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Monday, June 25, 2012

Reflections on a Birthday (or, feeling the alarm go off on my biological clock)

There's nothing like a birthday to get you thinking a lot about having kids.

Yesterday was my 29th, and it was wonderful. Nicole booked us a hotel in downtown Manhattan, and we frolicked around in the city like tourists. It culminated in NYC Pride on Sunday, my actual birthday. It always falls on the weekend that I would be celebrating my birthday, and one other year (my first Pride, actually) on my exact birthday. I have skipped Pride a few times just because I don't always want my birthday celebration tied up with it. This year we agreed not to go to the parade itself, but just to Pride Fest, where it would be less crowded.

One of the booths was for a fertility association that specializes in helping start LGBT families. They gave me a bag for women (they also had ones for men) that included pamphlets and information. The director of the organization was running the booth, and I teasingly asked him to verify whether starting a family at 37 was a good idea. Nicole and I had butted heads on this a little bit a few weeks ago. I want to be done having children by 35, which I know we've discussed before but I guess Nicole had forgotten. Feeling like there was a timeframe made her nervous, so even though we have never entertained the thought of waiting that long, she started talking about people she knows who had babies at 37 etc. and were perfectly fine. I started to panic a little, but reminded myself that she has to make things a distant, remote thing in the future in order to cope with the stress of it (right now househunting is making her unable to think about kids) and that this does not mean she actually wants to wait til then, but that she can't deal with the pressure of a deadline. I've learned this about her and have to reign in my tendency to be reactive. So I ended the discussion and knew the only answer was to wait silently and patiently until we are done with this house business, and then she will be in a different place.

Knowing the sensitivity of this, I probably shouldn't have half-joked with the director for him to persuade Nicole. It came off as passive-aggressive and making her feel vulnerable. But the point is, when I said, "So is it a good idea to wait til we're 37 to start trying to conceive?" I didn't expect the exact answer I got. He said that we would probably be looking at using donor eggs at that point, because we would have fewer viable  eggs ourselves and already have to go through a lengthy process to try to get pregnant. He then said that the first decline in fertility is at 27, and the next at 33. He said, "I'm not saying this to sound sexist, I'm saying it because it's biological fact. Societal expectations are different and people wait longer and that's okay, but our bodies are still meant to have their prime childbearing years in their early and mid 20s."

Women get pregnant all the time at 27 and later, so I'm not exactly panicked. But I did feel a little bit of worry, just because I've always thought I'd be fine if I had them before 35. But 35 is the age where it becomes riskier, and yes, more difficult to conceive. It's logical that that doesn't mean you're super fertile until the day you turn 35, and then your fertility drops. Of course it's going to start waning. I just wasn't thinking in my head that, at 29, I'm already less fertile than I was just three years ago.

Does this change anything? Not really. I'm already here, and there's nothing I can do. And there's nothing I could have done at 26 either - I had just started dating Nicole. But my "well, what's another year in the grand scheme of things?" belief that I have to convince myself of from year to year has definitely been challenged. And I think the reason it affected me most is that I feel ready now in every other sense. We're just waiting to have a house, and that is taking forever. I hate that that is the only real obstacle, and that my fertility is just ticking away while we work toward it. But I'm not willing to compromise it, because I value my wife's mental health and she cannot handle the stress of both at the same time, and because we will be able to save infinitely less toward a down payment once we have a baby on the way.

So here I sit, trying to be patient while my body keeps churning out all my good eggs. *sigh*