A Sort Of Single Mother By Choice

Twelve years ago when my daughter was born, my parents were there in the hospital room with me to welcome her. My mother cut the cord and my father announced, “It’s a girl!” The three of us exclaimed over her incredible size — over 9 pounds — and off-the-charts length — 23 astounding inches. It was everything I’d been dreaming of since I’d first set out to become a single mother by choice.

But not too far away, waiting patiently by the phone for news, was another person, my sometimes-live-in girlfriend, Sarah.

She wasn’t at the birth because I hadn’t invited her to be. In fact, I had expressly told her that she was not invited. I didn’t even want her waiting at home for us. I had embarked on my path toward motherhood on my own, and I was determined to see it through that way, even if the solitude of the journey had become something I had to enforce.

My girlfriend and I had first dated in college, and had spent those years of our early 20s madly in love. But our relationship had ended when she broke my heart by refusing to come with me when I headed off to the West Coast for graduate school. We’d stayed in touch for a while, and then she’d stopped answering my calls. I cried into my whiskey and referred to her among my new friends as “the one who got away.”

I spent the next seven years in and out of disastrous relationships with men who were mostly all wrong for me, commitment-phobic bad boys who couldn’t have been further from wanting what I did: a child. I was approaching 30 and desperate to settle down and start a family. One day, I asked my mother why it was taking so long to find someone who wanted to make a life with me.

“Maybe you’re not someone who’s meant to have just one great love. Maybe your great loves will be many,” she said. This from a woman who’d been married to the same man for nearly 40 years.

But if this was true, I reasoned, then why not have a child on my own right now? I could always fall in love at 50, but I couldn’t have a baby at that age. The more time I spent making the case to everyone around me, the more attached I became to the vision of myself as a single mother by choice. Why would anyone do this with a partner, I thought, when it’s so much less complicated to do it on your own?

So I asked an old ex-boyfriend — smart, attractive, and completely off the rails — if he’d be the donor. He breezily said yes, and I began to make plans to draw up paperwork with a lawyer. And that’s when Sarah stepped back into my life.

First she sent me an email on New Year’s Eve wishing me an early happy birthday and asking if we could talk on the phone sometime. I was furious. Who did she think she was to show up in my life now, crashing my pre-baby bliss and being a downer on both New Year’s and my birthday? I said sure, she could call me — but she better have a good reason for it.

I wasn’t going to let another relationship head off my dreams of starting a family.

As it turned out, she did: She had cut off contact all those years before because she hadn’t been able to get over our romance. And that’s why she was back in touch now. We still lived on opposite sides of the country, and neither of us had jobs we were ready to walk away from, but how could I say no to the most romantic proposal of my life? She wanted me back.

After that, we spent hours on the phone each day, relearning each other with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. We knew that we belonged together, but “together” was a complicated prospect. At first, she seemed understanding about my continued determination to become a single mother by choice. I made it clear that any relationship with her wasn’t going to change that for me, and she said she wouldn’t mind dating a pregnant lady. In these conversations, we chose to ignore the obvious fact that pregnancy only lasts nine months.

As the weeks passed, she began to ask for me to postpone the paperwork, to wait until our relationship had had more time so that we could embark on this journey of parenthood together, as partners, and without the conspicuous intrusion of my ex-boyfriend’s sperm. But I felt I’d waited long enough. I wasn’t going to let another relationship head off my dreams of starting a family.

Not surprisingly, like so many things having to do with getting pregnant, this was entirely out of my control. Days before Sarah’s first visit to spend a weekend with me at my place in San Francisco, I went to the emergency room for a burst appendix. I had surgery and was officially out of commission for several weeks as I recovered.

By that time, I’d accepted a one-year teaching position in Pennsylvania, only an eight-hour drive from her home in Boston, and I decided it was no longer convenient to use the West Coast ex-boyfriend’s sperm. I spent the next few months moving cross-country, researching clinics, picking an anonymous donor, and downing prenatal vitamins. Then I gave myself a shot of hormones and drove my Subaru to the insemination. I was doing this on my own, just like I’d promised myself.

