Hello, I’m Tami, and I’m trying to get pregnant on my own.
*echoes in 12-step chorus: “Hi, Tami.”
I’ve always known that I want to be a mom. I basically made myself a third parent to my little brother, I’ve done more professional and casual babysitting than anyone I know, and, most importantly, I just know! Knowing myself and my preferences is a good enough reason, and I don’t really feel the need to justify my desires. Get ready: this whole blog is gonna be a pretty big pile of “Whatever, I do what I want!” (Cartman voice extremely optional).
I’m 35, and after a divorce, a few years of wilding, and a recent, and much more shocking and painful breakup with the man I was 99% sure I was meant to have kids with, I said fuck it. I’m going for it! It’s 2020 (god, don’t remind me), and in this day and age a woman don’t need no man to make her dreams come true.
I mean, I do need a bit of a man, but that’s another post.
So off I set! Ready to face this new challenge and take control of my happiness and dreams. And what’s the first step of dream-fulfillment? (Say it with me, folks:)
Endless hours of obsessive research! YAY!!!!
Full disclosure: I’m a straight-up Hermione. I’m a perpetual student, a bit of a perfectionist, and I'm usually only ok with breaking rules when I have personally decided that the rules are dumb. So of course it made sense to me that I would start my journey by arming myself with every available piece of writing both by and about women who had made the choice to have a kid on their own.
And yet? There really wasn’t a TON of stuff out there. There are a few books written by women who made a go of it solo, and an online forum (I’ll talk more about both in other posts), and a few think-piece-y articles with a “Look At The Concerning Thing These Desperate Women Have Been Driven To” sort of vibe. Seemed like there was something lacking here.
Well, shit. I’m a writer. I sort of stumbled into writing when people in my life kept asking me to do it for them, and I kept not sucking at it, which totally blew my mind because: hello! I hadn’t read all the books in the world about how to be a great writer, so how on earth was this happening? We’re supposed to do endless hours of obsessive research, remember? My inner Hermione is still shook.
So, with the state of available materials about baby-making for the single gal somewhat light, it felt like I was going to need to step up to the plate and share my own experience choosing motherhood without a partner. I had the whole beautiful thing planned out: make my perfect angel, and spend my maternity leave writing a book that would go straight to the top of the charts. Two birds: one stone! I’d have my kiddo PLUS I’d be paid enough as a writer to make that my full-time gig, with all the flexibility and creative fulfillment I want. Bada-bing, bippity-boppity-booyah! I'm rocking a perfect balance of family, work, and self-fulfillment, all while perfecting my yoga practice and having periodic calls with my bestie, Oprah (hey, if I’m gonna dream, I’m really going for it).
Perfect. Great. Decided. Done.
And yet?
Yes, and yet. From the moment I looked up and said to no one in my empty apartment, “So... I just definitely decided to be a mom,” I’ve been faced with an absolutely avalanche of choices and questions and moral dilemmas and, frankly, some of the most hilarious shit I have ever been through in my life. The few people I’ve told about my plans have laughed and pondered and raged with me about all the unexpected pathways on this road I’ve started to stumble down. How could having a baby, something we as humans have done since before we were even really humans, have become so fucking complicated? I don’t know.
I don’t know! That’s another big theme of this blog. (So if you’re keeping track it’s: One: I do what I want, Two: I have no fucking clue what the answers are, and Three: I have a potty mouth.)
My instinct was to wait and make things into a nice, pretty, happy ending kind of story before I put it into writing. But if my life has taught me anything over the past five years or so it’s that happy endings don’t come waltzing towards you; you have to go out and make them yourself.
When my marriage unexpectedly exploded and I found myself living in a 400 square foot apartment with no oven (seriously! Who knew you had to ask if there was an OVEN?), I had this lovely window that looked out onto the scenic... um, well, it was a walkway. It went from the parking lot for the hotel next door to their lobby, so at any given moment of the day or night there were the soothing sounds of rolling luggage and children being told to just shut up, they could watch tv as soon as they got inside and mommy took her shoes off (I heard it in many languages over the years: the exhausted traveling parent sounds the same universally). But I digress...
Over this window I painted a quote I stumbled upon one day:
“She needed a hero, so that’s what she became.”
Damn. That was some Wonder Woman shit right there, and perfect for my liberated divorcée bachelorette pad. It lived over my head for the years I was in that apartment, reminding me that I was the steward of my own life and future, that I was strong enough to make my dreams come true, and brave enough to try.
I mean, I completely ignored it, obviously. Look: knowing a thing is right in your head and believing it in your heart are two wildly different things. But, hey, that’s what my therapist is for!
But today, I think that’s exactly what I’m trying to do, Dark Knight-style: be the hero I need. And what I need right now is not some well-styled finished product with a satisfyingly predictable happy ending. I need to see the process; how we do the next right thing. I need an honest account of the ups and downs and diagonals along the way. Basically: I need vulnerability.
Ew, I hate it! I really sort of hate it, honestly. But at this point I know that the only way to be is to be true, and true is very often uncertain and imperfect. Yuck.
So, why am I doing this? Frankly, I feel like I can’t NOT do this. As writer, I gotta write. And as a Leo, I gotta live out loud. And as a Hermione, I gotta be overshadowed by the inferior men around me my entire childhood WOAH. Sorry, I don’t have therapy until Tuesday, and that sort of slipped out.
That’s the plan, Stan! I’m going to give the middle finger to my fear of vulnerability, and bring you along on my journey to getting unconventionally knocked up! I hope that talking about all this helps some people who are also interested in giving this a shot, but mostly I hope it helps me to talk it all out. Self-centered? Maybe. But since when is putting yourself in the center such a bad thing?
So here’s to making myself a MonoMom!
Ah, shit. I forgot to talk about the super made up title of MonoMom. Well, that’ll be another post. Thank god Wix doesn’t charge by the word... (*immediately googles if Wix charges by the word).
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