Ode to the Oocyte and Letter to the Heterosexual Male
11:30am on a Wednesday. I’m in the front row of a developmental biology, frantically writing in blue ink every word that comes out of the professor’s mouth on the black and white printed slide sheets she gave us. We are immersed in the meiosis cycle of mammalian eggs, learning about the allocation of resources, the months to years of time it takes before a egg (oocyte) reaches the point of ovulation, and the energy strain on the body required to not only grow but protect that oocyte. A process so tightly regulated by the body that it has its own growth factors and trigger hormones associated with it to ensure successful fertilization. Fertilization. Shit. It’s 11:30am. I was supposed to take my birth control at 8:30am. And now I’m 3 hours late.
8:30am everyday for 21 days I pop the little pink pill in my mouth. A pill barely the size of my pinky toenail, that, when I let it linger on my mouth for too long tastes almost sour, and whose ingredient label is filled with drugs of unknown names that spill over onto the second line. The little brown pill follows the little pink pill for 7 days, but that one dissolves against your tongue and has an almost sugary aftertaste to it. It’s a humorous sweet treat for your morning wakeup. These little pills ensure that that very oocyte my body exhausts both time and resources on to make it developmentally competent and prime for ovulation actually dies before my body can reap the benefits of its work. Everyday these pills are mindlessly swallowed and expected against my tongue so much so that I don’t even need water to chase them down anymore. Its simply just part of the mindless morning ritual. Except this morning I’m 3 hours late because I did not sleep in my own room last night.
The teacher moves on to talking about the differences in fish compared to mammals. She mentions how pacific salmon spawn only once in their life and then they die. They spend their life in the ocean, eating to gain enough strength and body mass to then later return to a freshwater spawning bed where females exhaust themselves to the point of death, laying all the eggs they have. The goal of every single organism is to reproduce. We live to reproduce.
12:05pm I’m leaving class, quickly sending my boyfriend a text saying, “Shit, I forgot to take my pill — need to go do it now then meet you at lunch!!” His response, “Jesus Lizzie, you can’t forget to do that.”
Right. Because everyday at 8:30am it is MY responsibility — never yours — to take a little pink or brown pill to thwart any possibility of the reproduction process occurring. I understand there is no little pill you can take everyday to prevent your spermatogonia from undergoing its meiotic divisions to become active spermatozoas and eventual semen. Actually, coincidentally enough, you don’t even have meiosis arrest points to stop your premature sperm from dividing and developing into active sperm cells. Even such, please don’t spite me like that and make me feel guilty for forgetting my pill because I slept over at your house last night. You are acting like I’m clueless and clumsy. The fact is invisible to you that every time I’m going on a trip I have to count how many pills I have left in case I need to get a new packet. That when I went abroad last semester I had to coordinate with friends or parents visiting to illegally sneak over my pills because insurance only allowed 2 packets to be issued at one time. That it used to cost me 50 dollars a month for only 28 pills in one packet because that brand didn’t cause weight gain or acne like the others did. That I’m consciously killing the process of ovulation in my body, murdering the hand-selected golden trophy my body worked on for 28 days and the process that the salmon live to kill themselves for.
And yes, I know what you will say and I agree with you — I’m not looking to have a baby right now and neither are you. We are still struggling to take care of ourselves. We are in college and don’t have our own source of income. We like to be reckless without responsibility and party on the weekends. We don’t see a baby right now as part of the plan. The plan is to graduate college with a high GPA to then get a great job that pays well, find a husband, get married, and then have kids. There is no line on the checklist for “college pregnancy with the boy I’m not married to.” Just as there is no line on your checklist for “college dad” right now. So yes, I too surrender to my checklist and take the pill everyday. But I make the decision to take it for myself and myself only without any desire to have your opinions or concerns infiltrating. I take it because I don’t want my precious, carefully handcrafted and handpicked oocyte to become fertilized. I will take it, all the while thinking of the salmon. But don’t tell me to take it and don’t yell at me for forgetting to take it at the EXACT time I’m supposed to one morning. You don’t have to consciously kill what your body proudly shows off as its contribution to the cycle of life and its connection point with other organisms, some of whom like the salmon actually die of exhaustion in the process.
So it goes that tomorrow I will take the pill. On time at 8:30am. But I will go to class again on Friday and learn that the goal of every single organism is to reproduce. We, as a collective species of plants, mammals, vertebrates, invertebrates, we live to reproduce. And that salmon kill themselves laying eggs to produce offsprings. But for me, that one egg my body is beaming about, that one egg that has grown from an oogonia to an oocyte and has been triggered to leave arrest point number two to enter into meiosis II, that one egg is going to be killed by the little pink or brown pill. It will lose its ability to serve its sole purpose of attracting sperm and serving as a fertile, lush, supportive environment for embryonic development. So the next time you start tell me not to forget to take my pill, just don’t. Because you don’t understand that I consciously and actively consume an unnatural mixture of ingredients fit into a pill barely the size of my pinky toenail to murder that beautiful egg and steal its glory.
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