A math Ph.D. in The Wall Street Journal agonizingly sketched out every high-IQ woman’s life dilemma last weekend: Do you sacrifice motherhood to chase a world-class career? She did, and it broke her heart.
“In many ways, my life is what I always dreamed it would be, except for one glaring difference: I am not a mother. I wish I was. My childlessness is something I grieve every day,” Eugenia Cheng writes.
Cheng presents herself as a woman who tried to do everything right yet didn’t get the one thing she wanted most: motherhood. Correction: Cheng is the mother of several children, although she doesn’t specify how many she lost between the mentioned miscarriages and in vitro fertilization cycles. That’s the norm with IVF. Only 2 to 7 percent of the children it generates live to birth.
Like so many other women nobody knows have been mothers, Cheng grieves that she’s never been able to hold her children. Fertility is one of those mystical things that constantly eludes human attempts to control and forces us to grapple with our helplessness and limits.
“I am now 48, too old to have any realistic hope of becoming pregnant again—not that that stops people from urging me to not ‘give up hope,’” Cheng writes bitterly.
Cheng says she pursued a career, “not for its own sake,” but because a “partner” to make babies with didn’t arrive when she was “25 and in my first full-time job[,] when I felt ready to have children.”
