Life didn’t turn out the way I expected it to by 40.
I thought I’d have the partner, the child, the crazy mornings filled with cartoon voices and toast crumbs. I thought I’d be building a life with someone, not sitting alone in a fertility clinic getting blood drawn before 8AM.
But here I am. And this is what I chose, to give myself a little more time. To hold on to a “maybe” I wasn’t ready to bury.
I wasn’t Done Hoping
There’s this unspoken fact that if things haven’t happened naturally by 40, maybe they weren’t meant to. That maybe it’s time to accept and move on.
But how do you move on from something you still deeply want?
I wasn’t ready to grieve the possibility of motherhood. I didn’t want to look back and wonder what if.
Freezing my eggs wasn’t a grand act of empowerment; it was an emotional lifeline, a tiny rebellion against the ticking clock.
The body at 40 is not the same
This body has been through things. It’s tired. It’s sensitive. It reacts to every hormone with dramatic flair, mood swings, fatigue, tears at the smell of garlic. Every injection felt heavier than it might’ve a decade ago. Every ultrasound reminded me that my timeline was different.
And yet , this body of mine, she showed up for me. Over and over again. Even when I didn’t want to show up for myself.
It wasn’t easy. But it brought some peace
The injections. The bloating. The loneliness of going through it mostly on my own. The fear that it might not work.
It was a lot. Some days I felt like I was making the best decision I’d ever made. Other days, I felt broken, like this was a desperate attempt to fix something unfixable.
But after the retrieval… after the tears and rest and recovery… I felt something I hadn’t felt in a while: peace.
Not because everything is now solved. But because I took a step.
I made space for possibility.
I gave myself permission to try.
Life didn’t go as planned, but I’m still allowed to want more
This wasn’t the future I mapped out in my twenties. But it’s the one I’m living. And it still matters.
I’m still here , dreaming, deciding, doing scary things even when I’m scared.
Freezing my eggs didn’t give me answers.
But it gave me breathing room.
And sometimes,
that’s more than enough.
