Plan B

The conversation ended when a former poetry professor of mine, with whom I share a casual, yet fatherly, student-instructor relationship, asked me, “So you’re willing to let someone stick a needle in your vagina to get your eggs and then sell them for a back-up plan—BUT you’re not willing to initiate the first kiss with someone you just shared four hours of conversation and beers with?” Good question. 

It was a good question because I knew the answer. And somehow over time I managed to back myself onto a mental treadmill where I’m currently mourning the missed opportunity of selling my eggs.

That was supposed to be my Plan B. The thought process started benignly enough, after my friend Stephanie’s son, Tyler, had just gotten home from the hospital where he received stitches. He returned tired but triumphant, spinning in circles while Stephanie hollered at him to stop. It was the kind of amusing circus you would expect, and amidst the commotion I heard Stephanie tell her husband, “Leesh doesn’t even know if she wants to have kids.”

Whoa…Back up the truck!

I didn’t like the sound of that. Not wanting children and not having them are very different things. The latter just sort of happens to you quietly over time, like a sunburn, while the former is something that you make a conscious effort toward—which makes you categorically seem like the kind of woman who lounges in her sister’s back yard on Saturdays, asking her nephew to go grab her another watermelon wine cooler. I can see myself now, spreading a film of sunscreen onto my self-tanned legs.

No, I didn’t like the sound of this statement—me not wanting children. So I carefully corrected my friend , “Actually, I just don’t know if I’ll have them—it’s not that I don’t want them—I just might not have a chance to.”

“Why?”

Why? I know I’m not ancient, I’m successful in my career, and I fancy myself a fairly decent catch, it’s just that at some point talking about a house, kids, and a husband starts to make me feel like a bartender who says he’s saving for medical school.

I do realize that with the developments of modern medicine and the feminist movement I can in fact carry out the task of having a child without a man on hand. My friend Melanie has reminded me before that I’m just as well off to go for parenthood alone, because the “roosters rarely stick around to roost.” This doesn’t seem like new news, and I admire women who choose to brave it alone, but I find the idea of willfully putting myself into those circumstances sort of unthinkable.

For a number of reasons.

And it’s nothing to do with who I am. I’ve had people tell me I’d be a great parent and friends tell me I’d be a terrible mother. I don’t’ think much of those statements because I’ve never been convinced that personality or disposition alone makes a person more or less likely to be a suitable parent. Perhaps naively, I’ve always considered it a mixture of self-respect, circumstance, and chance. Where are you at in life, what kind of kid are you going to produce, and how will the likes of that person acclimate to the world you’ve created for them? It’s really a toss of the dice. What do I know, though? It’s just a guess.

With that in mind, I’ve always thought it best to try to create at least decent circumstances before I have children, that way I’d have more to work with when it comes to the chance part. The ingredients for the decent circumstances being: two sane and amiable people who have enough money to take care of a third person; health insurance; a car with less than 100,000 miles; a savings account with more than three digits; a mortgage; and all my credit cards paid off.

The last item of credit cards took so long to accomplish that I really haven’t gotten around to a few others, but I sold my ’97 Chevy about two years ago for a CRV, with AC, currently under the 100,000 mark. And the mortgage thing seems far less important in light of the recent housing meltdown. I’m doin’ all right, but this matter of two sane and amiable people is one that’s rather difficult to get around. It all begs the question: How much can I really negotiate with myself on this?

I draw the line at single parenthood. It’s a tough job—and I’m not going to pretend for even a second that I want or am able to do it. I don’t care if the rooster stays to roost at my house or not, at least my way I can garnish his wages and get the weekends off.

So when Stephanie looked at me confused and asked “why” I paused. With only mild annoyance. She loves me. She wants me to know a piece of the joyful mayhem that she has. Would I trade her? In a second. But I have to consider the possibility that it’s the not the hand I’ve been dealt. I’ve settled into thinking that if it happens great, and if not I’ll figure some other spectacular thing out. A Plan B, like vacationing. So I tell her, “You know, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to, I’m 32 and after 35 my chances will become more abysmal by the second.”

“Oh, GOD, Leesh, I hate when people say that about fertility and age.” Yeah, well I hate it too, because it reminds me of the statistics I heard on NPR. I realize that 32 is the new 15, but you can’t argue with science. It’s out of my hands.

Instead of going that route I explain, “I’m not saying it’s too late now, or that I can’t. I’m saying that I might not get to.”

“Well if you’re really worried about it, then freeze your eggs.” Well, to tell you the truth, I wasn’t really “worried” about it. My thoughts were less along the lines of sticking a needle in my ovaries and more along the lines of either happening upon pregnancy at 38 or jetting off to Nice with my younger Latin lover and renting a convertible. One does not seem worse or better than the other. Simply different. Okay, maybe at this point in life I would prefer the kid, but who am I to balk at a beach vacation? I don’t like to force things.

Still, this notion of frozen eggs appealed to my interest. Not because I would actually do it, but because… I might consider doing it… later. Or something. Or sometime. Or never. But I like to know my options, have a Plan D to my Plan C. So I nod my head a couple times and weigh the possibility.

