The grief and fragile hope of deciding to freeze my eggs

My mum got married at 27, then had her first child, me, when she was 32. I always thought I’d have children at that age too. Instead, I moved across an ocean to study documentary photography in New York. And now here I was, standing in the dim, narrow corridor of a Brooklyn apartment, my bare legs illuminated by a strip of light from the kitchen, my camera balanced on a mini tripod in front of me. I pressed record. With one hand, I started pouring salt onto the floor – I had wanted sand, like the grains of sand in a sand timer, but where would I find that? With the other hand, I took an egg from the carton balanced beside me, and let it fall to the floor. Its gooey insides splattered across the wooden floorboards, broken bits of shell cradled in clear jelly, the yellow yolk slowly bleeding out. After 30 seconds, I dropped another. Then another. And another. Until the whole pack was smashed at my feet.

Later, I added the sound of ticking clocks to the video. Then subtitles – the words of a woman I had recently interviewed: ‘I feel nothing but anger about having to do this, not empowered, not like I’m taking control,’ read the text. ‘I feel forced to do this.’ Forced because her biggest dream in life was to be a mother, she told me. Because others got lucky in a way she didn’t.

0:00 - 0:00 0.25 x 0.5 x 0.75 x 1 x 1.25 x 1.5 x 1.75 x 2 x Body Clock, a short conceptual film by Matilda Hay, explores the complicated emotions women can feel towards egg-freezing in an interview with Samantha, 36

I used Samantha’s words because I was too afraid to use my own and say out loud the ugly things I felt. That I didn’t want to freeze my eggs, though I knew that I should. Like a toddler having a tantrum, I didn’t want any of this new path I was on. Didn’t want to spend thousands of pounds and poke myself with needles. Didn’t want my relationship to have ended. Didn’t want to cry at friends’ weddings wondering where I’d gone wrong.

I was ashamed of feeling this way, full of self-pity and unwanted jealousies. Especially when I had so much to be grateful for. I reminded myself that to even consider freezing my eggs is a privilege not everyone can afford. But, through the lens of my grief, it only signified what had gone wrong.

When I was eight years old, I told my mum that I hated dresses and would never wear one, not even when I got married. Growing up, I just assumed that marriage would happen. I didn’t know exactly when, but I was sure I would meet someone, fall in love, and have a family, because that’s how the path of life unfolds.

The author aged around three

I was a late bloomer when it came to boys – late to experience my first kiss, slow to move through the bases, 19 when I lost my virginity. This led me to believe that love was easier for other people. In my first real relationship, at university, it was wonderful to discover that I could fall in love, and that it was easy. When it ended two years later, I was sad but not bereft. If love had found me before, it could do so again. But, a few years on, dating started to feel like a puzzle I couldn’t solve. I had summer flings with friends-of-friends. Kissed boys at house parties. Asked cute barmen for their numbers. I even asked out a guy I met on the Tube. Most of these encounters lasted two, maybe three dates before the excitement of getting to know a new person wore off, and one of us pulled away.

I watched my friends sail off to Couples Island, while I stood stranded on the shore

In most areas of my life, effort led to an outcome: revise hard and you’ll pass the test; train consistently and you can run a half marathon. But, no matter how much time or effort I put into dating, there was nothing to show for it. Just a dark swirling fear that I was destined to be alone.

I tell you this so you understand that when I finally met him – the man I thought I’d spend my life with – it felt like salvation. Like all the bad dates were worth it because they led me to him. He was funny, excitable, clever, handsome, kind. As one date turned into 10, I found a sense of safety I’d never really known. For almost three glorious years, I thought I had solved the puzzle.

And when it all fell apart? I can only describe it as a shattering. Not just of me, but of how I viewed the world. I thought that once you solved the puzzle it couldn’t break. That if you loved someone enough you could get through anything. Now he was standing on my doorstep saying: ‘I’m not in this anymore.’ It was unexpected and inexplicable. I abandoned our half-cooked dinner and sat on my bed staring out the window in shock. In one month, I would be 30. I felt like a tree that had been hit by lightning, only half alive, my branches burnt, my trunk scarred and split in two.

Three weeks later was my friend’s hen do. Three months after that, my younger brother got engaged. Then another friend, and another. I watched them sail off to Couples Island, while I stood stranded on the shore.

