WILL FREEZING YOUR EGGS HELP YOUR CAREER?

What I haven’t seen anyone explain is when, exactly, you’ll be ready. For most people, your 40s and early 50s are your peak earning years — is that really going to be a good time to meet that special someone, or finally step back to invest some time in having kids? I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m already noticing that I have a lot less energy than I used to. It’s not that I can’t get my work done or anything like that. But it used to be that if I had to travel for six days straight and then deliver a 2,500-word essay on the 7th, I could dial up my reserves and power through it — miserable and cranky, to be sure, but functioning. Then one day, around the time I turned 40, I dialed down for more power and there just … wasn’t any. My body informed me that it was tired, and my brain would not be doing any more work today, and we were going to sleep whether I liked it or not.

This is — as friends who have done it freely remark — a difficult age to be taking on your first newborn. I can’t even imagine trying the same feat 10 years from now, when my joints will be even creakier and my reserves even more depleted.

Well, my joints are a lot better than they were a decade ago, thanks to — you knew this was coming — the Rippetoe strength workout. But it’s true. And I was talking yesterday to a friend who used to run a lot, but who’s now switched almost entirely to weight training too (not exactly Rippetoe, but close) and he says all of his hip and knee pain has vanished. I believe it. A few months ago Helen and I thought he was walking like an old man. Now, he’s not.

Which is not a reason to put off having kids, just a reason not to accept all age-related decline as inevitable. Long-term, of course, it is inevitable barring new technologies I fervently hope to live to see. But there’s a lot of wiggle-room in the short- and medium-term.

Meanwhile, if I were a young single guy, I’d at least think about banking a bunch of sperm and then getting a vasectomy. That way I’d have control over my own reproduction.