Posted on 05/22/2006 3:13:25 AM PDT by beaversmom
With her biological clock winding down and no sign of Mr. Right, one woman pursues a different route to motherhood.
I'm in my ob-gyn's office, feet in the stirrups. Dr. Bakas peeks up over the paper sheet draped across my knees and pulls his gloves off with a snap. "So? Do you want a cigarette?"
My friend Bev laughs, as does the nurse, but I try not to because I don't want to jiggle or move or do anything to disrupt those tiny little sperm as they make the long journey up through my uterus to my little waiting egg.
They've already had to do a lot of traveling. I bought them from the Scandinavian Cryobank, which shipped them from Denmark. They're from Olaf (not his real name), who's 22 and blond, blue-eyed, and tall.
Olaf (well, his sperm) arrived packed in dry ice a week before I ovulated, so he hung around with me as we waited. He became my dinner companion. I set him up in his large round container on the chair across the table from me. I told him about my day.
A part of me thought it'd be lovely to not have to drink both glasses of wine — and he could have done more than just agree with me all the time. But then I took him into the living room to watch TV, and he didn't complain when I kept changing the channel. We became pals, Olaf and I. We took pictures.
Dr. Bakas hasn't done this before, though he did see the procedure when he was a resident. It's nothing, he said to me when I first talked to him about artificial insemination. We can absolutely do it here.
So now the deed is done. Intrauterine insemination. It has a higher success rate than the vaginal insemination I could have done myself at home. And I'll take any advantage I can get.
"If it's going to happen, it's happening right now, so just lie here for ten minutes. Let the magic begin," Dr. Bakas says, nodding as he and the nurse leave. Bev and I look at each other. Yes, I think, I'm getting pregnant right now.
(I don't know where I got off thinking that way. I knew even then that my chance of getting pregnant through artificial insemination was only 5 to 25 percent per try.)
I'm so excited it's hard to remember how reluctant I was about all this.
For years I had stuck faithfully to another plan.
The Plan
The Plan: Live life. Get married. Have kids. (I was hoping for two, but could have been talked into one or five or 20.)
In grad school at 36, I thought, This is good! But where's the rest? The men? The dating?
At 37, graduated, I turned to my friend Rebecca and said, That's it. I'm getting married.
She had found a wonderful husband by combining hard work, sheer determination, and a little luck. So I did what she did: Yahoo, Match, Nerve. Never mind that I'm shyer than Rebecca, and not nearly so slender, and I don't have her brilliant red hair. Still, I dated up a storm at 37 and 38. I met many nice men. And at 38 I began to settle in with Juan, a screenwriter who was between jobs.
He wanted kids, too — though it became more and more clear that he wanted them later, after he hit it big. I pulled out a BabyGap ad for strength, put it on the floor beside me and told him: We need to break up.
And then one day, watching the high school students in the summer program I run, I thought back to being 16. And I realized, holy smokes, I'm Thirty-Nine and One Half years old.
The kids went back inside to their classes, but I stayed in the sun and twisted a lock of hair around and around my finger. Well, I thought, I haven't asked Steve out yet. I could ask if he wants to go for a drink sometime. I also have a date coming up next week with a friend of a friend of a friend. It's not so bad. Don't panic.
But I was panicking. Because it struck me that even if I did fall in love right then, say with Steve (or the guy next week, it didn't matter), and he fell in love with me, we'd have to wait a year or so to get engaged and then a year to plan the wedding and then, well, he wouldn't be ready to have kids right away...I mean, jeez, I'd be 50 before we could even try for a baby.
I'm going to be alone, single, and childless for the rest of my life, I thought. This isn't the life I imagined when I was 16, sitting around listening to Love, soft as an easy chair and reading those romance novels, one after another.
He was supposed to have rescued me by now. He was supposed to have surrendered to my feminine wiles long ago: my doe eyes, my blonde tresses.
I stood up, fluffed my tresses, and faced the facts with my doe eyes.
He isn't coming.
I am absolutely on my own.
I'd suspected this to be my fate even as I dreamed of the other, more romantic life. When I was a teenager my parents said, "You'd better lose that weight or you're not going to find a boyfriend." And embedded in this warning was the fate-worse-than-death scenario that my mother's sister was living: 40, single, childless.
They shook their heads with pity. Poor Aunty Hanne.
I felt it like a curse on my head. Be thin! Or die alone!
Somewhere deep inside me I knew I'd be there, at the threshold of 40 and alone. I just knew it. And I swore as I watched Hanne get older and older that no matter what, I wouldn't miss out on having a child. Even if I had to go to some random bar and leave with a random guy and ravish him in some random motel. Then disappear.
Plan B
It'd be more dramatic to say that I immediately got on the phone, ordered some sperm, and got on with it. But it took another several months to officially move from The Plan to Plan B. Most especially there was the deep, hollow sadness to be worked through in watching The Plan fail.
Then, of course, there were things like money to be considered. And Rebecca helped me with a dirty little secret fear: Up until then it'd been hard to find a man ...but with a kid in tow, would it be impossible?
Come on, she said. It's not like the old days. Look around you: Over 40, single with a baby, is hardly shocking. Just move on with your life. Do what you want. You have the rest of your life to find a man. This you have to do right now.
Eventually I understood. I am absolutely on my own...for now.
