Life is what happens....

I used to think that that song lyric was just clever. Ha ha, it certainly does John ole boy. And then life happened to me: cancer, divorce, grad school too late, etc., etc.

I was sent this article on companies paying for women to freeze their eggs so they can be productive employees and not worry about something like, oh, reproducing mucking up their career.  I'm horrified. I'm creeped out. I don't know if I have a "career" per say, where I'm climbing up the ladder of greater success, but I'm trying to eek out something for myself now that I've found where I want to be. And yes, the thought that I want to get home at a reasonable time each night so I can do homework with Luke, and read to him and actually mother him and enjoy him is present in my thoughts. That leads me to wonder, is this my problem? That I don't want to work until 8pm every night and don't want to work weekends? Or is it a problem with American society? Am I lazy that I don't want that job? That I feel a job should entail 9-5 duties (or 8-4) and not overwork employees so they can enjoy some work/life balance?

And about freezing eggs. These companies make it sound like a pedicure. It's not easy. It's not simple. And it's certainly not fool-proof. When preparing to enter the world of chemo, I was advised to freeze some eggs as we didn't know what state my body would be in when we ended chemo. We had some (but not a clear picture) of how my cancer would react to chemo. Would we need more chemo? Even stronger chemo? (I had a pretty powerful cocktail) I called my insurance company and was given a litany of egg-freezing/harvesting procedures that would be covered and to what extent. This, on TOP of trying to navigate a new world of oncological treatment and all that new vocabulary (white counts! red counts! R-CHOP, drugs upon drugs!). And....not to mention I needed to start chemo, like yesterday. Luckily, my amazing life-saving oncologist put me on Lupron shots to put me into a chemical menopause. (Which was about as fun as it sounds.) It chemically froze my ovaries and protected the eggs. And it worked. Lucas is nothing short of a miracle, a fact that hits me every day. Which makes it a million times harder to say okay to a 50/50 parenting agreement and not have that little miracle sleep under my roof every night.My body went through all that and still produced a miraculous little boy and I have to give him up half the time?

Cancer. The gift that keeps on giving.