Maybe Once, Maybe Twice by Alison Rose Greenberg EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Alison Rose Greenberg
- Language: English
- Genre: Women’s Friendship Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
THIRTY-FUCKING-FIVE
THE ONLY PROMISE IS THAT nothing is promised to us. Someone should have
told me that at seventeen. I should have known better by thirty. Much, much
better at thirty-five. A childhood therapist once told my mom I was “filled
with promise.” I had been promising for over three decades—like a drug
that could work, but lacked federal funding.
While I was filled with promise, I was not so much filled with eggs,
according to my gynecologist’s tight smile. He loomed beside my papergowned body like the grim reaper, while his scythe—a rubbery ultrasound
probe—searched for signs of life inside my dying planet. He pulled the
wand out of me, sighing in my direction with a slight head shake. I
recognized this look. Like my former math teachers, this doctor expected
more from me. He snapped the gloves off his hands, flicking the latex into
the trash can as if he were the LeBron James of vaginas.
“I don’t want you to take this personally. Most women lose ninety
percent of their eggs by thirty.”
I went to scream, “How am I NOT supposed to take MY personal body
personally?” but instead, air huffed between my slack jaw, which I had
forgotten to pick up off the not-so-cute floor of infertility. It was a thrilling
way to ring in the elder age of thirty-fucking-five.
I studied the receding hairline atop my gyno’s round face. He appeared
to be in his late forties, and my eyes slipped down to his hand, where there
wasn’t a wedding ring in sight. I wondered if he was like me: childless and
single. I wondered if it scared him.
Of course it didn’t.
Men under fifty stroll through dark parking garages the same way they
approach their birthdays: without a second thought. They don’t lose sleep
over their place in the world—not until they find themselves inside a
midlife crisis. Women don’t have midlife crises, because we’ve spent our
lives constantly in crisis. If only I had done a better job of leaning into the
societal role that a woman should play. Every birthday should have been a
gentle reminder that I was losing a war against time—that my branch on the
family tree might hang aimlessly in the air. Instead, the End of Days had
crept up on me like an asteroid in a Michael Bay movie. I had wandered the
halls of my future with the false confidence of a mediocre white man, and I
would pay for it like a woman.
I had made this appointment with the vain hope that I would be declared
“a fertility marvel.” My doctor would pat me on the back with a wowed
smile and reassure me that I had plenty of years left to strum through life
without permanent repercussions.
Maggie Vine was not a medical marvel. Biology was holding me at
gunpoint. I was walking the tightrope of regret. “Kids, one day” had
become “kids, now or never.”
“If you have a partner, you should start trying,”
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