At the doctor's office, after I keep still for ten minutes, Dr. Bakas lets us go. At home I lie on the couch beneath my front room window. The couch where Olaf's sperm lounged for most of the seven days they were with me. I prop my butt up a little and focus on getting pregnant, just in case Dr. Bakas isn't right about the instantaneousness of insemination.
Two days later, while I'm visiting a friend, waves of dizziness almost knock me over. There's a strange pinging deep in my pelvis and — most strangely — an awful metallic taste in my mouth. I know I'm pregnant. I just know I am. It may not stick, but at this moment, I know I am.
It does stick, and my daughter Kaj arrives nine months later, one day after her due date. My miracle first-try baby. Meant to be, my mother says.
Kaj is long and thin — 8 pounds, 9 ounces. She's yanked out of me after 35 hours of labor and a near cesarean (which was most definitely not part of The Plan or even Plan B). But I can tell you this for sure: Epidurals are the miracle of the 20th century, and I have the best obstetrician in the entire world.
Single mom Alexandra Soiseth is assistant director of the MFA Writing Program at Sarah Lawrence College, where she also teaches. She is currently working on a memoir, Me and You and Baby Makes Two: One Woman's Decision to Have a Child on Her Own. Her daughter, Kaj, is 2 years old and talking up a storm.
"I think Alexandra did what was exactly right for her.I just had my darling daughter in September, she was not planned but wanted very bad.We also have a son that will be 13 this month. I feel that my children make me whole(complete)--Anonymous 8:38 PM on 05/21/2006
Yes anon, she did what was right for HER.
Second comment:
I was so relieved to read this post! I'm glad someone else did this too! I've been ridiculed so much for CHOOSING to be a SINGLE mom, (IVF at 23). I've used the same bank, same donor three times and I'm currently pregnant with twin girl (baby 3&4). As far as I'm concerned I don't need Mr.Right my two little men are all I need and atleast I can bribe them to make them happy, lol. Who even said there's a Mr.Right for everyone and who says you'll even find him? I think women have the right to become a mother whenever they want regardless of having a man in their life.--Mommy to Liam, Jailyn, Rinoa, Marleanna! 1:55 AM on 05/22/2006 Mommy to Liam, Jailyn, Rinoa, Marleanna!
I think the title is misleading--it should say a single woman's decision to go it alone not a single mom.
Ping
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/magazine/21food.html?_r=1&oref=login
Recipes for Disaster
Romanticizing a bad idea, the social and economic ramifications are enormous. It's difficult enough in a two parent family.
Unless the Mother is independently wealthy the costs economically may place her and the child on welfare.
It isn't fair to the child either but a woman having a child because of her biological clock or because she wants to be complete or whatever selfish reasons she chooses is not right.
Whatever happened to marriage and a family unit?
What does recipes, food have to do with this except to state indirectly it's a recipe for disaster?
Unemployed Juan was her best hope. At least he could have stayed home with the kid.
What ever happened to the notion that children need two parents for a reason, and not just insemination? Don't little boys need daddys so they can learn how to be men?
Her children will be at a disadvantage. And someday in the future, they may not be pleased when learning how they were conceived. The woman is selfish.
(Flame suit on)
What a self-absorbed twit!
She reads the NY Times Sunday Magazine. She will find recipes for disaster besides her own
There's half the problem.
I don't know how ugly she is, though she admits she's fat. She's a professor at Sarah Lawrence, one of the most liberal colleges in the US (which is redundant) so you know she's no beauty. It's tough to find an educated, upper-middle-class liberal man who is going to fall in love with a heavy woman(though he may continue loving her if he meets her when she's attractive and she loses her looks later).
She did something truly selfish. (She'll probably have enough money to raise the child in fine form, but the little girl will have little enough contact with her working mother and have no father.) I feel sorry for her, though. I feel sorry for both of them. The idea of going through life with no husband and no children when you want both desperately is very sad. I can understand her temptation. Being a liberal, she doesn't realize how crucial a daddy is to a child.
Ahhhh thanks for clearing that up for me cause I didn't "get it" at first.
Actually I had a more coherent post but it got lost so I posted the bare bones
She forgot the most important rule
"They all get prettier at closing time."
Funny she picked a blue eyed Scandanavian to be artificially bred with after picking Juan to do it the natural way.
"He isn't coming.
I am absolutely on my own."
"I'm going to be alone,..."
"Eventually I understood. I am absolutely on my own...for now."
Why didn't she just get a pet? Having a child to feed your need for company is just wrong.
"Unemployed Juan was her best hope. At least he could have stayed home with the kid."
- Apparently, she gave up on Juan as a potential father when she found that he didn't want children right away. This is a crock because women who desperately want a child before they grow too old will either convince a partner who truly loves them to grant their wish or become pregnant anyway and claim it was all an accident.
No, I fear that Juan didn't measure up as either a provider and/or he came from the bottom of the gene pool.
I suspect the Juan story was inserted to show that she is not a lesbian and that we should feel sorry for her because she tried, she really, really tried to have a child the old fashioned way.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least that after a few years the true turkey baster story will be dropped in favor of one involving a wild night of passion with a local Nordic male while on a trip to Oslo.
After all, it makes a much more romantic story than one in which she has to refer the kid to the kitchen drawer to see daddy.
The picture at the top of the page is apparently her and her fatherless daughter. Oops. sorry, the father is a container that sat in her mother's living room for seven days that watched TV with Mom. A relationship she can proudly look back upon, I'm sure. (ack!)
Psycho-lib mom gives kid idiot name ping.
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