Mikki Morrisette

a blog by Mikki Morrissette August 16, 2010

I still get surprised when people equate having a child on your own with deciding that men are not important. I understand why there can be the confusion. I’m just always a bit taken aback that so many people choose to blur that line in their reaction.

When Jennifer Aniston suggested in her promotion of the upcoming movie “The Switch” (a movie about a single women who uses a sperm donor) that being able to have a child on your own (rather than remaining childless) is a good modern-day option for women who can’t find the right partner, the comment drew predictable fire.

In a blast to the “Murphy Brown” past, Bill O’Reilly took the role of Dan Quayle to say that Aniston’s support of Choice Motherhood is “destructive to our society” by “diminishing the role of the dad.”

To my ears, equating single motherhood with “diminishing the role of dad” is akin to saying that a person who decides to have a child despite an income under $100K is diminishing the importance of financial security in a child’s life. My response would be: “No, it just means you don’t have it.”

I know I’m being simplistic here. But really, do we honestly think that a child thrives for the simple reason that they have a mother and a father in the home? Obviously that tends to make it easier in many important ways. But talk about “diminishing.” What about all the other vital ingredients to a child’s success?

Strong teachers. A spiritual community. Role models outside the family home. Enriching activities. Solid rituals. Positive friendships. Access to quality health care for physical and mental well-being. Freedom from violence and chemical abuse in the home.

I am the proud Choice Mom of two kids, 11 and 6. We recently returned from a month-long adventure in Europe with my parents. What was ultimately most meaningful to my kids was the time spent together on a rainy day in Lucca playing a card game, and the hand-in-hand chain we made sitting in the waves on the French Rivera. NOT the absence of a father in the scene. NOT the fact that we couldn’t afford the Ritz-Carlton. It was the special, simple moments we created together. It was having TIME together, focused on each other.

Aniston said it well: "Love is love, and family is what is around you and who is in your immediate sphere."

As my motto on the ChoiceMoms.org website reads:

“The goal of a single parent is not to raise our children alone. The goal is to consciously create the village in which we and our children will thrive.”

Far from diminishing the role of men in our child’s life, we tend to ADD as many positive influences as we can — men and women, family and friends, young and old. And yes, discard those who are destructive or negative models for our children. Importantly, as critics of single motherhood tend to assume, we don't think those weak links are simply men and dads.

A humorous hot topic with the Choice Moms online network this week has been creating a Top 10 list, in Jeff Foxworthy fashion, of ways we can relate to each other as single women who proactively decide to build a family on our own. Here are some of the leading suggestions.

1. You've freaked out patrons in a nice restaurant by talking about sperm, ovulation cycles and sperm donors with your brunch companions.
2. Mother's Day is a Holy Day; Father's Day is spent with a lot of women and children.
3. You take your breast pump with you on a first date.
4. The most intimate relationship you've had in a while has been with your fertility doctor.
5. You simply smile in response when someone bonds with your single parent status by saying: "Me too -- the kids go to their dads every other weekend," or "Me too, my partner is a cop/firefighter/nurse so I'm a single mom 2 to 3 days a week."
6. Your child is away at a sleepover and you don't know what to do with yourself. Then you make a to-do list of 20 items and find you don't have nearly enough time after all.
7. Two weeks, while in the trying stage, is the most agonizingly long period of your life. And if “Aunt Flo” (your period) comes, it is the most agonizing period of your life.
8. You spend your morning helping your kids get their shirts on so they aren't inside out and their pants aren't on backwards. Then you get ready for bed and realize your tag is on the front of your shirt and your shirt is inside out.
9. You tell people the Dad's name is "donor 5824" and they look at you as if you are from outer space. Then you get to explain how you bought the boys online.
10. You have a childhood picture of your present or future child's "donor dad" stored in your iPhone.

Now go ahead ... offer your own. We'll compile them into a full review for the Choice Mom community.

a blog by Mikki Morrisette, May 28, 2010

A long time in the making, the point/counterpoint debate between a Glenn Sacks father's rights crony, Robert Franklin, and me recently launched on PublicSquare.net. I love the opportunity to offer a rational perspective on choice parenting, even if my opponent has a decidedly different viewpoint.

You can read the full debate here, including an interesting set of comments from readers (that I'd love you to contribute to), but here's a synopsis of how I describe our community, and why Franklin believes single parenting is not good for children:

Mikki:

"The women I know who choose this path tend to be highly self-sufficient, 'can-do' women who find solutions, build strong networks, and are devoted to motherhood. Like our successful counterparts who are widowed or divorced, we seek out male role models and build support within our families of origin and our school, church, and fellow parenting community. Like a family quilt, we blend together the many good materials we have in ourselves and our networks to create something greater than the sum of its parts."

Robert Franklin:

"The major problem with single-parent child-rearing is not what’s in the hearts of the parents, it’s how the children fare. As over four decades of social science tell us, children of single parents tend to fare worse than do those of intact families. Morrissette prefers to mostly ignore that fact; wiser parents will not....

