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    DIY Mom
    DIY Mom
    DIY Mom
    Ebook51 pages31 minutes

    DIY Mom

    By Rachel Lehmann-Haupt

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    A candid, wry memoir about how a “half-liberated” woman stops waiting for Mr. Right and chooses to have a baby on her own. From the decision to freeze her own eggs and the selection of a sperm donor to her multiple attempts to become pregnant to taking her profile off Match.com, the author explains how she came to make “the best decision of her life.” Rachel Lehmann-Haupt is an author, editor, and media strategist living in Sausalito, California. Her writing on gender politics and the influence of science and technology on culture has appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, New York, Vogue, Self, Outside, Wired, the New York Observer, and MSN Money. She is the author of In Her Own Sweet Time: Unexpected Adventures in Finding Love, Commitment, and Motherhood (Basic Books). This is a short e-book published by Shebooks--high quality fiction, memoir, and journalism for women, by women. For more information, visit http://shebooks.net.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherShebooks
    Release dateAug 25, 2014
    ISBN9781940838687
    DIY Mom

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      Book preview

      DIY Mom - Rachel Lehmann-Haupt

      Author

      Before

      On a cold night in January 2007, a few months after my 37th birthday, I came to a crossroads with Jacob, whom I had been dating for a year. We were sitting in the dimly lit living room of his New York City apartment on opposite ends of the couch when he told me that he wasn’t sure whether he could spend the rest of his life with me.

      I love you, he said. I wish I didn’t.

      It was the most confusing statement I’d ever heard from a lover. He thought our relationship should feel more like a honeymoon. Instead he felt I was pushing him to decide whether or not to get married. He admitted that my desire to have children and my worry about my fertility felt like too much pressure. All through our relationship and two years before, I had been working on a series of articles that became a book proposal about why so many women were facing the edge of their fertility, planning their families after the age of 35, when doctors traditionally stamp pregnant women’s charts advanced maternal age. Because I was so steeped in the research, I was worried about my fertility.

      I burst into tears.

      I’ve had all this freedom to come this far in my career, and I’ve finally found myself, I explained. And as a result, I found you. But now I don’t have control over my biology!

      It’s nature’s cruel joke on women, he said, and then explained how he needed more time.

      Fortuitously, I was offered a writing assignment in India, to review a new lodge in the central state of Madhya Pradesh. A few weeks later on a flight from New Delhi, I found myself sitting next to a chatty Indian businessman. He asked me if I wanted to meditate with him—after all, we were in India, or at least floating above it, so I accepted. With my eyes closed, I contemplated my odd position in the universe, suspended between locations, between the familiar and the strange, between deepened commitment to a man or to a new life alone. Just before we landed, my new friend offered to read my palm. I laid my hand on the plastic tray.

      He studied it carefully. You will live until you’re 80 and make lots of money. You will have two great loves.

      Will I have children?

      It’s unclear, he said. I need a magnifying glass to read the smaller lines.

      Why is family so important? I asked him when he looked up.

      His face was bemused, as if the answer was obvious.

      It’s the traditional system, he said. It’s the way we survive.

      When I returned from India, Jacob and I broke up. He said he just didn’t know if I was the one, and I didn’t want to hang around waiting for him to figure it out. I was devastated but found solace by throwing myself into my work.

      I wanted to understand how women—how I—got in this predicament, ending up single in our late 30s with our biological clocks ticking louder every day. I also wanted to investigate the new choices many of us made to change

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