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Recently I turned <<if random(1, 100)<= 35>>[[35|older]]<<else>>[[35|geriatric]]<</if>>. It felt momentous and definitive: a culmination of sorts, a new Census bracket, a new [[vantage point|30]].

I’ve been with my partner for almost a decade. Before him — before the last handful of years with him, really — this was all [[hypothetical|names]], far-off and amorphous. He is so solid and sure and unanxious; he makes the [[future]] feel like something that can be touched, can even perhaps be [[shaped|control]].

I’ve always been afraid of the future, its boundless unknowability. I worry about how the [[choices|mother]] I’ve made, consciously or otherwise, reverberate and compound and double back; I worry about not being able to [[choose|world]] at all.

I seek control where I can find it, synthetic and otherwise, to counterbalance my fear. It’s why I like yarn, and words, and code: materials that can be constrained by [[rules|random]], organized into patterns, in which I (maybe paradoxically) find a kind of [[freedom|mother]]. It’s why I’m prone to addiction, to compulsion, to picking away at myself when I’m [[the only thing|world]] in arm’s reach.

[[We|partner]] trade baby names back and forth. Some jokes, some [[serious|memory]], all kindling a wisp of something real for a beat before they’re blown out again — not yet.

The year I turned 33, [[we|partner]] decided to try to freeze embryos. My work would [[pay]] for it. It would be, we said, an insurance policy in the event we had [[trouble|31]] later. It didn’t mean a [[definitive|mother]] yes, just an in case. Still: not nothing.

I did [[pay|labor]]. Around two thousand dollars total, a far cry from the hundred-thousand-plus price tag the procedure can command out of pocket, but not nothing. Mostly the money went toward [[medications|injections]].

I paid in other ways. Hours of phone calls, dozens of [[appointments]], blood draws administered by kind nurses and indifferent ones. And [[injections]], each day of each active cycle at a precise on-the-dot time, administered by me. By the conclusion: [[six months|31]], a half-year lease on my body.

The appointments were all early; they had to start before 9 a.m. This was so there was time for the lab to process any test results — blood draws, ultrasounds — so my daily cocktail of medications could be [[tweaked|calls]] accordingly.

Starting at noon each day, I’d keep my phone volume at the highest setting so I wouldn’t miss the nurses’ calls with instructions. When I [[inevitably did|random]], I'd navigate the endless phone tree of options to hopefully reach the person I needed in time.

Around 6:50 p.m., I’d [[lay out|control]] my vials and syringes, my gauze pads and my American Girl Doll-sized sharps disposal container. At exactly 7 p.m., I’d give myself two or three shots in the lower abdomen. The last, with the on-the-nose name [[Menopur|trigger]], always [[burned|hormones]].

The shock of hormones made me tender and raw, like all my [[nerve endings|machine]] were closer to the surface than usual.

The orthodox [[rigidity|control]] of the [[process|33]] felt at odds with its practically arcane degree of randomness. I’ve never had access to more up-to-the-minute information about my own [[body|machine]], nor a more attentive team of doctors, nor a more [[finicky|appointments]] medical protocol, but even then nothing meant anything definitive.

My body for a while felt like a piece of machinery that at best would not cooperate and at worst was irreparably broken. I hadn’t tended it, hadn’t trained it, and now it was failing at the very thing it was built for. I knew how melodramatic this was, how violently opposed to everything I actually believed, but it was hard not to feel like I was coming up short on each guided tour of my [[underpopulated ovaries|math]].

Fertility math is both ineffable and precipitous. The dosage calculus is meant to, among other things, stimulate growth of egg follicles, but provides no guarantees, no predictive precision. A body could respond well to a medication one cycle and reject it the next. One promising bud could give way to [[many eggs or none|eggs]].

After the eggs, if there are any, comes attrition. [[Only so many|one]] will be viable, which can become only so many fertilized embryos, which can become only so many stable frozen ones. Only so many of those might survive the eventual thaw and [[implantation|pregnancy]].

Because of course this is all the pre-work, the table setting, not the main event. That’s its own country altogether, with its own set of embodied fears. My [[history|31]] means it will almost certainly be difficult; there are many worlds in which it’s [[not possible|geriatric]]. But the math there is [[random]], beyond brutality and kindness, and hope weighs about the same as dread.

