All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (45 page)

Kristina leads a Girl Scout Troop in Bismarck. When she filled out the application, she said, “It seemed kind of creepy for a woman with no children.” But Kristina loves kids. Plus, she said, “I think it's important for these girls to see that you can be thirty-five and be successful in your career outside of a marriage and having babies.” For her, the Girl Scouts, “has been a vehicle to be part of children's lives and I guess maybe exercise my parenting muscles.”

But an attachment to other people's children doesn't always fulfill the women who are childless not by choice, and not exactly by accident, but for some complicated set of reasons that fall somewhere between the two. It's not that these women haven't considered doing it on their own. As it becomes more common, it's almost impossible
not
to consider doing it.

Elliott, the D.C. novelist, described a conversation with a distraught friend who is thirty-eight and not in a relationship. “She always wanted to have kids, always wanted to be married and have a family,” said Elliott. “But she has been crunching the numbers and feels like it is absolutely not possible [to do it on her own]. She's a teacher and is barely making it month to month.”

Elliott herself moved to D.C. to be closer to her two nieces. Partly, she said, that move was about resigning herself to a future in which she would not have kids of her own. Financially and emotionally, she said,
“It would be too much work to do it on my own. I was never one of those people for whom it was going to be the be all, end all. So, making my peace with not being a mother was actually easier than making my piece with not having a partner.”

In her mid-thirties, Elliott said, her maternal urges grew stronger. Then she wrote a book. “Part of why I no longer have that yearning is because I've given birth to another thing, and have been very satisfied, creatively.” Elliott has started a second book, and said, “Maybe things work out the way they're supposed to. I'm really lucky to have had so much mental space to write.”

When she was thirty-nine, Dodai Stewart wrote, in
Jezebel
,
²²
of the “Ambivalence. Indecision. Fear.” she faced at the realization that she might not wind up with kids: “As friends and colleagues get hitched and have babies, sometimes I start to feel like a straggler at a party. Everyone's gone home, what am I still doing here?” Stewart wrote of how the entertainment media bombards women with “mommy propaganda” about celebrity baby bumps and post-pregnancy weight loss, and the ongoing saga of actress Jennifer Aniston's empty uterus, in which, Stewart wrote, “[Aniston] is not a person but a character, a woman smiling and fit and happy yet apparently deeply sad that she's unmarried and childless.” That narrative, Stewart observed, “Is a haunting reminder that if you're not doing what's expected of you—pairing up, mating, reproducing—you must be doing something wrong. Actually:
There must be something wrong with
you.”

In a perfect world, Stewart went on, “It wouldn't even be an issue, it would be like, hey, you do you, I do me, everything's cool . . . But this world is baffling: you're meant to make something of yourself, work hard, contribute to society in a meaningful way. And once you fight tooth and nail to establish yourself. . . . you're chastised: ‘What, no kids?' ” Maybe, Stewart wondered, “instead of picturing myself as the straggler at the party, it's important to see beyond all the baby mama drama, recognize that on this side of the fence, there's plenty of love, good time, late nights, late mornings, travel, shopping, joy, indulgence, pleasure, accomplishment. . . . If I end up staying at this party instead of heading to the other party, it's still a party, and if we're not praised, we should praise ourselves.”

Indeed, even for those who are bereft about childlessness, there can be other unexpected rewards.

Television commentator Nancy Giles said that throughout her life, she had always envisioned herself being a mother with one little daughter. At thirty-eight, she lost her mother. “After my mother died and I saw mothers and daughters on the street, I was in pieces,” she said. When her mother died, both of her sisters were married with kids. “It was something they could fall back on: I gotta get up, gotta get the kids ready for school. They had a family unit to focus on. I was completely adrift, and I felt so alone.” But, in the wake of her mother's passing, Giles wound up spending time with her father, something her sisters could not do. She forged a new and improved relationship with him. “For the first time in my life, I'm a daddy's girl!” she remembered telling her therapist. “Reconnecting with my father and feeling a kind of special love from him was wonderful. It happened late.”

At no point, Giles said, could she imagine having had children on her own.

But there are lots of women who do it.

Pamela, a twenty-four-year-old senior at City College, got pregnant accidentally, when she was seventeen. “I was stigmatized,” she said. “I had all of these people on top of me saying what was I going to do, who was the father, and if he did exist, was I going to get married to him?” She did have a boyfriend, and lots of people, she said, pushed marriage on her, but she didn't see the benefit. “I wasn't going to tie him down if I got married,” she said. “There wasn't going to be anything different if I got married.” She's glad, in retrospect, that she did not rush to City Hall. Pamela believes that women making decisions about single motherhood need to carefully sift through the reasons they want to have children, with or without a partner. “You don't want to have kids, and then be financially dependent on somebody,” she said. “You want to be able to sustain a life, even if the person did walk away, even if you didn't have the
father there to help you out. I don't think there's a timeline to get married. I don't think it is necessary to get married.”

But, she went on, “Society stigmatizes women who don't have kids.” And it lays complicated traps for them. “People say you're not ready to have kids when you're eighteen to twenty-two, because you're still in school; it's too difficult. And it's true. It's difficult every single day. But, at the same time, later, I may have a career that requires my full attention, so when will I have time to have kids then? So, when am I going to have a kid? So, I don't know if there's a certain time frame when people should start trying to have kids.”

Single motherhood is a norm for women in low-income communities, where early marriage has largely faded, but where parenthood can provide women with meaning and direction. It is also an increasingly accepted and available option for privileged women. For those who are single, but quite sure they want to have kids, and who decide they have the resources to do it, even conceiving of the possibility of having a child on one's own can be enormously liberating.

