Over a year ago I bought a mini trampoline for the garden. In the first corona summer I had taken my roller skates from the attic, chalked up sidewalks and climbed trees; now it was time for my long cherished trampoline dream. Jump between working from home.
The trampoline turned out to be less mini than I thought, and after an exhausting transport by bike, the thing still had to be put together. Fortunately, there was a manual. Tighten feet firmly, do not leave in the rain, remove sharp objects before jumping. There was an additional warning at the bottom of the page. ‘People over 35: consult a physician before use.’ I was 34, and had a hearty laugh.
I am now 35 and next Sunday I will be 36. Last night I made a list in my head of possible trampoline risks: broken bones, heart problems, urine loss. My doctor would have seen me coming. After all, at my age, only one jump really seems to count. Those of my eggs.
The hairdresser asked if I had children a few months ago. He himself had just become a father at the age of 29. “Not yet,” I said, “but the wish is there.” After a short silence he inquired how old I was. “Above a certain age as a woman you have to think about whether you want to do that to your child,” he said as he put the scissors in my dead spots.
I was so stunned that I was silent. At checkout I bought an overpriced shampoo. It wasn’t until outside that I thought of an answer: that my mother was 38 when she had me, and that it never felt like she had done anything to me.
A few years ago I wrote with a colleague about the CBS report Fertility at the dawn of the 21st century, which tried to explain why women are having children later and later. Women would give priority to their careers and be critical in their choice of partner. Objective language, yet it felt like a stab underwater. If-you-don’t-have-children-it-is-your-own-fault.
Not a day went by in the past year that I didn’t think about my fertility. Plenty of options, even if a partner who wants children is missing. Donorship, co-parenting, freezing eggs. But there is a downside to these individual options: the sense of personal responsibility. The fear of making a wrong choice. Now that more and more is possible in the medical field, it feels like a failure to be unwanted childless. Or as fertility researcher Lucy van de Wiel puts it in the documentary Freezing fertility: “You can now think: if I had frozen my eggs, I could have gotten pregnant.”
To calm my mind, I decided to go for a walk – less risky than jumping on the trampoline. But even the walking route interfered with my childhood wish: ‘Keep left at the next Y-jump.’
Gemma Venhuizen is a biology editor at NRC and writes a column here every Wednesday.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of October 20, 2021
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