Even as a home-owning adult, I feel like a child. I am a small woman. I stand just over five feet tall and, outside of pregnancy, my heaviest weight (my current) is 110 pounds. I can still buy some clothes from the children’s department, which I do, on occasion, because it’s usually less expensive. I […]
As a mother of a white child, I don’t worry that my son will be killed by a cop after a traffic violation; I do worry that he might want to be that cop someday. I am the mother of a son. These days, with angry white men bearing guns, with unarmed black boys and […]
I have baby pictures of the donors who made my children possible. Sometimes I look at them for resemblance. They are not family photos, but my family wouldn’t exist without them. On Mother’s Day, after her younger brother has been tucked in to bed, my daughter and I look at old photos on the computer. […]
Choosing to freeze your eggs is choosing to be a fertility patient, with all that entails. It’s a physically and emotionally brutal process. As a woman who (a) believes in reproductive choice and (b) needed assisted reproductive technologies to conceive, I should like egg freezing as an idea that attempts to preserve both choice and […]
Your infertile friend doesn’t want your sympathy. She just wants your friendship. One afternoon when my son was a colicky, refusing-to-sleep newborn and I was stuck home with him, out of my mind from sleep deprivation and round-the-clock nursing, a good friend played for me a voicemail she’d saved for a year, in which I […]
You don’t have to share DNA to be a family. It is a typical Saturday morning. I struggle through the grocery store, the toddler threatening to jump from the cart to find the fish, the 10-year-old reminding me we’re out of grape juice and asking if can we please get a new kind of ice […]
That happy-ever-after narrative we’re sold as kids doesn’t always work out. But there are alternatives. Say you are a young woman in your 20’s established in your career of choice. For as long as you can remember, you know you’ve wanted a child. There is not a long-term partnership in your semi-near future. Do you: […]
Robin Silbergleid’s kids don’t have a daddy or even a biological father. They have a donor. And that’s exactly how she wanted it. On the night I checked into the hospital to deliver my daughter, the nurse asked me who the father was. A sperm donor, I said. Aren’t they all, she kidded, what’s his […]
Robin Silbergleid has never regretted her decision to have two children on her own, but after a decade of solo parenting, realizes the value of having another adult around. When I decided, at 28, to become a single mother by choice, I wasn’t worried about what other people would think or whether or not my […]
