Nonfiction | October 07, 2026

My Search for Life 

In a giant metal tank colder than nightfall on the moon, the seeds of human life lie in wait. Liquid nitrogen keeps them frozen in time. Not just ingredients but the earliest stages of the possibility of life, created in a laboratory that exists because people like me, who want children but can’t create them otherwise, exist by the millions.  

The frozen inhabitants are ignorant of their owners’ expectations for them, that the lucky ones will transform from cells in vitro to fetus in utero. That they will emerge slimy and crying, but breathing. That they will be held and named. That they will live longer than the ones who take care of them. 

Five of these embryos belong to me and my husband, Ben. These frozen precursors to children know nothing of my rage at my body’s failure to create them the “natural” way, the old- fashioned way, the way that TV and movies would suggest happens every single time a man and a woman copulate.  

Given my allegedly decrepit forty-one-year-old vessel and two previous failed attempts to produce viable embryos, I assume that most of our proto-kids in the frozen day care will not grow up—ultimately, one at most will have the opportunity to shed its prefix. It’s a truth that makes some people want to shut down the whole enterprise of IVF. It’s a truth I wouldn’t verbalize even to close friends, unless they have gone on a similar journey.  

Making possible life outside the body requires a lot of time, money, patience, and acceptance of risk—much like planning a mission to another planet or our moon. Unlike a motto often associated with NASA, where I used to work, failure is absolutely an option.  

For the uninitiated, here’s what IVF entails: the partner blessed with female anatomy kicks things off by visiting a fertility clinic for blood draws and ovarian monitoring most days in a roughly two-week period, all the while injecting herself with multiple kinds of hormones to mature as many eggs as possible in a short spurt (the comparative ease and comfort with which the partner with male anatomy produces his part of the embryo cannot be overstated).  

“You’ve got this, Bizzie,” Ben would say each time he watched me slowly push the syringe plunger into my lower abdomen, gritting my teeth because one of the injections stung with each milliliter of liquid. We often watched the vampire comedy “What We Do in the Shadows,” featuring a lot of extracting and drinking of blood, during this routine. 

Then comes the “trigger shot,” an intramuscular injection that feels like a needle puncturing a bone in your butt that you didn’t know you had. That chemical delivery sets the timeline for surgery, exactly thirty-six hours later, to remove whichever eggs happen to be available for plucking. Nurses like to say you take “the best nap ever” under anesthesia, but I experienced egg retrieval surgeries as though time itself had been robbed from me. Each time, my conscious memory kicked back in at a different point—first in November after my husband had been brought back into the recovery room, then in February before he arrived, and in May, most alarmingly, when the nurse asked if my leg still hurt, and I had no idea what she was talking about. While I enjoyed a post-recovery Turkish appetizer plate at the mall, technicians ran my husband’s semen through a filter, inserted some lucky sperm into my eggs, and waited to see which embryos would grow normally.