How To Not Get Pregnant in your 30's

I’d been to sex toy parties before, where girls giggled over dildos and lingerie while sipping on champagne, but this was my first invite to an egg-freezing party.

Crap, have I gotten to that age? I thought as I clicked on the link that my best friend had sent me.

On the homepage was a picture of a four young, beautiful, seemingly successful women enjoying themselves over carrot sticks (because: carbs), with a big tagline that read “Smart Women Freeze.”

I was the target market — mid-30s high earner, single — and also not their target market, as I am not planning on contributing to the gene pool. I had nothing against the freezing aspect either, as I had in fact just frozen my whole body so I could “detox on a cellular level.” I also was surprised to learn that in addition to the $20,000 “extraction fee” one also had to pay rent. Is there anything more ridiculous than paying rent for children that aren’t even born yet?

I’ve never experienced a maternal urge. In fact, the only change I’ve sensed recently is that I have the sex drive of a 17-year-old boy, which I think is my body’s last-ditch effort to get these eggs fertilized.

But other than that, nothing. No ticking clock. Not even real social pressure from my parents, which actually concerns me slightly, as I am an only child and the family line is therefore in danger of ending with me. I mentioned this to my mother over Christmas, and she reminded that I was behind on my pet support payments to her. Which was true. I had not been sending the $150 in monthly support that my mother almost insisted be automatically deducted from my paycheck.

“You’re the one who chose to bring this cat into the world,” she would croak.

In my defense, I did send him some Tuna Treats and a new plaid bowtie, which proves that I care.

My dad somehow still thinks I’m a virgin, evident by the fact that he sent me an article clip (yes he physically mailed me a cut out) of the rise of thirty-something Christian women saving themselves for marriage.

I texted him,

Got note. Thx. Cool :)

Honestly, I always wanted to be a stepmom. In my imagination, I would get along so well with the biological mother, and my role would really just to be more like a fun auntie. And if for some reason the step-mom thing didn’t work out, I always figured I could pick a kid up from an orphanage Angelina Jolie-style.

My friends usually protest at this.

“You never know what type of emotional problems they’ll have,” or “You don’t know their DNA”.

To which I respond: based on my family tree, my chances are actually better with the adoption.

I also find it amusing that my whole life, I’ve been desperately trying to not get pregnant with shots and pill and now that I’ve hit a certain age, and the opposite is true, now you take the shots and the pills in order to get pregnant. The only difference is that the meds now cost the price of an entry-level luxury sedan.

Just months before, I’d been shocked when I went to a friend’s party and the waitress asked if I wanted a “shot.” To which I answered, “Hell yeah, I’ll take two!”

Only to find out that she meant Botox, not Patron.

Surely I didn’t need Botox! And yet, more and more of my friends confessed to getting fillers with the same frequency that one might get an oil change.

One night, I looked around the patio of my friend’s gorgeous Mediterranean mansion (with imported Italian marble and pool lights you can change colors with from your iPhone) and realized something: I was coming to the proverbial end of the road with my peers.

Sure, most of my high school and college friends have already been married and were starting to have children and, sure, I’ve begun joking that I’m at the age when all of my friends are getting married, again. But there have always been the few of us holdouts — those of us who are running major NGOs in Chile, or raising millions for their startups, or running for office.

But now even those of my friends were ready to jump on the baby train…however they can; they were throwing tons of cash to experience the joys of motherhood. I joke with my friends, “you should’ve gotten knocked up when it was free.”

After years of trying not to conceive, my friends are now part of the TTC club.

If you do a quick Google search you will find that TTC means “trying to conceive” and there are thousands of Facebook groups, Meetups, and blogs dedicated to women who literally take pregnancy tests in the way a crack fiend looks for their next fix.

My friend Melissa, a CPA, has a Google Doc of when to have sex with her husband down to the exact minute. She’s synced alarms on their iPhones so they won’t miss their 45-minute appointments that sometimes happen during work meetings at random hotels near their respective jobs.

At a recent party, she confessed that now she is scheduling them for an hour to include “15 minutes of foreplay.”

I glanced over at her husband, who mustered a shrug and a “Yeah” before giving us a half-hearted two thumbs-up.

My single friends have it the worst. It’s hard to have baby fever when there are no prospects short of putting on your Tinder profile that you want to hook up and keep the baby. (Which is no joke. One of my more tech savvy friends is employing this strategy, but so far, zero takers.) She also tried the sperm banks, but she strangely found that too impersonal.

Another friend confessed to a group of us that recently she was in the kids clothing section at Target, where she saw the cutest baby in a yellow jumpsuit in a shopping cart. The mother apparently had wandered off. And for a split second, she imagined pushing the baby straight out of the Target.

My friends all exhaled sighs of relief and shrieked a unanimous, “Me too!”

I avoided eye contact and started intensely swirling the straw of my mojito.

Instead of quirky Buzzfeed quizzes, now my friends are forwarding 18 Unusual Tips to Get Pregnant Faster:

“Lay out in the sun (vitamin D), eat Yams (Zinc), visit a Navajo shaman and get a fertility doll (which is, oddly, shaped like a penis).”

I don’t mean to discredit the emotional challenges my friends are facing due to infertility or the quest to get pregnant. In fact, I empathize, because I too wonder, if you really experience womanhood if you aren’t a mother. Throughout time, the three stages of being a woman are: virgin, mother, crone. I am not a virgin (sorry Dad), so does that make me a crone?

I try to offer support as they try to rein in their jealousy of other new moms who just get pregnant by accident at 41. Or when my friend calls sobbing, “He just doesn’t have sex with me enough.”

Even though I had heard from her very tired husband that last week they had at least 6 sessions. “Don’t tell anyone, but it is not even fun anymore.”

Even harder is that fertility is a rich woman’s game. I have many friends who are buried not only in student loan debts and recent wedding expenses but now also in IVF payment plans. It seemed like just yesterday that I had to counsel my friends through pregnancy scares. “What about tenure?!”

Now, beyond just counseling, my friends want me to hold their hand as they jab a needle full of baby-making hormones in their bellies, which funnily enough is 2 inches below her belly ring.

But back to that invite to the party:

I said no. Why shop for a car you don’t ever intend to drive?

A few weeks later, I was at lunch with two of my friends, both lawyers in Beverly Hills, eating $25 plates of lettuce with dressing on the side, when Cheryl started demonstrating how she checks the viscosity of her vaginal mucus in the bathroom of her firm.

Turns out vaginal mucus is like a force field for sperm and it only drops out like every few days a month. Higher concentration of vaginal mucus, higher chance of getting pregnant.

“It should look like egg whites.”

“Disgusting,” I said. “I’m eating!”

(This assumes you consider plain Romaine lettuce food.)

“Oh, I forgot. You’re one of those chicks.”

She purred this, as if to say I was one of those women who dared to not have kids, a woman who will never know true love — the love of a child. And I looked at her like one of those women who treat motherhood like it is the ultimate Girl Scout badge.

Sensing tension, my other friend piped up.

“Kimberly will be fine. She’s just going to end up being some cat lady.”

“Actually,” I said. “I probably won’t even end up being a cat lady.”

And then I said, “Too much trouble.”

It was then that I realized that while I am excited to see the babies that my friends produce, I’m quite okay with my less chosen path, a path that won’t be filled with babies or cats.