-off room was a frequent topic of conversation on Eggcellent Adventure. Matt described it as almost comically unsexy, with a sad armchair covered with a disposable pad, a three-ring binder filled with pornographic DVDs, and some old Playboys. We’d heard from listeners who opted not to use the jerk-off room—some because they were Orthodox Jews, and they were having sex with a “fertility condom” instead, then rushing their specimen to their clinic within an hour. Another listener wrote in to ask for advice on setting up an in-home jerk-off room for her and her wife’s friend, who was donating his sperm to them, and she asked what kind of vessel we thought was best for collection. We suggested a ramekin, and she henceforth deemed herself the “Ramekin Queer.” But Matt had to use the jerk-off room, and just the thought of it seemed to make him depressed.
Going into the morning of the retrieval, my numbers looked good, and after the retrieval, Dr. Baek seemed cautiously optimistic. We ended up with five fertilized eggs—a lower number than we’d ever gotten, but at least something to work with. Now we just had to wait five or six days to see how many of the embryos would make it to the blastocyst stage.
That weekend was the last episode of Matt’s stint as the host of After Trek, and I made the trip to New York to watch the show in person. It was taped in a studio on the far west side of Manhattan, near the Hudson Tunnel, a weirdly desolate neighborhood especially on a freezing Sunday afternoon. Going into the weekend, we had no idea how many embryos were still growing, and I kept checking my phone because I wasn’t sure when we’d get word.
Finally, my phone rang. It was Dr. Baek. “None of your embryos made it to blastocyst,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“How…how is this possible?” I asked. I was pacing the hallway outside the studio, trying to keep my voice down and also trying not to cry.
“I know, it’s really disappointing,” she said. “The good news is, I’m confident that it’s a sperm issue. So if you wanted to do another round, it’s likely you wouldn’t have the same problem, because Matt was on planes every week and so stressed.”
“Okay,” I said. I couldn’t think about doing another round right now. I hadn’t even contemplated the possibility that none of the embryos would develop to the blastocyst stage—that had never happened before. Just when I thought I had seen every curveball that IVF treatment could throw at me, it managed to come up with yet one more. I was almost numb to the news—it just reminded me that there was absolutely nothing fair or rational about this process—and realized that I’d held out hope even when it didn’t look like things were trending in the right direction. What was the point anymore of even holding on to any hope? I wondered. Every time I’d done that, I’d been devastated.
Matt was angry. “I knew we should have waited,” he said. “I told you that my sperm wasn’t going to be good.”
“Can you just let me be upset about this without telling me that you were right? It’s really annoying,” I said. He skulked off as I tried not to cry. I didn’t need to be reminded that Matt had been right. Shouldn’t I be allowed to try without being made to feel like a failure for the attempt? I was angry at him, but I was mostly angry at our situation. All I had to show for nearly two years of fertility treatments was a podcast, a repaired uterus, and a lot of debt.
* * *
—
ONE OF THE things that is hard for people who aren’t dealing with infertility to understand is how endless and hopeless it can feel when you’re in the midst of it. Sure, there are those lucky people who only have to do one or two retrievals, their first transfer works, and whaddya know, they also had insurance coverage, so the whole thing cost them almost nothing. We did not have insurance coverage, and I was getting to the point where I felt like I was literally just throwing money away. But it’s also hard to know when to stop, because it’s hard not to get swayed by the sunk cost fallacy—that is, thinking, Well, I’ve spent SO MUCH money and time on this whole process already that I should just continue, when in actuality, if you stop, you won’t spend any more money or time, and if you keep going, you will definitely spend more money and time, and you still might not end up with a baby.
We told ourselves that every retrieval (after our second) was the last one. We were done. And after this retrieval, when none of the blastocysts had been normal, I wanted to be done, I really did, but there was a part of me that refused to believe that it wasn’t going to work for us, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Deep down, I believed that our luck had to turn around. The whole time we were doing IVF, I hadn’t truly allowed myself to consider all the possible outcomes; I had just assumed that we would end up with a baby that was biologically ours at the end. That was why we were doing this, right? That was what the doctors told us would happen. But I was choosing to ignore the fact that IVF does not give one single shit about how carefully you followed the protocols, or if you’d bought a car for a baby, or stayed at a job so you’d have maternity leave for a baby, or how much you thought you deserved this baby. IVF is here to say, “Who the hell do you think you are? You don’t deserve this baby. You don’t deserve anything.” IVF was going to make me its bitch and it was going to make sure I knew it.
We decided to do one more retrieval—just one more. This would be the last one, definitely, for sure, 100 percent. I was feeling confident going into it—after he had stopped traveling every weekend, Matt’s sperm was looking a little better. IVF thought I was its bitch? I would make IVF my bitch.
We did the fifth retrieval and ended up with four blastocysts to bio
psy for genetic testing. I was cautiously optimistic; we were already ahead of where we’d been on the last round, and I’d gotten at least one normal blastocyst from the previous three rounds. A few days later, I was sitting in my car after visiting a friend, about to drive off, when Dr. Baek called. She sounded subdued.
“So none of the embryos that we sent to be tested would be compatible with life,” she said. “They were all abnormal.” She paused. “I wasn’t expecting this. I’m really sorry, Doree.”
I wanted to be angry at someone, but I didn’t know who. I knew Dr. Baek had done all she could. I couldn’t be angry at Matt—it wasn’t his fault that his sperm was “dumb.” I could be angry at myself for thinking that IVF was foolproof, or for waiting so long to try to have kids, or for being born with a uterine septum, or or or…Or I could just be angry, full stop.
A year ago, I’d been impressed by the depths of the rage of the beautiful woman I’d encountered in a barre class, the grimness with which she was “working on herself” in front of the mirror, but I hadn’t fully identified with her anger. Now, I realized, women are conditioned to believe that their anger not only isn’t valid but also is something that needs to be contained or channeled into something productive. I was rejecting that notion. I just wanted to acknowledge that what I was going through sucked, and I was allowed to be really fucking angry about it, and I wanted everyone else to know how angry I was, too.
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