'Choice Moms' had...strong feelings of insecurity and lack of rootedness that they tried to assuage by becoming mothers. In short, for those women, motherhood was more about them than about the children . . . . That continuing parade of males through the child’s life creates continually changing loyalties both on the part of the child and on the part of the mother as well."

Mikki:

"Robert Franklin is concerned about the struggling children in single-parent households, but in criticizing the decisions of hundreds of women to raise children on their own, he fails to make crucial distinctions between good parenting and bad parenting. Franklin’s use of statistics is misleading. You can base any number of generalized opinions on what certain numbers tell you.

I take offense at the idea that a child is likely to suffer in a single-parent home. The majority of single-parent households are good environments for their children."

Franklin:

"Not only does Morrissette abjure science, but she also neglects to mention just how a woman comes to be a single mother by choice....The decision to become a "Choice Mother" is the decision to have a child without a father involved in the child’s life. One way utilizes the services of a sperm bank, and another is adoption, but both are fairly rare. The dark side of 'Choice Motherhood' includes things like paternity fraud and the simple expedient of the woman lying to the man about whether she’s pregnant or, if he knows about the pregnancy, lying about the identity of the father."

Alas, my debate with Franklin is obviously a reminder that not everyone will understand who we are and the strengths we bring to our children. The point is NOT to butt our heads against a wall. Some people will never get it.

Let's keep finding opportunities to let people know that Choice Moms (and Dads) are rational, thinking people who carefully consider what we are doing in raising a child on our own.

We can proudly point to our own successes as parents -- including that of our Single Mother by Choice pioneers whose children are now grown -- to remind anyone who actually wants to listen that we are smart, capable parents, not perfect or stress-free at all, but certainly doing very well even without a second partner in the home.

a blog by Mikki Morrisette, April 30, 2010

Congratulations on your adoption of Louis Bardo Bullock! Just so you know, you are in amazing company, becoming a Choice Mom.

Tens of thousands of single women make the decision every year to build a family without a partner. A growing number of them -- as I hear from the membership requests to my private Choice Mom discussion board -- are leaving relationships with partners who don't want to be parents, or who are not good role models. Many have been enmeshed in careers and post-graduate education and they find themselves in their 30s, finally able to take a breath, and realizing they are running out of time to start a family.

I was actually in your hometown, Austin, recently (well, one of your hometowns) and met with 30 such women, We talked with each other about how hard it was for many of them to conceive. How they were getting organization and stress relief back into their life. How they were leaving corporate careers to try to find flexibility in home-based businesses, and finding creative ways to pay for health insurance. Many of them are grateful for the amazing gift that adoption has been to them in building a family. (FYI: I later took my 10-year-old Choice daughter to your bistro; she recognizes you as a great example of strength and admires the heck out of you.)

At these Choice Mom events, we always find remarkable joy and strength in connecting with each other. As one woman put it, "It was so great being in a room full of like-minded women and realizing that we were all beautiful, intelligent, independent, successful ladies. Before I found this community I just felt like I was so alone in this choice or some kind of societal anomaly."

I recently engaged in a point/counterpoint with a fathers’ rights advocate on PublicSquare.net, who seemed to believe that many of us are lonely, desperate women who fill our children's lives with a parade of men. He seemed to think that our children suffer greatly by not having a father in their life, and not being in a two-parent family.

As I told him, "The women who choose this path tend to be highly self-sufficient, 'can-do' women who find solutions, build strong networks, and are devoted to motherhood. Much like women who are widowed or divorced, we seek out male role models and build support within our families of origin and our school, church, and fellow parenting community. Like a family quilt, we blend together the many good materials we have in ourselves and our networks to create something greater than the sum of its parts.”

I take offense at the idea that a child is likely to suffer in a single-parent home. Yes, it’s hard to be a great parent if you are financially and emotionally handling everything without a strong partner by your side, but, by and large, we do pretty well."

I am the proud Choice Mother of two -- the second added to our family when I was 41. I left a high-paying job at Time Inc. 11 years ago, and couldn't be happier with my new role building connections and resources for our remarkable community.

Sandra, welcome to the journey!

a blog by mikki morrissette, Mar. 15, 2010

It's increasingly common for the Choice Mom community to hear from women who are with a partner who's ambivalent about having children or flat out opposed to the idea.

Is this because more partners are finding the strength to say "no" to raising children? No, I suspect it’s simply because more women are finding a community where they can talk out loud as they grapple with this very difficult place.

Many people have always been less-than-enthralled with the idea of having children. And now that women, in particular, are increasingly finding family building options on their own, the choice is now more than simply, “yes, I win” or “no, you win.” A third option is emerging: “Should I leave this relationship and have a child on my own?”

It can be an extremely agonizing choice.

One 40-year-old woman recently shared her story. Five years ago, she started a relationship with someone who eventually told her he didn’t want to have children. A few years after that, she decided she wanted to have a baby and ended the relationship. Her partner said he would reverse his vasectomy. It took a year for him to make the attempt. It didn’t work. Now what should she do? She wondered whether she should pursue donor insemination and convince the man she loved to co-parent with her, when he seemed to not have both feet in. Should she move on and have a child on her own?

