Seven reasons to have a baby on your own
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By Wendy Greene
If you’re anything like me, you’ve found yourself 40 years old and dating a guy for a year who seems to be in no hurry to commit to or impregnate you. He’s watching the hockey game, fiddling around up in your vagina with two fingers while yelling “center, center, CENTER!” at the TV.
You realize that you are so much of a cliché that if this were a sitcom pilot you’d find it trite. You even have a cat.
So you turn to your boyfriend and say, “We need to talk.”
Throwing away a solid relationship feels scary. I kept thinking, “a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush.” Except it feels like that bird keeps shitting in your hand, and you want to be holding a kid (also shitting in your hand, as it turns out).
I didn’t want to miss out on motherhood because of that fear. And maybe you don’t want to, either. So here are the reasons you should go ahead and get cracking on being a mother even though you might not have a partner.
- BECAUSE YOU WANT TO
It seems simple: you really want to have a baby. But for me, this turned out to be the single hardest step of the whole journey — just deciding that this was something I wanted badly enough that it didn’t matter how completely terrified I was.
2. BECAUSE YOU CAN
I know. You are already having that argument in your head with me, telling me how I don’t understand how you can’t. You don’t have enough money, or the right job, or the right situation.
But here’s the thing. You do. Whatever you have is enough. If it turns out you need something more, you can figure that out. That’s because you are tougher than you think you are.
Right in the middle of doing fertility treatments, I got laid off from my cushy staff job with its amazing healthcare. I knew I wanted a baby, so I hustled. I took whatever freelance work came my way, including a couple gigs that kind of sucked. But it didn’t matter, because it was all in service of my end goal of becoming a parent. And in the end, those few toxic jobs turned out to be the best way to develop the patience required to be a parent. Trust me, no boss is more of a tyrant than a toddler who wants a cookie.