The last day of a given cycle is unlike the others. Instead of the typical cocktail of two or three medications at the usual time, I would wait until exactly twelve hours before my scheduled [[retrieval]] to administer what is called the “trigger shot,” which is a polite way to say that I jabbed myself in the ass with a 2-inch needle around 1:30 in the morning. The first time, I was terrified; the last, I was bored of waiting up.

“Retrieval” always felt like the wrong term, too jaunty and erstwhile, too evocative of spelunking. Nobody liked when I called it a “harvest,” but that seemed closer to [[the truth|math]]. What it really is is a [[surgery|31]], a relatively minor one. I came to enjoy the apple juice and graham crackers they’d give me when I groggily revived from the anesthesia.

Despite the frantic calculations, all you really need is <<if random(1, 100) <= 35>>[[one|four]]<<else>>[[one|random]]<</if>>.

After everything, we have four embryos. Four [[possibilities|souls]], four [[combinations|math]], four [[potential outcomes|random]] in an industrial refrigerator somewhere under New Jersey.

I categorically don’t believe that life begins at fertilization or whatever but I do believe that the die have in some sense already been cast, that there is a fundamental, existential expression of singularity in each of those four [[hard-won clumps of cells|injections]]. Or, at least, in [[my relationship|mother]] to them.

The term is outdated but still widely used: “geriatric pregnancy,” describing the supposedly higher medical and developmental risks a mother and baby experience after the threshold of age [[35|33]].

Growing older is a profound privilege; not [[everyone|memory]] gets to be 35.

What I remember of them still: The feathers in her hair. The bonsai tree on his front step. The clean, sweet way he smelled. The press of his lips in the dark. The way she loved him. The way she loved him. [[...|33]]

From ages 17 through [[30|33]], I worried about getting pregnant accidentally. My period each month came with an edge of relief, even when there was no chance beyond [[immaculate conception|partner]].

Right before my 31st birthday, I started [[bleeding|hormones]] and didn’t stop. For weeks at a time I couldn’t leave my apartment, couldn’t sleep for more than a few hours at a stretch. I spent six months like this, two surgeries and two aftermaths, thousands and thousands of dollars, piles of ruined sheets and towels and [[underwear|better]].

I’m better now, although permanently anemic, and permanently mistrustful of the [[shaky clockwork|machine]] of my body. No one could tell me why it happened, just how. No one can tell me that [[it won’t happen again|math]].

Right now I am not a mother. I [[want]] to live a life where I get to be one, but I oscillate over trading for the life I have now, with its movement and freedom and solitude. I feel many days like I’m only just starting, like I’ve only just arrived, like it’s much too early to give over to something beyond myself. The clock, though, continues its relentless tick forward, and maybe I’m [[more expansive|mama]] than I think.

I think about my own mother, the best at love I’ve ever known. In my heart of hearts I worry that I don’t have that same capacity, that same instinct, that I will never [[measure up|jig]]. In my heart of hearts I want so badly [[to try|love]].

And what about the world? What about it melting down, icing over, its fragile manmade systems collapsing under the weight of our shortsighted hubris? What about the abject, banal cruelty of so many in power, who would sooner have me bleed out in an operating room than allow me or any child of mine a dignified life? Who would come here unbidden? What right do I have to force them? What right do I have to decide they’re better off staying away? <<if random(1, 100) <= 35>> [[...|yearn]] <<else>> [[...|want]] <</if>>.

I think about the astonishing, anchoring [[love|mama]] I’ve built with my partner, and my friends, and the people I’ve taught and been taught by, and this [[world]] that at its best is shared, is something we create among ourselves. I think about how I am not alone in this no matter how you [[run the numbers|jig]].

I think about the eight- or nine-year-olds I see at coffee shops with their dads, reading chapter books, pushing their plastic glasses up the bridges of their noses. I think about seeing the world again at ground level. I think about what we could make together. I think about who we could be. <<if random(1, 100) <= 35>> [[...|mama]] <<else>> [[...|love]] <</if>>.

Above all else I don’t want to extrude [[a person|souls]] into the shape of my own image, my own desires, my own strictures. I want to relinquish [[control]], or at least I want to want it. I want to learn how to square that with a lifetime of anxiety, of pre-planning and pre-feeling and pre-fretting that’s so far amounted to nothing but wasted energy.

I kept thinking I’d somehow be better by now, more fully formed. I think the [[jig is up|35]].