Once I was in the privacy of my own couch I opened my laptop ready to begin some research. I’ve been known to Google everything from how to make candied yams to how do know if your new boyfriend has erectile dysfunction. Still, I recognized that I was crossing over to a new domain when I typed the words “cost of freezing eggs” into the Google powered search box and was met with a deluge of online resources.

I managed to piece together some common themes that I decided could be considered fact based on the fact they reappeared in virtually every article. Turns out the initial “set-up” fee for this hullabaloo, by my estimation, is no less than $10,000, on the low end. And then you’ve got to factor in the yearly storage fee to keep them frozen, which is around $500 a year—sure, that’s less than a storage unit but I’m not looking to keep my eggs at a motel six. Nor am I thinking that the actual retrieval of my eggs is one of those services that you go with the lowest bidder.

I closed my computer still not quite close to being sold on the notion, nonetheless considering its possibility, and a little taken aback by the cost. That night I dreamed that I was fishing my invisible ova out of the toilet with a gold fish net and dropping them in an ice cube tray, warning my roommate to only use the ice from the clear tray not the blue one. She thought this was completely normal.

With the clear head that comes with a morning shower, in between shampoo and conditioning, I remembered my fallback financial plan for everything. How had I missed this before? Sell my eggs. Sell my eggs so I can pay to harvest and store some other eggs. I mean, really, it’s one-stop shopping. And selling my eggs had been in my back pocket since I was eighteen.

It was in my Bio 102 class, ignoring the lecture and reading the Collegian classifieds that I first came upon the advertisement. “No Job? Need Money? Sell Your Eggs!” And this became my Plan B for a number of circumstances.

At 18 it was, “What if my car breaks down and I can’t get to work?” I’ll sell my eggs. (I discovered selling my plasma instead.)

At 22 and uninsured it was, “What if I get appendicitis and I’m drowning in medical bills?” Hell, I’ve got all these eggs I’m not using.

At 26 it was, “What if I get pregnant and my boyfriend leaves me abandoned, with nothing but a lousy masters in poetry and some crappy nonprofit job to support his bastard child?” Well, I guess I’ll have to buckle down and sell a few of these here eggs.

It sounds bad, and I get the miracle of alife, but at those particular moments in my own miraculous life, it seemed necessary to have a back-up plan in place. This one seemed good enough and required no immediate effort, but apparently there was one piece of information I neglected to notice—and that little fact was the age limit. I was informed by a friend the following morning via Facebook a message.

It read “Sorry to report most places/people won't buy eggs from women over thirty.”

What the fuck? Everyone knows 32 is the new 15. Sure maybe I had fewer eggs left, but only by a handful, and we all have something like 300,000 anyway. Could my viability be less than even I realized?

I did my own investigating and apparently I could sell my eggs in India and I was still good to go on selling a kidney—oh, and my hair—but sure enough, across the reputable board no one wanted my eggs. I suppose you could find a buyer if you were out there marketing them on your own and willing to sell at a discount. Craigslist? Basically, though, the clinics that post their ads on the internet and college newspapers don’t want your stinking eggs at 32.

It was odd to know that my once industrious safety net for the sundry of life’s catastrophes was pulled out from under me, and E-baying my eggs was the nearest Plan B for bearing children that I could come up with at the moment. It really just put me back to my previous fallback plan of driving along the coast of France as a cougar in a souped up convertible. That was fine and well, but part of me started thinking that the beach Plan B could just as easily slip away. Possibilities in general were beginning to seem ephemeral, which left me feeling blind-folded.

It was really bothering me. I explained the whole crazy saga to guests over drinks at my friend Brian’s 31^st birthday party. They’re all friends, so I was in good company. Overall, the dilemma was met with surprise over the age limit on egg sales, and somehow that topic spurned Brian to ask how my match dot com date went the week before. He loves my dating stories— well, he both loves and hates them. He loves to be aghast at them, and I enjoy his astonishment. This particular date was leading nowhere of interest though. I enjoy telling tales of some my worst and most odd dates, but those that have no build up and end blandly I like to avoid.

“Oh, it was a bust, after four hours and a lot beers he didn’t even kiss me goodnight, and no kiss is the kiss of death,” I told him matter-of-factly.

“What? Why didn’t you just lean in?”

Oh, Jesus. I could have sworn we’d been through this before. I do not, under any circumstances, ever dole out the first kiss. Never have. Never will. I wait it out. It’s worked so far. I think. I don’t like to establish too much control at the onset. I need to maintain an ambianse of casual, don’t-care, indifference. I have a whole series of reasons that I explained to Brian, again.

And then I was stumped by the question that ended our conversation.

“So you’re willing to let someone stick a needle in your vagina to get your eggs and then sell them for a back-up plan—BUT you’re not willing to initiate the first kiss with someone you just shared four hours of conversation and beers with,” my poetry professor asked?

It was a good question. There are days that it seems like life is just happening around me and I wonder if the sum of my existence has become a series of back-up plans and excuses. And how do I say out loud that I don’t know what my Plan A is anymore? I don’t know if I forgot, gave up, or even had one in the first place.

So instead of explaining, I did the next best thing, and smiled like I’ve learned to do when feigning social graces, lifted my two-buck chuck and said, “Absolutely.”

And that’s the thing about Plan B—it’s easier.