By Inimai Chettiar
As I plan my daughter’s first birthday, I keep circling back to that number: one.
I debate whether she’d prefer Lilo or Moana on her cake. She cruises across the living room, steadying herself on the coffee table, then turns and flashes me a conspiratorial smile as if we share a secret. In a way, we do.
Out of 21 eggs, she is the only embryo that survived.
When I froze my eggs ten years ago, I was 37 and aware of time in a way that felt both abstract and suffocating. I had always wanted to be a mother. I had imagined I would become one the usual way—through love that arrived right on schedule. Instead, I found myself alone in a fertility clinic in Manhattan, filling out paperwork that felt like a mortgage application.
Egg freezing is often perceived as a savvy career move to buy time and have the perfect baby right on schedule. I remember lying there on the ultrasound table thinking: Is this what taking control of your future feels like?
But all I felt was grief. I had spent over a decade dating with intention and still hadn’t found my person. Freezing my eggs was an admission that life was not unfolding the way I had imagined.
The process itself was relentless. Hormone injections lined my kitchen counter. Every evening, I spent over an hour mixing powders and liquids like a chemist. My body bloated and ached. I became hyper-aware of every twinge, every follicle count, and every lab value like I was some kind of test subject.
The daily early morning ultrasound appointments meant taking two weeks off work for each cycle. I was fortunate to have that option, but even then I felt guilty for stepping away from work to center my future child.
The night before my first egg retrieval, a doctor called to say I needed to take a “trigger shot” immediately, at 11:00 p.m.—administered in my buttocks by someone else. When I explained I didn’t have anyone, his irritation was palpable. I hung up and stared at the phone, humiliated. I had chosen this path precisely because I didn’t have a partner.
A neighbor I barely knew came over to help, graciously. I remember standing in my kitchen, pulling down my sweatpants while she tried to make small talk. I had never felt my singleness so acutely.
Over the course of 2016, I completed multiple cycles and froze 21 eggs. I was told it was enough for two children, statistically speaking. I held onto that phrase—“statistically speaking”—like a talisman. It gave me a sense of security in cold, hard numerical facts. In my mind, those eggs were already children—suspended in time, waiting for my other half. Every date I went on carried a quiet weight. The question wasn’t “Do I like him?”; it was “Is this the man my future children deserve?”
The financial cost of the process was staggering. Egg freezing cost $30,000, a medical bill that triggered an IRS audit requiring proof of the bill and the loan I used to pay it. Years later, when I was married and ready to thaw the eggs, it cost twice as much to fertilize and transfer embryos. To pay the bills, I sold my apartment and left a city I loved. Each payment felt like doubling down on a bet.
Twenty of my 21 eggs ultimately did not survive. I went from feeling secure in the belief that I could have two children to suddenly having a coin flip’s chance at one. The mental math was torturous. I lay awake each night running probabilities and oscillating between hope and grief, bracing myself for disappointment.
Thankfully, on the advice of a woman in a Facebook group, I had thawed the eggs in batches. Of the first batch, none became viable embryos. When the nurse called to deliver the news, I felt something inside me collapse. After much research and angst, I had moved the second batch to a clinic in Denver with a better lab. One embryo survived.
When I saw the positive pregnancy test, I didn’t feel joy, I felt terrified. The clinic warned that my hormone levels suggested a 95% chance of miscarriage. I began preemptively mourning almost immediately.
For four weeks, I held my breath and prayed constantly. When we finally saw her heartbeat flicker on the ultrasound screen, I wept with both relief and disbelief.
Even then, pregnancy after 40 brought medical issues for both myself and my newborn. Motherhood did not arrive as a triumphant conclusion to a well-executed plan. There were emergency rooms, surgeries, and anxious conversations in hospital corridors.
And yet, here she is, the improbable survivor of decades of longing, debt, self-advocacy, and faith.
If I could sit beside my 37-year-old self in that exam room, I would tell her this: You will need more than money, luck, and persistence. You will need to learn how to keep hope, grieve, ask for help, and believe in yourself even in the face of uncertainty.
Egg freezing is not an insurance policy. It is an act of hope—expensive, invasive, imperfect hope. It does not pause time or promise a child. It simply creates a possibility.
And as I press frosting onto her smash cake and envision my daughter smearing it across her face, I understand something I couldn’t have known back then: sometimes one survivor is enough to make it all worth it.
Inimai Chettiar is a mother of two who serves as President of A Better Balance, a national legal organization advancing pioneering workplace policies to support mothers and families, including paid leave and pregnancy accommodations. After a complex fertility journey, high-risk pregnancies with disabilities, and navigating her daughters’ medical issues, shifting how our society treats mothers has become her work and lived reality.
Photo: Heros Gnesotto
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