Single but a mom like any other

I’M not sure what I hate being called more: a single mother or a single mother by choice.

The first term is technically true. I have a 2-year-old son. I am not, nor have I ever been, married. Nor do I have any particular desire to be – although I do expect to be in a relationship.

What is there to like about being labelled a single mother? The term only distances me from other families, making my son and me seem different, lesser, wanting. Our culture derides single mothers under a false veneer of respect and honour. “You are so valiant,” we’re told, followed by: “What a shame that your kid is going to be messed up.”

Many like me are placed in the “single mother-by-choice” category. We are older and well-educated, typically, and more financially secure.

But for me, it’s a problematic label. First, it’s not completely accurate. Like many, I longed for a child for years and spent most of my thirties trying to make less-thanideal relationships work. I would sit in my therapist’s office and weep, despairing about the fact that my boyfriend went on holidays by himself (red flag) or that his mother kept a copy of his doctoral diploma under her bed (Oedipal complex). It was a means to an end, but the desired end – a baby – never came.

When yet another relationship ended and 40 was rapidly approaching, I decided it was time to take action. I found a fertility specialist and asked a gay friend to be my donor. I organised my life around monthly blood draws and ultrasounds; obsessed over my menstrual cycle; and despaired about my “ovarian reserve”. I barely held it together when I got a call, while walking into a meeting, with the news that I wasn’t pregnant. After five unsuccessful attempts, I found a new doctor and prepared to commute from Washington to New York for treatment. But when a friend offered to set me up on a blind date, I also said yes. After months of thinking about nothing but (in)fertility, I was in need of a diversion.

On our first date, we hit it off. After a couple of more dates, I decided to put getting pregnant temporarily on hold. After a couple of months, that budding relationship fizzled, and I contacted my clinic to restart the process. When my doctor called, she told me I was already pregnant.

I reject the single-mother-bychoice label because it doesn’t fully honour my story. But I also reject it because it divides mothers into a hierarchy, a stratification that, as Kimberly Seals Allers notes: “Glorif(ies) some while demonising others, mostly across racial and socio-economic lines.”

Single mothers by choice fall just behind widows and divorced women, both of whom carry the social cache of having once been attached to a man. But underlying this hierarchy is a racist and classist myth that assumes that middleand upper-class white women want their children and plan their pregnancies, whereas black low-income, single women do not.

Despite the unusual circumstances surrounding my son’s conception, the news was celebrated. Family members and friends cheered, threw baby showers and told me I was “sassy”. Yet the “you go, girl” shout-outs ring hollow. Although it does feel empowering to have built a family that brings me so much joy, mothering solo is hard.

It’s time to dismantle the single-mother hierarchy, to stop calling out my family’s supposed difference from that of other single moms, as well as from two-parent families. At the end of the day, I’m doing something that is as incredible as it is typical – raising a young boy.