Wanted: Baby Daddy
My quest to get pregnant without getting a boyfriend.
by Nan Mooney
March 18, 2009
The Almodovar movie was sold out that November night and, after studying the marquee, my friend turned to me and said: "Do you want to just get a drink?"
It was a regular night out with my friend, let's call her Daphne. After a glass of wine on an empty stomach, I found myself confessing not how much I wanted a man in my life but how much I wanted a baby, so much so that I was seriously contemplating doing it on my own.
Daphne rolled the remains of a second martini around her glass.
"Why don't you ask Z?" she said finally, meaning her ex-boyfriend, let's call him Zachary. "You two have a good relationship. I bet he'd do it."
Zachary was thirty years old, with a dimple on his chin. He was kind, funny, and trustworthy. He had everything I was looking for in a man to father my child.
It wasn't that I'd given up on true love, but that biology was threatening to give up on me. At almost thirty-seven, I was every cliché of the aging, baby-crazy spinster I swore up and down I'd never become. I nursed an embarrassing envy of Angelina Jolie — not for her lips or her lover but for the terrific ease with which she could amass children. Even if I wanted to adopt, that road seemed closed. I could just imagine the application: "Broke, single, self-employed writer seeking kids."
He would have to make himself available at 9 a.m. or midnight, fresh off a red-eye and with a killer case of the flu.
I wanted to have a baby the old-fashioned way, and I had to do it on the cheap, which meant finding someone willing to pick up the other half of the job with no strings attached. It was asking a lot, and that was before we even got to my list of requirements. First he had to be clean. No question. And a lot of men out there, though you respect their minds and even their hearts, you have no idea where the rest of them has been. The last thing I needed holding up my baby-making project was a rendezvous with the neighborhood STD.
Second, he had to be single. Not necessarily uninvolved, but no wife or long-term partner in the mix. You may know the rare married couple so secure in their affection for each other and so overflowing in their affection for you that wife would be willing to let husband have sex with you four or five times a month indefinitely until the little blue line appeared. But I've never met them.
Third, he had be trustworthy, and to trust me. Babymaking would require real commitment. Unless you ovulate like clockwork -- and I most definitely did not -- he had to be willing to show up on short notice. No headache nights, no mysterious trips out of town. My baby daddy would have to make himself available at 9 a.m. or midnight, fresh off a red-eye and with a killer case of the flu.
More importantly, the laws on parental rights are changing all the time, so even if you do write up a contract, odds are it won't hold up in court. You want someone who you can talk to, reason with, should either of you decide you want the "family" relationship to be different from what you agreed upon up front.
©2009 Babble
About the Author
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Nan Mooney's third book, (Not) Keeping Up With Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Middle Class, comes out in May. She lives in Seattle with her son Leo and lots of rain. |
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