My Formerly Hot Life (14 page)

I won’t keep you in suspense: Four hours later, worried husband by my side, the results of the repeat blood test came in and I was confirmed fine. The first test had been compromised by my doctor’s office somehow, yielding false readings. In those four hours, I ricocheted between thinking,
How ridiculous, this must be a mistake
, and imagining never being able to kiss my daughters on the top of their heads again, and smell their little-girl scalp smell. The thought, even today, is crushing. This wasn’t the narrative I could imagine for my own end-of-life story, being called in off the street one winter’s day with bad blood and never going home. In fact, I hadn’t given much thought to how I might die, but since then, I’ve been thinking about it more. I don’t dwell on it, but compared to never having thought about it as a young person, the entire subject feels new. I still think it best not to envision it.

It’s not only that Formerlies have more actual and pseudo-scares now than we did in years past, such as mammogram findings that wind up being nothing (I’ve had three so far, and like several Formerlies I know, have binge-shopped while awaiting the results of the biopsies). It’s also that, as I’ve mentioned, I’m starting to perceive time as passing faster than it used to. “One minute, girls,” shouted through a closed bathroom door seems to take an hour to pass for them, yet only ten seconds to me, and that’s not just because it’s the only place I have any privacy in our house. I think it’s because one minute is a larger proportion of their lives than it is of mine. I feel as though I’m ceding my time to them, like
a senator might to a colleague who has more of a point to make. I can only imagine that this feeling grows stronger as you get older still.

And there’s nothing like noticing your parents slowing down to cause you to feel every bit the Formerly. My parents remain young of affect, and vital, with no big health issues. Still, it’s becoming increasingly clear that I and my husband are on deck. If your parents are older or less healthy than mine, it’s scary to think that before long you will not have them to rely upon, assuming they were reliable in the first place. The role reversal, if they become infirm, is difficult for everyone.

But perhaps less expected and more bizarre for some of us Formerlies when our parents get old and need our care is that we often have to knit back together that separation we made when we left home for the first time—and it just doesn’t seem that long ago that we left! Depending on what your relationship was like with your parents growing up, having to be close to them in an intimate, day-to-day way can dredge up adolescent sewage better left in the septic tank of your childhood home. I suppose that’s one way of feeling young again.

A
more optimistic way to feel young again, of course, is to have children of your own to drive crazy for the rest of their lives. I’ve heard people say that kids keep you young, and that’s true in the sense that it’s hard to take yourself seriously when you’re walking down the street wearing a giant yellow construction-paper duck beak that your kid made for you in art class. (The great thing about being a Formerly is that you’re unself-conscious enough to wear a giant yellow construction-paper duck beak that your kid made for you in art class.) But physically, children can kick your ass. I have never felt so old as when chasing after Sasha and Vivian. It seems as soon as I finally sit down on the bench at the playground, one of them needs to be taken to the bathroom. They also take a few years off of me mentally, just keeping up with their sharp little minds, as mine gets more and more blunted. I suppose that’s natural. They’re meant to replace us, and the urge to reproduce is a gesture toward our own immortality.

Much has been written about the mad dash to bear children when you’re a Formerly, or at least to decide whether or not to bear children before the decision is made for you by your body, which has been preprogrammed to start striking the reproductive set around age 40. I had my ladies when I was 35, through IVF. My inability to get pregnant without help had nothing to do with my age; I had plenty of eggs, but none of them seemed to want to drop out of the nest. Still, because I went the high-tech route, and because I have several single Formerly friends grappling with the get-pregnant-or-not dilemma who may need help, I’ve stayed attuned to what the world has to say about Formerlies having babies.

With the array of stigma-free options for single prospective moms who want to experience pregnancy and have a biological child—using a sperm donor, co-parenting with someone who you’re not romantically involved with, egg-freezing, flying to India for lower-cost fertility treatments and others—you’d think there’d be this thrill in the air that for many women, babies that would not have been possible only a few years ago can now come into being.

And yet, it seems like women are more anxious, not less. If you’re at the choose-or-lose age, you’re not only making a tough decision to deliberately have a baby on your own, which, while increasingly common, is not easy, you’re making the decision all by yourself—and against your will, because your hand, or your ovaries, is being forced. Add in all the judgments that some women place on themselves
about the “right” way to feel in any given situation, and you’ve got stress with a side order of stress. Instead of covering the fabulous choices Formerlies have arrayed before them, many media treat the to-breed-or-not decision like the alleged mommy wars (aka, some guy’s catfight fantasy, recast with MILFs), with all the hyperbole and hysteria that no social or personal issue that men face is ever treated with. Granted, it’s a heavy decision, but there’s a whole lot more nuance than what you see in these facile takes:

I’m sure I’m missing some, but do you see a pattern here? Panic, fear, uncertainty, self-doubt and a lot of unhappy Formerlies feeling … if not cornered, then disempowered. It’s a similar feeling, I’d imagine, to what women who had no option but to marry young and breed dozens of farmhands to till the field must have felt if the biological realities of their lives didn’t fit in with their hopes, dreams and plans. And I think that plain stinks.

Look, I know I’d have been profoundly sad if I couldn’t have had my girls, and I was fortunate to have a partner at the right time, so I didn’t grapple with any potential societal disapproval for my decision, although that’s not the kind of thing that tends to trip me up. I remember being initially disappointed that I needed help getting pregnant, and then glad to have science on my side, and the means to pay for it. The fact that many Formerlies have similar options makes it marginally easier to have a deadline on such a huge decision, one that isn’t entirely within your control.

