On embryo freezing

and the other thoughts we don’t share easily

If you’re married and you reach a certain age, the question start to roll in — slowly at first, infrequently here and there, until it becomes so loud to ignore.

So when are you having kids?

The short answer being “not right now” and the longer answer being “we don’t know” are both answers that leave the question-asker in a dissatisfied state. This grey area is a perfectly normal place to be — deciding whether or not to be parents should really only be up to the people who are actually going to do the parenting.

There are many great reasons to want children, and there are equally many great reasons to not. Like any person presented with a variety of choices who also happens to suffer from decision paralysis, you are thankful that technology and procrastination have presented the gift of time — time to wait, time to dedicate a few more years to careers, time to decide if being parents are in the cards for you.

You might work for a company that happens to have generous fertility benefits. It’s something you had given passing thoughts to before, but nothing that serious. Some of your co-workers are going through treatments, and you start to get a little curious.

You’re not 100% sure how to answer the question you get from the parents and in-laws, because you’re not even sure how to answer the question “Do I want kids? Do I want to be a parent?”

This is a much harder question to answer, a luxury that generations before you didn’t have — the luxury of choice. Your relatives and immediately family members, especially the older ones, make the same comments at family affairs: “Your nephew is so adorable! I can’t wait to open a college savings account for my grandchild. Have you thought about having kids soon?” You smile and deflect on the outside, but inside you feel the many layers of questions and unknowns.

You feel conflicted on the inside, to balance what you want/need against what your generations of family members want/need/impose.

How do you uphold the filial piety of an Asian household and respect for your elders while also carving your own path?

How do weave and dodge the wishes that your parents and in-laws have for you, while holding love and compassion for their hopes and your desire to be a “good child”?

What makes a “good child”? You got the grades, you got the university diploma, you got the tech job. What other hoops are there left to jump before you finally make it?

You buy more time by scheduling an appointment with a fertility clinic, the one your friends and co-workers have gone to. You have 12 vials of blood taken from your veins, and wait for the doctor to tell you about your fertility health. You sit as the doctor gives the facts to you straight — you have X-number of eggs, resulting in possibly X-number of embryos, and ultimately X-number of children to add to your family unit. You click through the PDF of paper work that you’re signing over breakfast in a cafe at the office, feeling pangs of anxiety as you leave initials across the pages. You push that anxiety deep down in the last few minutes ahead of your 9AM meeting.

You watch your phone as the dot representing the delivery driver bringing your fertility drugs turns onto the street corner. You unpack the boxes of drugs, needles, gauze, and alcohol pads into the refrigerator. On the first day, you ask your partner to help you with the injections because you’ve chickened out. On the second day, you end up jabbing the needles into yourself because the anticipation of someone else’s hand steadying the needle is too much. You ice the injection site to keep the Menopur from burning (but it burns anyway), and you observe the bruising mentioned in the training class. You are thankful for a supportive partner in the journey.

After 14 days, you can’t move as nimble as you used to; lifting bikes on and off the train carriages is too much effort, too tiring. You can no longer regulate your body temperature, and sleeping is isn’t restful. So you work a few days from home, waiting for the last trigger shot to go in.

Your partner drives you to the clinic and goes off into a separate room with his own instructions. The nurses are inserting needles as you lay in a medical gown in a dark room under the bright surgical lights and you think about Grey’s Anatomy. When the doctor asks how your weekend went and you respond with “I had some great tacos yesterday”, suddenly the world is gone when the anesthesia kicks in.

And you wake up in a medical bed, as if no time had passed and you have no memory of anything after the tacos remark, the curtains drawn around you. Your partner appears, relieved to see you awake and conscious. The nurses have left a heating pad on your torso, and after 20 minutes, you’re outside in the real world again.

A week or so later, a physicians assistant calls to let you know the outcome of the retrieval, fertilization, freezing process. The doctor’s math was as accurate as it could be — the expectations he had set were aligned with your new reality. You breathe a sigh of relief for the outcome, and for the opportunity to not go through another round of injections and retrievals.

Weeks, months, and years pass. Aside from paying an annual storage fee at the beginning of the year, you don’t think of your eggs, of your “biological clock”, of children, of having to decide if you want to be a parent or not. Birthdays are celebratory and aging is just passing of time, of gaining wisdom, and not of thinking of about the shrinking time window or of losing one more egg from the stash you were born with and will ever have in your lifetime.

Instead, your mental space is free to think about work, your career, what hobbies you might pick up, what feels like a breaking point in the fabric of society, what businesses you might start or contribute to. The answers to all the questions become the same

Not now, but maybe in the future