Two years and a global pandemic later, moving to New York was my silver lining. I had always loved photography. Its power to capture memories and freeze moments in time. Here was something positive, something I never would have done if I wasn’t single. The city surprised me with its dirt and grime, the onslaught of noise, the scrappiness of it all. Was this really the greatest city in the world? But, beyond the rats and the trash, it pulsed with a creative buzz that soon felt addictive. People were loud and expressive. The sun almost always shone, and the light had a golden quality all year round. When I was distracted, I found joy. But, when I had space, the loneliness at my core would roar.

‘Do you ever find it hard, going to weddings?’ I asked a single friend one night.

‘Not really,’ she replied. ‘I know I’ve got all this coming, and I’m enjoying my life as it is.’

Where she felt confident about the future, I felt helpless. That’s what shattering does. The crystal ball was broken, and I no longer trusted that things would work out.

Especially not with the sense that I was running out of time. I don’t remember when I first learned about the body clock, but, by my late 20s, the message we had all received, however untrue, was that fertility plummets after 35. Egg quality decreases, the risk of miscarriage increases, the risk of genetic complications too. If you want children, you need to start trying in your early 30s. Of course, there’s variation, but you don’t know until you start. You don’t know if your body is destined for early menopause, or if fertility will follow you into your 40s. I didn’t want to miss my window.

As part of my documentary project, I started photographing dogs – open, joyous creatures, full of unconditional love. But when I finally googled egg freezing late one night, and stumbled across the Egg Freezing Support Community on Facebook, I felt so seen. It was full of women just like me, navigating an uncertain future, asking questions. And many other wonderful women, who’d been through the process, answering them. Every post contained a story of heartbreak or grief or time running out, punctuated with celebrations of babies made from frozen eggs. A whole world of women walking the same new path and figuring it out together. We need to talk about this more, I thought. My pain and angst had found a purpose. I changed my project.

I started interviewing women from the Facebook group, and photographing them at home. I heard about cheating fiancés, cancelled weddings, and partners who weren’t ready for children. One woman had never had a boyfriend. One had grandparents who had survived the Holocaust, so having biological children was important to her. Another became pregnant naturally with a partner she had met later in life, never needing her frozen eggs. Unlike Samantha, who had not yet gone ahead with egg freezing, these women had all been through the process, and I noticed a difference: hope. With each courageous story, I felt it stir inside me too.

Although egg freezing is not a perfect insurance policy, it lifted the weight of timelines off my chest

People often confuse egg freezing with IVF because they both involve hormone stimulation and egg retrieval. But emotionally they’re not the same at all. With IVF, you move straight to fertilisation, making embryos and trying to get pregnant. With egg freezing, you’re suspended halfway through. Freeze-framed several steps behind, waiting.

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It’s not just about wanting children, but about wanting someone to have them with. And while there’s space in our society for the grief of infertility, the grief of absent partnership is more ambiguous, more unseen. There are no funerals for lost relationships or past versions of ourselves.

My inner scientist became fascinated by the process. Originally created so cancer patients could preserve their fertility, it became increasingly available to healthy women in the early 2010s and, by 2012, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine deemed that the procedure should no longer be considered experimental. I learned how it uses vitrification, a ‘flash-freeze’ technique that cools the eggs so rapidly they transform into a glass-like solid state before damaging ice crystals can form. And how your levels of anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) can give an indication of your ovarian reserve: the lower your reserve, the fewer eggs your body might be likely to produce in one go.

My inner feminist enjoyed challenging society’s message that fertility is a female burden for the female body, with no pressure put on men.

‘Do you ever worry that you’re running out of time?’ I asked a date, after telling him about my project.

‘No,’ he replied with a nonchalant shrug. ‘I figure my 30s are for having fun and building my career, and my 40s is when I’ll settle down.’

I launched into my spiel about how men have a body clock too, just not as intensely as women. Did he know that the risk of miscarriage increases by around 40 per cent for pregnancies fathered by men in their mid-40s? Had he read about the worldwide sperm decline, and the rise of male infertility? Would he feel differently if we talked about these things more, the way we do for women?

At 34, and back in London, I finally took the plunge myself. As I mixed together my medication, then drew it up into a needle and pierced the skin two inches from my belly button, I felt proud. Although egg freezing is not a perfect insurance policy – based on the research, 15-20 eggs could give me an 80 per cent chance of a baby – it lifted the heavy weight of timelines off my chest. Yes, life hasn’t turned out as I had hoped, but maybe it can still work out for the best.

I think of them sometimes, my glass eggs, fragile manifestations of a dream. They’re not a crystal ball, there’s still no guarantee, but those tiny frozen chances are helping me to trust that I, too, still have all this coming to me.