Yahoo Lifestyle The New Normal: Single And Having A Baby
Lisa Zimmet and son. Photo: James Geer
On a rainy October morning in 2012, Lisa Zimmet set out for an appointment that she hoped would change the cards life had dealt her. Dressed in an understated suit and with her hair in a sleek ponytail, she looked like any other busy executive as she battled the wet and the rush-hour crowds at Melbourne’s Hawthorn station, except that Lisa wasn’t on her way to another uneventful day at the office. She was about to make a baby. Alone.
At 35, with no relationship on the horizon and after much late-night tossing and turning, the finance executive had decided to try to become a mother, regardless of her single status. That morning, she would have two embryos transferred into her uterus at Monash IVF.
She knew that if it worked – and with IVF that is still a big “if” – there would be no cosy pillow talk about the growing baby, no husbandly hand holding in the labour ward, no proud partner on the scene to dote on a toddler taking his or her first teetering steps. She would be the only parent. It wasn’t the romantic path she had planned. It was reality.
Lisa, now 37, recalls: “I had been thinking, ‘This is ridiculous. I’m over [waiting to meet someone]. It wasn’t how I thought I’d have kids, growing up, but it did feel exciting to be taking charge of the situation.”
Lisa is emblematic of a growing breed of singletons who, confronted by what seems like a “man drought”, are challenging the accepted norms of motherhood and family. Women like Lisa are actively and unapologetically scheduling appointments at IVF clinics, tapping into specialist websites to meet potential co-parents, or calling on male friends to help them realise their very modern vision of a family.
It wasn’t always an option. Where biology once dictated “first find your man” and then have the baby, technology is turning the sequence on its head. Now women can choose to have the baby while they’re in their most fertile years, using methods like donor and IVF, and then wait for Mr Right at leisure and without that panicky tick of the biological clock in their ear. Lisa Zimmet was lucky. The IVF worked and she is now a mother to boisterous 20-month-old son Harry.
“Here I am, a single woman, and it’s empowering that I am able to do this, though it wasn’t how I had planned to have kids,” she concedes. “Even now I see couples, mothers and fathers with their babies, and, of course, there is an element of sadness there. But I thought it could be short-term thing ... and maybe when Harry is older he will have a dad. I haven’t put up the white flag and given up on meeting someone.”
Lisa is not alone. In Victoria, between 2010 and 2013, the number of women using sperm donors quadrupled, after legislation came into effect to allow single women and lesbian couples the same access to assisted reproductive technology as heterosexual couples. Indeed, such is the demand for donor sperm, clinics are reporting having trouble keeping up with orders and have considered petitioning authorities to import sperm from the US. Whatever the method, Australian Bureau Of Statistics figures show that more than one in three babies in this country is now born to an unmarried mother.
Lisa Zimmet and baby. Photo: James Geer
We live in an age of options and if more women are crafting their own version of “happily ever after” without the prince, it’s simply because they can, says journalist Rebecca Traister, whose book on unmarried women is due in 2016. Globally, we are marrying later, achieving higher levels of education and greater economic power.
“If you have options, you don’t have to settle,” observes Traister. “We have the ability to bring into being choices about our lives and our family situations that work for us, and to imagine new types of happy endings.” Yet choice, as we know, can be a double-edged sword: sure, it provides options, but it also brings fiendishly difficult decisions of a kind undreamt of in previous decades. As we head into our 30s, we women must ask ourselves some tricky questions: should we wait for the elusive Mr Right, pray he wants babies straightaway and hope our wombs are still up for it, or take the plunge while we still can? How long should we wait? And what are the repercussions – for us as well as our children – of going it alone?
Those single women who in the past may have come to accept their circumstances – “I didn’t get a chance to have kids, so be it” – may end up feeling virtually compelled to try the donor/IVF route, despite what it does to their body, mind and bank balance. Some women aren’t even sure they actually want children, but, now that it’s a possibility, can come down with a bad case of FOMO.
