Frozen Eggs and Feet of Clay

New York Magazine published an article by Jillian Dunham entitled, The Real Reason Women Freeze Their Eggs. Dunham is a childless, thirty-seven-year old, successful New York professional woman. This is a woman who should have children preparing to leave the nest. Instead she is meeting with doctors, trying to harvest whatever wisps of fertility she may have left.

In short, this woman is a failure at being a woman.

In the most telling exchange in the article, her doctor tells her, "It isn’t you. All day long, I see patients like you. You’re smart, beautiful, accomplished, nice. It makes no sense. I go home to my wife and I say, "There’s something wrong with the men in this generation. They won’t grow up.'"

She has already come to this conclusion. Her doctor is just confirming her bias. Earlier, she writes of a beautiful, sardonic friend who got dumped, and realizes that "none of us were responsible for the fact that so many men see relationships as a giant albatross."

Interesting that she uses the analogy of the albatross. In Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the albatross follows the ship and is considered a good omen. When the captain kills the albatross with a bow, the bird becomes an omen of misfortune and is hung around his neck.

Dunham had her man in the bag, and she blew it. "Matt asked me to marry him..." but "the ring stayed in my jewelry box." That is the anecdote that symbolizes her albatross.

Men can sense desperation, and in her case it clings like fog clings to the moors. It emanates a fragrance of shame and fear, and gives men a reason to be "cagey," a word she uses twice. I'm going to infer that Dunham is the one who is a "commitment-phobe." She mentions the death of her mother, but doesn't mention her father once in the article. This is a very important developmental relationship, and it isn't mentioned. The omission is glaring.

Perhaps her mother divorced when she was very young. The freedoms secured by her feminist forebears, like abortion and no-fault divorce, were once seen as good omens. These desiccated birds are now hung about her neck and everyone can see her humiliation.

Perhaps her mother divorced, and was given full custody of her. Her father could only visit on weekends, but he was compelled by the court to pay child support every two weeks to the mother. Her mother, knowing this, traded this convenience for the relative inconvenience of having a man around to tend to. This feminist freedom was once seen to be a good omen. Now her daughter is the one carrying around this mangy menage of beak and feathers.

Well done, sister suffragette!

It strikes me that when a woman is in her twenties, she has a financial incentive to sell her eggs. It's a seller's market. A woman in her late thirties is buying time for her own eggs. For what? In ten years, when she finally settles for someone, and they go to the doctor to hopefully inject an embryo, what kind of embryo will it be? Eggs with freezer burn married to semen from an old guy with the world's biggest U-Porn collection?

I hope she likes cats.