Meanwhile, my girlfriend and I had come a long way on our path back to partnership. And, up until the morning sickness kicked in, I continued to give her every indication that we were walking it together. Then came months of physical and emotional agony, our lives moving forward against the backdrop of my severe nausea and vomiting, with a propulsion that felt out of my control. I took a permanent job in a small college town in Alabama. She found a new job in Atlanta and followed me south. We bought the house that I lived in mostly without her, and she rented an apartment in the city for herself. My family was thousands of miles away and I knew no one in my new hometown. On weekends she’d drive the two hours from Atlanta to buy my groceries and listen from the other room while I threw up. I couldn’t have gotten through it alone, but at the time, alone was exactly what I wanted to be.

While she was doing everything she could to make our dreams come true, I had turned inward. I stopped talking about our future together and started thinking about my own. My all-day, eight-month morning sickness was exacerbated by smell and touch, and I couldn’t stand for her to be near me. The only person I could imagine sharing a space with was the baby, and my tunnel vision of life as a single mom narrowed again.

But though my vision for the future felt like it was gaining new focus, everyone around me seemed to grow more confused. Sarah’s parents called with well-wishes and inquiries about baby gifts, which I accepted with a mixture of scorn and appreciation. Not surprisingly, my new co-workers didn’t understand the situation either, clearly longing to turn our story into one of a happy, little queer nuclear family — something I vehemently objected to, even as Sarah rubbed my swollen feet. It’s a stretch to say that anyone was convinced by the explanation I gave — we’re dating and I’m having a baby on my own — but I stuck to it. At the baby shower my new friends threw for me, I gleefully unwrapped a baby book and declared, “I hope this one doesn’t have a family tree in it because our family tree only has one side!” My girlfriend sat an armchair away.

We did everything out of order. And that is something I remain strangely proud of.

They say that if you’re in a relationship that’s under stress — for instance, you haven’t been together in years and one of you is committed to a fantasy that most people try to avoid — having a baby won’t bring you closer. But, in our case, that’s just what a baby did.

After my daughter was born, I started to fall in love with Sarah again. On weekend visits, we would take the baby on long walks around the neighborhood and she’d rock my daughter to sleep while I cooked romantic meals for two. She was gentle and kind — everything I wanted in a partner — and I was suddenly able to see that again. Maybe we would have found our way into parenthood together by another path, but watching her fall in love with my daughter and my daughter fall in love with her was a big part of what helped me fall back into love, too.

I think sometimes about how hard those months before my daughter’s birth must have been for Sarah, and what strength of belief it took for her to single-handedly carry our relationship through them. How did she pass the night of my labor, knowing I was at the hospital pacing the halls with my parents waiting for my cervix to dilate? The next day, while my daughter and I recuperated in the birth wing, Sarah had been at her office in the city coming up with succinct answers in response to her co-workers’ awkward questions about whether or not her girlfriend had had a baby yet. She tried to sleep and she tried to work, even though she knew that the woman she loved and a child she wanted to call her own were just a drive away. In retrospect, it seems a series of cruelties I can’t believe she endured.

When my daughter was 3 years old, Sarah and I finally got married. But we still didn’t move in together full-time as a family for another six months after that. Eventually, Sarah officially “adopted” my daughter (the somewhat anachronistic term for adding a second, non-biological parent to a child’s birth certificate), but that was still an additional three years down the road. We did everything out of order. And that is something I remain strangely proud of, as if the beautiful life we’re living now together as a family is a better one for being hard-earned. And perhaps that was what I was after all along: not to be a single mother by choice, but to stick to my belief that doing parenthood and partnership my own way — out of order and unconventionally — was the only way that would deliver me to happiness. But Sarah’s belief — in us, our love, and the partnership that might wait on the other side of this baby’s birth — was something I never considered, though it is surely the force behind the marriage and family I am so lucky to have today.

A few weeks before going into labor, a large cardboard box had arrived on our front doorstep addressed to me. Inside was a giant stuffed carrot, a baby gift from two people whose names I’d never heard before. Examining the return address, I noticed they shared a hometown with Sarah’s parents. I called her up and read the names to her, and she told me they were her parents’ neighbors. What, I asked, were her parents telling people? What did they think was going on here? Now, when I see my wife putting our daughter to bed, that oversized stuffed carrot propping up her sleepy head, I realize it was everyone but me who knew all along.

Keetje Kuipers’ most recent collection of poetry, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, was the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award. Poems from her three previous collections have been honored by publication in The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies, and her poetry and prose have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, POETRY, and over 100 other magazines. Keetje has been a Stegner Fellow, an NEA Literature Fellow in Creative Writing, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. She lives with her wife and children in Montana, where she is Editor of Poetry Northwest.