Let’s Start with the Eggs

It’s early, or not even that early, because other people on the subway are neatly dressed for work. I am dressed in I just got out of bed because I am going to a doctor’s appointment, one I don’t want to go to, or one I would like to pretend I am not going to, because it’s about the possibility of getting pregnant, a possibility I am not sure yet I actually want. 

I don’t entirely understand my own motivation to freeze my eggs, other than I’m in my late thirties and people say the door is closing rapidly. I don’t fully recognize the door as one I want to go through, but stick my toe in to keep it shoved open a crack.

My partner and I have not been sure if we wanted children, but the closer we get to forty, the closer he gets to a yes, and the more I wonder. Most of our friends are parents. I don’t feel jealous of what they have, but I struggle to imagine a future without children of my own.

“You don’t necessarily have to do it yourself,” my partner says. “Like give birth.” He holds his palms out flat in front of his pelvis. They could be mimicking a belly or a bundle to hold. “We could adopt,” he says. His forearms widen, dropping the baby. Or the burden.

I love watching his body express our unknown. The green brown of his irises brighten almost psychedelically at the idea of parenting as a creative project rather than a fate. I love when he tries to think ambitiously, to relieve me of assumed gendered labor. You don’t have to be the one to make the plans, he’ll say, or you don’t have to communicate first. I try to hold off in group chats with our friends so that there is space for him to step in. 

“I think I’d want to do it with my body,” I say, “if I can.” This part feels unambiguous, my urge for literal gut-level transformation. I always crave that.  

I squeeze his calf in one hand and find it surprisingly soft, malleable between the threads of muscle and the wooly fur along the skin. He clenches a muscle, pulsing, so it is hard under my hand and then pliable again. It’s not the part of his body known best for erectile tissue, but I like the crest of its change. He feels me there and I feel warmth flush from my neck to pelvis in response.

“Let’s start with the eggs,” I say. I’ve gotten this far only because I take things one step, one possibility, at a time.   

*

The doctor calls a few hours after the first morning appointment to tell us that my “numbers” are fine, that based on what they can see in the blood and the imaging of my ovaries, my body is ready to start the cycle of medications. 

We go in optimistically, hoping this process will suck less than it has for everyone else. We watch the videos about how to jab the medication into a pinch of belly. We unsheathe the needles and attach them to the vials of drugs that will stimulate my follicles to produce extra eggs. If we succeed in stimulating and can get those eggs out of me, and if my partner’s sperm makes it in there, they may become the embryos we can freeze and store. If. If.

The shots hurt more than everyone said they would, even after a few nights of practice. It’s not the needles that hurt, but the Menopur, one of the medications we inject. It’s fine enough when my partner sticks the needle in, but the liquid burns as it slides into my fat. I hold an ice pack over it, pleather jumpsuit peeled down to my hips, the cheap material sticking to my legs even as the straps hang down.

It’s a Friday night and we plan to go to a party after this. My partner slides his hand around my belly where he usually grips firmly to press me toward him, but now I jump away. Since we began the shots, I have not been able to tolerate the kind of urgent touch that usually turns me on. I feel tight and defensive everywhere.

“I don’t like this,” I say. Self judgment crowds in; I feel shrewish, frigid.

He nods, and cautiously pulls one strap up over my shoulder. “What if you imagine the discomfort is a kink?” We’re going to a kink party. It’s our thirteenth anniversary, and this party will be our celebration.

“It’s our bar mitzvah,” my partner jokes, “we’re finally adults.” The party tonight is categorically an adult activity. We don’t always go to sex parties on our anniversary, but we often hang out with other people, purposefully extending our love for one another outwards, expanding who belongs in our family. We both find going to dinner a boring idea of a date. I would love to write a PSA that goes something like: kids, enjoy your dinners, or you might get consensually whipped.

*

Neither of us is super into being whipped. One of us likes getting tied up, and one of us likes getting lightly scratched and tingled by different devices. We mostly like to role-play.

“Does it turn you on to watch?” my friend Adrian asks. We are at the bar on my block the day after the party.

“Sometimes,” I say. What draws me more is the definition of kink spaces, the permission they give to experiment. I remember holding out my fingertips to a woman with a bone-white wig and a wire strapped to her waist. When she touched the other end to my hand, an electric shock hummed through me.

“I don’t know if I liked it,” I tell Adrian, “but I like going places where we try on what we might like.” Who we might be, too. Mostly I’d paced around the club, tired. In one room, I watched someone offer their face up for slaps. By the hot tub, I drank some water and admired the elegant Shibari knots parceling the flesh of a person dangling from the ceiling. 

It feels oddly correct to be thinking about parenting this evening. It isn’t that incest or child play is my kink. It’s something about how Adrian’s kid plays under the table while we talk and she switches between mom-voice (firm) and friend-tone (softer). She lets me in on the ups and downs of single parenting. It’s unusual—even a bit erotic—because most parents don’t share this openly.

From the outside, parenting can seem like a rigidly bound role-play that never ends. You are supposed to know if you want to do it, and then leap into the role wholeheartedly without pause.  I listen to my friend gratefully, and try to track my reactions to an experience I haven’t had. It’s part of how I understand desire: My own sexual consent is always contingent upon how my body reacts, and I reserve the right to retract it if I don’t feel comfortable.

Kink has given me practice in dwelling here, part way in and out, assessing just enough to enjoy the unknown. When I imagine being a parent, the mundanity and tiredness do not scare me. So much of kink has begun to feel mundane, too, the splats of hot wax being peeled from skin and floor, the stretch of arms up a Saint Andrew’s Cross. What I’m scared of is giving up my capacity to try on and observe.

Observing fringes has guided many years of my life. I’ve always been drawn to situations that push against norms, push me just past what I know. I’ve confessed interest in taboo sex, too—I spent years writing about my interest in Nazi role-play, which originated from being a Jewish person in Germany and wanting to poke fun at how awe-fully careful Germans were around my identity. Instead of pretending they owed me, I wondered, what if we played with the dynamic itself. It wasn’t about masochism. I liked bringing to light things that were silenced, exposing the agency and intimacy there.  

*

Parenting is notoriously a role a person takes up for life. Looking at it through a kink lens, I can imagine taking up some aspects of it and not others. The choices provided by egg freezing are grotesque, privileged, and alienating in many ways. But this very alienation allows me to consider parenting while inhabiting a wider range of aspects of self, alternating between stern and gushy, public intellectual and private body, among others.  

If my partner and I do have a child, conception won’t be due to sex. This is what in-vitro means. This appeals to me, because it allows my romantic relationship to remain on its own terms, not necessarily tied to heteronormative futurity. To gauge my level of desire for reproduction, I  peel relationship and parenting apart, trying  to see which is which kind of passion. 

I do not let my partner forget how much physical labor I am doing to preserve our possible fertility, and for months he makes up for it by doing all the cooking and cleaning.

“You’re giving me wife vibes,” I tell him, tossing my keys onto the dining room table and hanging my jacket over a chair, my belly so distended from the medications I pretend it’s the puff of a Dad Bod.

I go to the appointments and back. I go under anesthesia and freeze enough eggs to stop. A few days after the retrieval, my partner and I lie in bed and his fingers move from my neck to thighs to feet. I feel joy rushing in my blood, following the spontaneous whims of contact. I come loudly, nearly howling, my body shuddering with relief at no longer being an instrument. My partner points out that our bedroom windows are wide open.

“We were probably disturbing the neighborhood,” he says.

 I laugh, cold air pouring over my skin through the window.

“It could have been anyone,” I say.