By the time I turned thirty, I'd been single for several years and my fibroids were worse than ever. I knew I was going to have to have surgery to remove them and, that, after the surgery, there would be a window of time before they grew back during which I might be able to get pregnant. In other words, I anticipated a curtailed reproductive window, and I had never been in a romantic relationship that I had ever found sustaining.

At thirty, I made a plan, determined to address the feeling I'd had when I left my gynecologist's office three years before: This was my life. What was I going to do?

I would plan to have a baby on my own. My parents would be supportive; they told me so. I would put away money, begin to prepare. When I turned thirty-four, I would have the operation, with an eye to getting pregnant, perhaps by a sperm donor, or maybe with one of my male friends, when I was thirty-five. A girlfriend and I spoke about the possibility of doing it at the same time, moving into adjacent apartments, helping each other with childcare and meals and companionship.

Even beginning to consider this scenario was incredibly freeing. It's not that I relished the idea: I hoped fervently that it wouldn't come to
pass, that some person who was right for me would pop into my life by the appointed moment. But the fact that this other part of what I wanted from life—to make a family—didn't have to be lashed to that passive hope was exhilarating. The notion of even imaginatively separating the question of partnership from the question of parenthood felt liberating.

As it turned out, the timeline I'd mapped out as a single person fell into place, except with a partner. I fell in love at thirty-two, had major surgery at thirty-three, a baby at thirty-five and another at thirty-nine. I was unimaginably lucky, timing-wise, love-wise. I cannot say what would have happened in real life had I not been. I make no claim to the bravery that single motherhood entails, only to the fact that the imagined possibility of it enabled me to move forward with energy and optimism and a sense of familial agency.

Kristina, thirty-five and working in Bismarck, North Dakota, has been thinking about making the same kind of plan I did. She's begun to divorce the idea of marriage from children, prompted by her father, who suggested that she read an article about how you didn't necessarily need to do both at the same time. She recently went to a new gynecologist in Bismarck. “I was frightened. I knew I was thirty-five, and I really want kids.” Kristina had an IUD set to expire when she was in her late thirties, and the new doctor remarked that they probably wouldn't have to fit her with a new one; Kristina freaked out at the implication that she'd be infertile by her late thirties.

But, to her surprise, her North Dakota doctor said, “You want kids? Well, just do it, Kristina!” It turned out that the doctor herself had had her first child when she was single and in med school. Kristina's New Year's resolution, she said, “is to prepare myself for when I hit thirty-six. I'm going to take care of myself, so I can make a baby. I am taking prenatal vitamins, and my nails and hair are awesome.”

Law professor Patricia Williams was forty when a relationship in which she “most wanted my biological clock to be respected and it didn't happen” broke up. She said that it was at that moment that she “hit that crossroads where you ask yourself: Do you give up on the idea of having children?” She was fortunate enough, she said, “to have a marvelous career and remarkable parents who communicated to me that my ability to have children was not hooked onto a man, necessarily.”

Williams had long felt that the boundaries placed around family and race were social constructions, and she was put off by the amount of money charged for in-vitro reproduction, wary of the idea that “a woman isn't a full woman until she has a baby.” Williams was also interested in “alternative models of family, tribal models, adoptive models, kinship models. There are so many other alternatives to this very econometric model of family and marriage we have now.”

Just on the cusp of her fortieth birthday, “People were basically saying ‘It's now or never.' I didn't feel it was now or never, but that relationship ending was the moment that I really deeply felt that I could unhook the ability to have a child from the necessity of having a man.”

Williams adopted a son.

The impact on how people viewed her, she felt, was immediate. Prior to adopting, she said, “I was viewed as this strong black woman who was a professional striver, a triumph of the race.” The day she adopted, she said, “I was a single black mother.” When her son was just five weeks old, she recalled, she was attending the Republican National Convention and wound up on a panel with Ralph Reed, of the Christian Coalition. Reed lit into her, upset, she said, that “I could adopt a child without a father. It wasn't just Ralph Reed. There were members of my family who felt exactly the same way.” Within New York's private school system, Williams said, “People just assumed that because I was a single mother that I was somebody's nanny, whose generous family was paying for my son's education.”

But the other line she got, she said, “Was that I was Mother Teresa and this child wouldn't have had a chance in the world. I hate that even more than the black single mother thing. This idea that he was a lost soul. He was a healthy, beautiful baby. I hate the narrative of necessary gratitude that I picked him up from the gutter. His biological parents were college students. But people just assumed that he was a crack baby.”

Often, single motherhood is less of a consciously planned and considered identity.

When Letisha Marrero was thirty-five, and in a long-distance relationship that was coming to a close, she allowed herself a final romantic fling and fell pregnant. “At that point, I wanted to be a mother more than I wanted to be a wife,” she said. “That was my purpose in life. And all the depression
I've gone through, all the ups and downs all melted away once I got pregnant. For the first time in my life it became completely clear what I had to do. I never loved myself more than when I was pregnant. I had natural childbirth because I knew I might not have it again. I wanted to breastfeed as long as humanly possible.”

When she was pregnant, Letisha was a copy editor for
Star
magazine. Her maternity leave paid half her salary but, when it was time to return to work, the reality of fifteen-hour workdays with no partner and a breastfeeding newborn hit her. She quit her job, and said that she lost three or four subsequent opportunities for work because of her inability to combine childcare with reasonable work hours. Her daughter's father has remained present in their lives but, when she lived in New York, he was only able to visit a few times a year, and he, too, struggled financially. After moving around the city, to ever cheaper apartments and rougher neighborhoods, Letisha recently moved to Virginia, where life is more affordable.

Through it all, Letisha said, “I was just going to forge a way. Forge a way for this little girl to have a life. She's never known if I had thirty-five dollars in the bank or thirty-five hundred.”