But perhaps the most powerful driver is a new attitude. Women are now less likely to buy into the traditional narrative that only love and marriage can lead to baby carriages. This new crop of single mums is unwilling to settle for Mr Just-OK, simply to fulfil their ambition to parent. Aside from anything else, they don’t want to use men in that way.
“I don’t want to go out and meet someone just for the sake of it,” explains Prue Newton, a 39-year-old marketing manager who is preparing to undergo IVF. “I either want to be in a solid relationship, or do it myself and find a solid relationship at a different time.”
Leanne Haynes is a single mother of two and secretary of the Melbourne IVF Single Mums Support Group, and felt similarly before deciding to go it alone. “I found I was almost interviewing each guy as a prospective father, rather than as a partner for me. I don’t think that’s fair on the guy. I started to ask myself if this was the right reason to get into a relationship, and I decided it wasn’t.”
It might seem like the answer to a single girl’s prayers, but embarking on the parenthood journey on your own isn’t all adorable babies, tiny pink ensembles and cooing friends. Rebecca Merton*, a 40-year-old education consultant from Sydney, first started thinking about single motherhood at the age of 36, when she returned to Australia after living in the US for several years. A pay rise two years later made the idea a financial possibility. Since then, Rebecca has spent more than $30,000 of her own money on four rounds of IVF, and will soon embark on a fifth, this time using an egg donor as well as a sperm donor. The process has been both emotionally and financially harrowing.
January Jones and son. Jones is just one of the celebrities at the moment choosing to go it alone when it comes to motherhood. Photo: Getty Images
“I do struggle with loneliness at times,” says Rebecca. There is no “shared investment of hope”, she explains. “I deeply miss that shared decision making that joint parenthood brings.”Lisa agrees with her. “On my ‘down days’ I do sometimes think it would be nice to have a bit of support,” she concedes. “At the end of the day, it’s just me and Harry going home at night. At this stage, I don’t think I could do it again on my own, but I would love to have [another] child with a partner.”
Lisa admits to occasionally growing teary when she sees a child out with his doting father and says the photos stuck up on the creche noticeboard – all couples with their children – can make her feel sad. But that passes. “This is a lifetime of happiness and being together,” she says about her son. “I will tell Harry the story of how he came to be ... and hopefully it will be quite a cool thing.”
While Prue comments that deciding to embark on IVF on her own has been an “emotional roller-coaster”, she is adamant it is the right decision: “If I don’t create my own family, for me there will be something missing.”
Like Lisa, none of these women are ruling out future relationships. Assuming she gets pregnant, Rebecca feels the circumstances surrounding the baby’s conception may even be a plus in any new relationship. “This child was conceived because someone wanted to donate to help someone like me. There’s no [previous] ugly relationship to impact my new relationship. This child doesn’t have a father, so it’s open for any man to embrace the child,” she says.
Here’s the point where someone cries, “What about the children?” For many of these women, the possible emotional repercussions of their choice weigh heavily, and it’s not a path they sought. “I’m not entirely comfortable bringing a child into the world without a father,” admits Prue. “There is a part of it that feels selfish. It’s a lot of what I wrestle with in doing this. Part of me doesn’t want to let go of the dream of a two-parent family. But even when there are two parents, it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s no trauma ... no difficulties, and it might be that you end up being parented more by one [parent] than the other anyway,” she explains. Issues concerning rights to identity are already being addressed by the courts. In Australia, Victoria, NSW and WA have formal legislation to allow donor-conceived adults to apply for information about their donor parents.
Despite the hurdles, solo mums are increasingly visible. After all, when Jennifer Aniston stars in a rom-com about a social trend (such as her 2010 turkey-baster caper The Switch), it signals a shift in public opinion and helps banish any lingering whiff of moral outrage. As going it alone becomes part of the social vernacular, it encourages others to see it as an option.
Rebecca admits she was motivated to tackle single motherhood after seeing gay women friends turn to donors. And while her mission to have a child has been punctuated by highs and lows, “the overarching narrative is one of hope”, she says. She’s not only looking forward to the day when she will cradle her baby in her arms; she’s also excited by the new society her choices will help create.
