Frozen

Bofang Zhou

Word count 1187

On a bright morning in early March, I sat in the waiting room of my gynecologist’s office, rehearsing how to describe the way my body had begun to betray me. Each month, a few days before my period, a familiar shadow crept in. What I had once dismissed as simple moodiness had thickened into something heavier—low, pressing gloom that edged uncomfortably close to sleepless depression. I blamed the hormones, of course. Four months earlier, I’d had the Nexplanon implant removed from my left arm. I watched it slide out, streaked with blood, hoping my moods would steady once it was gone.

They didn’t.

When the doctor entered, she was as warm as ever, the same steady voice, the same careful hands. I was prepared to ask about other birth control options, ready to troubleshoot my chemistry like a faulty lighting board. Instead, she set down my test results and, in a tone almost offhand, asked:

Do you plan to have children - soon, or at all?

Children?

“I think it’s time to explore egg freezing,” she continued gently. “We’re fortunate to have the technology.”

She listed clinics and organizations, their names threaded with words like Hope, Generation, Fertility—bright, forward-looking nouns that floated past me.

That was when I first heard the phrase premature ovarian failure.

“It’s most likely genetic,” she said. “Only about one percent of women your age experience this.”

The other ninety-nine percent seemed to gather invisibly in the room, a quiet jury I had never known I was standing before.

“But I’m only thirty-four,” I wanted to shout.

I didn’t. For a moment, my mind went blank.

Children had always existed somewhere abstract, filed under Later. I had only just stepped out of grad school and the long blur of a pandemic; the world still felt newly unlocked. I could vanish into a rainforest for days and return exhilarated. My face carried almost no visible history. My body answered when I called on it. I felt young, unspent, unconcerned. Why, suddenly, did it feel as if time were closing in, as if a decision about children had already begun without me?

I left her office in an even tone, telling her I would think about it. By the time the elevator doors closed, I was already dialing my insurance company. The Nexplanon removal cost me $5.17 out of pocket. I had placed a small, irrational faith in that number. But the representative explained that egg freezing would not be covered if I was under thirty-five. If I were married and pursuing IVF, however, they would cover it entirely, regardless of age.

I ended the call before it tipped into a full feminist rant, before I started railing against capitalism to a customer service representative who was only doing her job. I recognize that shift in my voice. I’m the one always ready to argue that age is a construct for women, that the biological clock is tangled up with market logic, that motherhood is not a prerequisite for wholeness. And yet, when the possibility of children began to feel so conditional, when I read that declining estrogen could accelerate aging, that this quiet malfunction might one day announce itself on my face, my convictions slipped. The arguments I had sharpened for years seemed to fly straight out the window the moment the stakes became personal.

We are full of contradictions. I am.

I skipped my afternoon meeting and walked a few blocks to a glass office in Midtown. One of the Hope–Generation–Fertility clinics was hosting an open seminar. The doctors delivered a thorough presentation. I learned that I would inject hormones into my body myself. That I would be put under anesthesia. That a needle would be penetrating through my vagina wall to retrieve the eggs.

“It will be painless,” the doctor said.

I don’t believe anything is painless. Anesthesia alone sounded terrifying—I had never been under. Around me sat ten women, all roughly my age, holding pens as if this were an exam. Through the thin glass walls, a television hummed in the neighboring office. Commentators were debating military escalation with Iran, speculating about gold prices, predicting how the stock market would respond. The language of risk and projection drifted in and out of the room. It struck me then how strange the math of adulthood has become. A global war felt far more concrete than my own future.

I wanted to hear nothing but my mother’s voice. We live almost as far apart as two people can on this planet, and it was past midnight where she was. I called anyway.

She answered, already worried. “Is everything okay, kid?”

“Mom,” I asked, “when did you go through menopause?”

There was a pause. She hadn’t expected that question. “Fifty-three,” she said.

“Was I in high school?”

“No,” she said. “You were already in graduate school in the U.S.”

Fifty-three.

That was the year she became a widow.

Suddenly I understood that there is an entire chapter of her life I have never read. I didn’t know what the first two years after my father died had looked like for her. I was busy wrestling with English, stumbling through school, tangled in a love that kept undoing me. What was it like to enter menopause alone, while grieving the man you had loved for twenty-nine years?

She never mentioned it. In the past decade, seeing each other only every two years, our conversations have become carefully edited versions of our lives. She tells me her boyfriend loves playing basketball and cooking, that he’s outgoing and tough—the opposite of my father. I tell her my life is great, that I landed a good job, that my salary doubled, that I’ve successfully exited another chaotic relationship.

In the end, I told her none of it. In Chinese, “premature ovarian failure” sounds less like a diagnosis than a sentence. The language feels terminal. I couldn’t ask her to hold it. I couldn’t let her see that the daughter who left home at nineteen—forever nineteen in her mind—was now speaking casually about timelines and decline.

This will be my own battle. Again.

Somewhere, ninety-nine percent of women my age are moving through their evenings without thinking about this at all. Somewhere, my mother is asleep, her body having already crossed that threshold years ago.

I am still here. Still undecided. Strangely, I find myself drawn to the promise of a steady, dreamless sleep under anesthesia.

Bofang is a Chinese bilingual writer and theater professional. She won top prizes in China’s national competitions for violin, writing, and classical Chinese language, and studied music and theater in Beijing, Paris, and New York. She now works in theater production in New York and has recently begun writing in English. Her debut publication appeared in The Sun Magazine, and her plays have been produced at Theater for the New City and The Chain Theatre in New York, among others. She currently lives in Brooklyn with her violin and forty plants.