While she has told some supportive family members of her plans, the Toronto resident has looked elsewhere for both practical and emotional advice: an online group called Choice Moms.
“I've always felt like an outsider because almost everybody is married with kids, so it's hard for me to find people who understand my feelings,” says Lily, who asked that her full name not be used.
“I feel like I've found people who understand me.”
For women like Lily, the choices never stop. First, you have to choose how you are going to become a mother: adoption, sperm donor or unprotected sex? If it is via a donor, will it be a known donor or anonymous?
Then, there's what to call yourself. Are you a Choice Mom? A Single Mother By Choice?
As a social movement comes of age, this may sound like a branding exercise. But for those on the inside, how you identify yourself is a crucial part of the process.
For one thing, it is difficult to know exactly how many like-minded women are out there – or where to find them. According to Statistics Canada, 25 per cent of births in this country in 2005 were to single women, but the circumstances of those births are not collected. Some may have started out with a co-parent. Still other solo moms may be classified as divorced even though they chose to be parents for the first time post-divorce. So, the demographic pieces itself together from within.
“It's like you're inventing yourself all the time and figuring out what your priorities are and your values are,” says Mikki Morrissette, the author of a new advice book, Choosing Single Motherhood: The Thinking Woman's Guide, who created the label Choice Moms.
She started the Choice Moms website in this last February, and it is now attracting about 2,000 visitors a month. A Yahoo message board she started a few years ago has about 800 regular members. She is hoping to find more. “There's a lot of us out there, we just don't know it,” she says.
Ms. Morrissette is the new solo mom on the block. A group called Single Mothers by Choice is considered the godmother of the genre. It was founded in 1981 by U.S. psychologist Jane Mattes and runs support groups across North America.
Ms. Morrissette, a journalist and mother of two who lives in Minneapolis, credits Ms. Mattes and her work for boosting the acceptability of going it alone. But she thought it could use a fresh moniker. She coined the term Choice Moms when she was writing her book because it was shorter. More importantly, it dropped the word “single,” mention a major distinction for followers.
“A lot of people think we chose to be single,” Lily says. “We didn't. We ended up single through circumstances and we're choosing to be mothers.” (And for Ms. Morrissette, that is not how it ended up. She met her husband when pregnant with her second child, now 4.)
The Choice Moms parameters are otherwise fairly rigid. Ms. Morrissette mostly serves women using sperm donors, but welcomes women who adopt, women who accidentally become pregnant, and single lesbians.
However, she admits she has turned women away if they started with a partner but are now single: “It's a completely different beast. There are different emotions.” Choice Moms don't grapple with child support or custody, for instance.
Instead, she caters to the next generation of moms-to-be, who are opting for solo motherhood earlier than their predecessors. Lily reports seeing women aged about 26 or 27 seeing advice on the site; she says they were gently told by many to give it a few more years. When they do choose to go ahead with being a Choice Mom, Ms. Morrissette hopes to address some of the stickier issues she and other solo mothers may not have felt comfortable talking openly about in the past, such as how to tell a child she has no father and how to admit not having a spouse is tough.
“We tend to be very focused on conceiving or adopting; we don't really think about what happens later,” Ms. Morrissette says.
For instance, when Atlantic Monthly writer and single mom Lisa Gottlieb wrote an essay in March suggesting that she may have been better off “settling” for Mr. Good Enough instead of using a donor, some members on the Choice Moms discussion board went wild with disapproval.
“Then there were some women who said, ‘Let's admit there's some loneliness that comes with it, but we're afraid to say it,' ” says Ms. Morrissette, who eventually interviewed both Ms. Gottlieb and one of those women for a podcast. “Those are the things we need to acknowledge. It's hard to do that outside the community because you get the I-told-you-so's.”
Even women completely at ease with their choices, like Vancouver school principal and single mother of one, Kathleen Jeffrey, find they could use a little face time with others like them.
“I learned a lot though this experience,” she says. “It is a hard decision to make. Some people look at you like you're out of Star Trek.”
Ms. Jeffrey, 42, chose to align with SMC and is trying to start a Vancouver support group. In the United States, she says, some SMC groups are so close-knit they even arrange cruises together.
That different labels are emerging indicates the movement is coming of age, says Andrea O'Reilly, an associate professor of women's studies at York University in Toronto and director of the school's Association for Research on Mothering.
“In the last decade we have been redefining or reshaping what it means to be a mother,” she says. “A woman 48 and single can say, ‘I chose this.' And a woman at 18 can say, ‘I chose to keep my baby,' ” she says. “It's something we would not have seen a decade and a half ago.”
Ottawa Mens Centre.com, from Ottawa, Canada) wrote: Choice
Moms like any extreme feminist group camouflage their basic goal or denying
children a father by referring to "accidental pregnancy".
This is a group of women hell bent on not having any "custody or access issue",
They even state "Choice Moms don't grapple with child support or custody". Thats
because odds are the fathers will never know until and if they receive a demand
for child support accompanied by an effective order preventing any meaningful
contact with the child.
Generally speaking, hetrosexual males will not "donate sperm" for a lesbian
mother seeking a child who is going to be denied a relationship with their
father.
The fact is, children develop best in a hetrosexual family with a father and
mother, children need role models of both genders.
Extreme feminists have literally run men out of elementary school teaching,
education has been feminized to the point that any male waiting outside a school
is enough to get a swarm of police cars in seconds.
Choice Moms are very obviously encouraging and promoting the obtaining of sperm
by "accidents", that are never accidents.
Women know when they are fertile, the accidents are generally very well planed.
First of course, is genetic research, they generally chose the right looking
man, they check out his qualifications, his intelligence, personality and of
course, his ability to pay child support is generally a high factor.
Those women who seek out unwitting sperm donors, are often highly intelligent,
highly motivated, with extremely selfish goals that if looked at often are
classic symptoms of a severe personality disorder and or a mental health
problem. Their problems often prevent them from having relationships that lead
to marriage and their own dysfunctional personalities cause children to grow up
with similar problems.
Ottawa Mens Centre.com, from Ottawa, Canada) wrote: Donating Sperm is often child abuse. First, many women who cannot have a relationship with a man are victims of childhood sexual abuse, and often their own mother's were also victims of childhood sexual abuse or a dysfunctional family background. Some women who cannot have a relationship with a man were not just victims of childhood sexual abuse but includes a dysfunctional family background that could also include daughters of an alcoholic or violent father.