Having choices doesn’t always make the way clear.

Although for some women, it certainly does:

One woman suggested: "Set boundaries and be as clear as possible. I'm in a relationship now and that is what I had to do. I'll start in September this year. I basically had to say to my partner, ‘This is what I want and you are either on board or not.’ Although I love my partner very much, a live-in relationship is definitely something I would give up if we’re not on the same page. If I don’t see it, like a light switch, I’ll turn the relationship off. It’s just that simple for me. Good luck."

A 41-year-old woman shared her story. She felt she had been complacent in letting a long-term relationship linger: “Looking back, my relationship was enough of a distraction that it kept me from doing some really hard thinking and making some hard decisions in my mid-30s when it would have been much easier for me to conceive. Maybe the most revealing thing you could do is to ask yourself if you would still want to be with this man when you're 46 if you don't have the child you dreamed of. Would you be happier with a 5-year-old son or daughter without him, or would you be happier with no biological child, but with him in your life? If you stay together and you try on your own for a year but never conceive, will you resent him for the time he spent stalling? Could you forgive him enough to live a happy life with him?

Choices. We're better off with them, certainly, but are we more tested?

What do you think? Do you know someone who has faced the "partner or child" question? If it was you, how did you decide?

a blog by mikki morrissette, Feb. 18, 2010

A recent question from a newly expectant mom on our Choice Moms discussion board erupted into a three-headed monster. A generally friendly monster, but a nerve-wracking one nonetheless.

The controversial issue? A woman learned that her soon-to-be-delivered child was a boy, not the girl she'd always imagined. She felt disappointment about the gender of her child. As a single woman with waning fertility, she knows this will potentially be her only child, and she was mourning the baby girl she might never have.

Not an uncommon reaction. Even though we work so hard to become parents, some of us envision bringing up a boy or a girl.

Women replied with their own stories of brief mourning about the gender of their children (interestingly, I think this tends to happen when we learn gender in advance of the actual delivery, not after birth when the baby is actually OURS).

I always was more of a tomboy with guy friends, so I was worried when I learned that my first child would be a girl. Four years later, after I'd gotten so used to what an attentive, fun-loving daughter she turned out to be, I worried when I learned my second child would be a boy. (Of course, now that she's a more emotional 10-year-old, and he's such a peaceful 6-year-old, I feel so blessed to have both sexes to grow with.)

Then the conversation started turning into one about whether boys or girls are easier to raise, without a role model of the opposite sex in the home. Some suggested that boys might require less worry because they naturally have more opportunities. Others wrote about how much they learned from their own families about making goals happen, regardless of obstacles we might see. To have the ability today to become a parent without a partner for emotional and financial help is scary, but also an amazing choice for single women (and men) to have.

Of course we are all grateful when parenthood finally opens up to us, either through treatment or adoption. Being able to honestly talk about what we mourn, and what we are afraid of, is one of the liberating ways that our community can support each other.

What do you need to get off your chest?

Mikki

a blog by mikki, Jan. 14, 2010

I am a Choice Mom.

Depending on who you talk to, that might mean I’m selfish, cocky, or something akin to a tasty piece of beef. But what I mean by the term is how I defined it in my Choosing Single Motherhood book in 2005: I am a single woman who consciously and proactively decided to become a responsible mother on my own.

In fact, in 2009 New Oxford’s New American dictionary considered “Choice Mom” a contender for word of the year. Whether that is a true mark of legitimacy I cannot say, but the new term is increasingly popular. I created it as an alternative to its older sister (created by Jane Mattes more than 25 years ago), “single mother by choice,” to put the emphasis on Choice, not Single, in our motherhood journey. Most of us did not choose to become single mothers. Rather, we chose to become mothers, even though we are single.

I estimate about 50,000 of us make this decision each year in the U.S. alone. That’s based on a U.S census report indicating that more than 100,000 single women aged 30-44 give birth each year. Roughly half of those women have a partner but are not married, which means they are not a Choice Mom. But if you add in the fact that many single women choose to adopt rather than conceive, and the certainty that many single women each year are actively trying to conceive, I think my estimate is pretty sound.

Some of those women accidentally conceived, of course, which might seem like a blessing to those of us struggling to consciously do the same. But in my view, any single woman who proactively decides to build a family on her own – whether she’s had two years or eight months to ponder and prepare – is a Choice Mom facing enormous challenges and joys, with a strong and growing community around her.

In this blog I will speak to and for these single women. It is not an easy step. Especially if you are attempting to conceive without a sperm partner lying next to you in bed every 28 days. Especially if you are over the age of 35, as most of us are. Especially if this is NOT how you dreamed of creating a family.

As moderator of the Choice Moms discussion board, which has more than 1,200 members, and the ChoiceMoms.org website, I have a decent sense of the concerns we face in making this decision and living this life.

But I welcome your questions and comments here as we begin to take the Choice Mom journey together.