“The nuclear family with the mum, dad, 2.4 kids and dog is no longer,” says Rebecca. “If I am lucky enough to have a child, that child will develop friendships with other people from unusual families. It won’t just be me sitting on the sidelines. We will all be sitting together, sharing in the power of our decisions.”
Last October, Lisa made another train journey, this time into the city to introduce Harry to her friends at work. She remembers the day being a little warmer, although that may have been
a reflection of her mood. She couldn’t help thinking how far she had come.
“When you sit on the train, you often look around and wonder what people’s stories are. Are they single? Are they married? Do they have kids?” she says. “I felt very proud to be going into the city with him on the train, one of those mothers showing off her baby.”
Rachel Sklar. Photo: Supplied
“Hello, I’m Rachel. I’m 41, single and pregnant” Writer and entrepreneur Rachel Sklar is proud to be one of the new breed of mothers:
Taken together, these three elements tend to act as sad little modifiers for one another. “Single” is usually applied to women as though they are a problem to be fixed. “41” is usually past the age when people consider your problem fixable. “Pregnant” – well, everyone seems to have ideas about what women ought to be doing with their uteri. Some may even feel sorry for me, all alone with no husband to rub my feet. (This is a pregnancy book staple, I am discovering.)
I know how it looks: at 41, single and pregnant, I’m a sad, lonely outlier. But it’s 2015. I’m not. Actually, I’ve discovered that I am living a whole new reality for women – that is to say, approaching and experiencing motherhood from outside the narrow bounds of the default, traditional model.
You know that model: boy meets girl (the girl is always met, after all), boy marries girl, boy impregnates girl, smiling happy family ensues. But sometimes boy meets boy, and girl meets girl. Sometimes boy and girl meet, marry and struggle with that third part – maybe boy has a low sperm count or girl has uterine fibroids. And sometimes, at 41, after lots of great relationships and some less-great relationships and optimistic plans to explore fertility treatments, girl gets unexpectedly knocked up.
That’s what happened to me. I had a lovely summer romance, and got pregnant. The relationship ended, the pregnancy did not. And so, here I am, 41, single and pregnant. Whoo hoo, I have it all! I’m now in my second trimester and luckily, all is well so far. I’ve started telling friends. They’ve started telling friends. And I’ve realised just how many non-traditional parents I know.
There’s the friend who has been jumping through the complex hoops of surrogacy. There’s the friend who ordered up a sperm donor and happily did it on her own. There’s the friend who is carrying her wife’s fertilised egg. There’s the single friend who took advantage of her company’s corporate egg-freezing benefit because she’s in her mid 30s and hopes to someday have kids, and the married friend who did it because she’s in her mid 30s and isn’t sure yet. There are the friends who
adopt, and there are the friends who don’t want kids at all. (I also have friends who met, married and reproduced. They’re great, too.)
I’m lucky. All this is happening for me during a moment of unprecedented transparency around parenthood, fertility and the rainbow of options thereof. Odds are I won’t be the only single woman in my birthing class. And while I can’t click on a pregnancy-related link or open a pregnancy book without being informed of what my assumed “partner” should be doing, I also recognise that they are out of date, not me.
For single women, admitting you want kids when you’re still unattached can feel like exposing a vulnerability. It did to me. If someone said, “Don’t you want kids?” (when you hit a certain age, it’s usually framed like that) I’d say yes, but I would defect more questions. I certainly didn’t share that I sometimes lay down on my bed and sobbed to realise that I was 40 years old and had probably missed the boat.
Now that I am pregnant (and showing) my body is a tell. There have been, and will be, perfectly innocent reactions, like, “I didn’t know you were seeing someone!” (I’m not) and, “Is the father involved?” (He’s not.) It’s fine. I’m happy to be where I am. I want to be transparent about where I am. I don’t like the cone of silence – it didn’t do me any favours in my 20s or 30s, and I don’t see it doing much for other women, either.
We’re having a coming out moment about fertility. In 2015, having children is complicated and daunting and fraught – as much as it’s always been – but now we’re talking about it. And the more we talk about it, the more of us will realise that we’re not going through it alone. Far from it. I’m 41, single and pregnant. It feels good.
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