Stop Letting Men Decide Whether You Become a Mother or Not.

I first heard about egg freezing when I was 30. It took me four years to actually do it.

My adventure starts in Italy. I was single, and a friend who worked as an obstetrician recommended it to me. Some women had started talking about this new possibility. But it felt like a secret. A whisper passed from woman to woman in corridors and private conversations.

Nothing really happened inside me at first. I didn’t know if it was something I really wanted to do. I was scared to open up. I felt somehow ashamed. Then I met a new guy, and my anxiety stopped. I wasn’t alone anymore. Three years later, we broke up, and the anxiety came back. Then another man entered my life. Then another.

Slowly, I understood that this wasn’t about having a boyfriend. It was about not putting a decision I deeply wanted for my life — motherhood — in a man’s hands.

One day, I was on holiday at Lake Garda for a wedding. Some gay friends from Los Angeles looked at me and said, “Why haven’t you frozen your eggs already? Are you silly? In LA, every woman has done it by her twenties!”

After lunch, we were lying in the sun by the lake. It was a beautiful day. And I suddenly realised that years were passing, and I still wasn’t doing anything to take control of my life.

I’m a creative. I work in theatre as a director, and it’s not always easy to build a family when you live a precarious and fast life. So I brought the topic to my therapist, and she encouraged me to do it.

Looking back, I started thinking seriously about egg freezing when I was 31. I finally did it just before turning 35. Four years. It took me four years to make that decision. In the end, I was incredibly lucky because the retrieval went very well. And honestly, it turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

I was there with one of my best friends, a Roman gay choreographer with the charm of Isabella Rossellini. We were driving through the outskirts of Rome on our way to the clinic, and the whole thing felt like a scene from Little Miss Sunshine.

There were a lot of gay guardian angels on this journey of self-determination. And a fair number of heterosexual men coming and going in the meantime. But this is what I learned: it takes courage to choose for yourself before life chooses for you.

I live in Italy, a country full of paradoxes, where conservative thinking is still very present. And egg freezing remains a taboo topic for many women. It’s also expensive; €5,000 to €6,000, even though some regions are starting to rethink the laws and public support around it.

But let me tell you something. This is the best money I have ever spent in my entire life. And I think women should talk about it much more openly. I also think egg freezing is one of the few scientific developments created specifically to expand women’s choices. And choices matter.

If you’re a single woman and you live in more open-minded countries, such as Portugal or Spain, becoming a mother on your own is a possibility. It’s not an easy possibility. It’s not necessarily my plan. But it exists, and that changes something.

Right now, I’m coming out of a very happy relationship with a man ten years younger than me. I dared to live in that relationship for six months because I wasn’t desperately searching for the father of my children at 36.

And egg freezing helped me freeze my anxiety, too. Girls, you don’t want to put your decisions in the hands of men. I see so many women around me; even privileged women, women with money, women who could afford it, who are terrified of taking this step and instead become increasingly desperate to find the right partner to start a family with.

And sometimes, around 35, the search starts to feel less like desire and more like urgency. By 40, we all know how that conversation sounds. So I have a question:

What would happen to the way we choose partners if motherhood didn’t feel like an emergency?

Would we choose differently?

Would we stay in the same relationships?

Would we fall in love with the same people?

I cannot say that anxiety has completely left my body. I’m still afraid of the idea of having a child on my own, and I still hope to find a partner to build a life and a family with. But it is a desire. Not an urgent need anymore. Because I know I did something. I know I did everything I could to protect my freedom to choose.

We live in a society where we cannot and should not control everything. But this is one thing I would encourage women to take control of. Egg freezing didn’t give me certainty. It gave me authorship.

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Photo © Emily Ratajkowski via @emrata