But here’s the thing: The deadline by which to have a baby—whether you’re single or partnered when it hits, and
whether that deadline is at age 35, 40 or 50—is still a deadline. As in, you feel as if you will
die
if it doesn’t happen.

Of course, you will not die, but you will feel about as powerless as the baby you are thinking of having, only without someone as together as you to coddle you. Formerlies hate to feel powerless. Well, the odd masochist likes it, but only in strictly proscribed situations involving whips and handcuffs. Formerlies in particular, who have just recently come to a place of maximal self-determination, might not be ready to hand over the future of their domestic life to biology and fate (even though these have been largely in the hands of biology and fate this whole time). When you’re up against a deadline like this one, it hits you that your choices are no longer unrolling infinitely like the red carpet before you. You already knew this, of course, but now that knowledge has spread down from your brain into your heart and, worse, into your reproductive organs.

This deadline, while set by your body, is entirely impersonal and outside of your control. Where you are in your life simply does not factor in. Which means even though a Formerly has long since gained the wisdom to participate in her own future, she does not get a say in the matter, as if she were a three-year-old being forced into an uncomfortable snowsuit she knows she’ll just be sweating in. If this is you, all you can do is protest, ruminate on your options, strategize and feel paralyzed. There simply aren’t that many important choices we must make as adults that we truly won’t get a second chance on.

The Formerlies who come out of this whole stink pile feeling good seem to be the ones who modify their vision of what their future is going to look like, and use their Formerly wisdom to rethink their past. Instead of deciding they missed their chance to get pregnant the “right” or easier way, they recognize that had the deadline been earlier, having a baby would have been hard for other reasons. If the biological cutoff had been in your 20s, you likely wouldn’t have been ready and it would have been an equally tough decision. Likely you weren’t equipped in your early 30s, either, because if you had been, you’d probably have a child by now. So here you are, the deadline has arrived, and the time might not be perfect to have a baby under the ideal circumstances. That’s nothing new, except that you’ve used up your deferments.

If, like me, you like to be in charge of your life (I don’t mind jury duty; I mind having to go when they say I have to), it’s infuriating! But it’s not that much different from being stymied by the fact that you weren’t born rich or Swedish or with the perfect parents or as one of the Kardashian sisters. You notice, you mourn your perceived loss (everything should have gone according to schedule, but it did not), and then you figure out how to be reasonably happy with the options you do have. Railing against this deadline for too terribly long doesn’t bring you closer to a decision, a baby, or feeling happy in your Formerlydom.

It’s actually kind of cool, looking back from the other side of the angst, once some kind of decision (any kind) has been
made. I have one single friend who had a baby via donor sperm. It wasn’t ideal—she had to move back in with her parents for the extra childcare and to save money, but that won’t be forever. My friend Sarah is divorced and doesn’t want to have a baby without a partner. Since she doesn’t foresee meeting someone and building a relationship with him in time to have a baby biologically, she’s had to let that go, and will weigh the adoption option if and when the time comes. That wasn’t her perfect vision, either, and it was tough rethinking things, but she is happy. I have another friend who adopted from Ethiopia, another who is co-parenting with a guy friend and another who had a baby under the wire with her 10-years-younger boyfriend. She’s thrilled about the baby, but the disparity in their ages definitely poses some challenges. That’s not perfect, either.

In short,
none
of these scenarios is ideal, but if a Formerly has learned anything over time, it’s that few things are—even when you think they will be, even when they appear that way from the outside and even when you do everything “right” and on time. Alas, you can’t have everything, and whoever told women we could was an asshole. An asshole who probably thought she was being “empowering,” but an asshole nonetheless.

M
y personal stylist, Restraint, who has firm guidelines about what I wear, is much more promiscuous with her views on fashion footwear. She has no issues with my going to town with the shoes, especially regarding their quantity and degree of flamboyance. I appreciate this about her, even if my husband does not. A few weeks ago he was nearly concussed by a (gold metallic Sven) clog when he tried to take something off the top shelf of my closet (he’ll only do
that
once). I gave him the Boo Boo Buddy we keep in the freezer for the girls, and he didn’t say a word.

What could he say, really? That I had too many shoes? This is not news, nor is it particularly shocking—many, many women do, since we love that our shoes still more or less fit us even if other clothes, over time, do not. He also probably didn’t want to hear me rationalize my vast collection (over 100 pairs), especially because I do it by bastardizing the theory of the renowned cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker,
who wrote the Pulitzer Prize–winning book
The Denial of Death
.

(Bear with me here. If you do, you will be rewarded with an excellent excuse to go out and buy more shoes you don’t need and not feel bad about it.)

Inherent in becoming a Formerly is that nagging awareness that you’re getting older (not old, mind you, but oldER). It’s dawning on you that you are closer to death, whenever it has a mind to pound on your door. In fact, this always has been true, even when you had huge hair and danced with moronic frat boys to Sheila E. in the late ’80s. Oh, wait. That was me. Yeah, but I think I saw you there, too, by the keg. And your hair was not exactly small, either.

This was the big idea in Becker’s book: He argued that everything we humans do, short of eating and reproducing, is an attempt to defend ourselves against the knowledge of our own mortality. We keep ourselves all kinds of busy studying, working and fighting wars with people who don’t believe what we do, essentially to distract us from freaking out about the inevitable. Some of us attempt grand and heroic feats while we’re still alive, and thus, symbolically at least, expand our power and live forever. Making a ton of money is one of the big ways some of us capitalists like to think we’re going to live forever, at least symbolically.