Book Review: Choosing You

Choosing You: Deciding to Have a Baby on My Own by Alexandra Soiseth (Seal Press: May 2008), chronicles the author’s journey to becoming a single mom by choice. She is not a lesbian, but I wanted to review her book here because of the parallels between straight single moms by choice and lesbian moms, partnered and not. I think there are many places where our experiences overlap, and there is much we can learn from each other.

Soiseth writes with insight about her inability to find the right man before she reached 40 and her time for childbearing grew riskily short. She also tells of her struggle with significant weight loss, and how that fed into her insecurity about relationships. It is a reflective book that manages to be sensitive without being sentimental. Soiseth doesn’t gloss over her fears about the process nor the difficulties she had in getting her family to accept her decision to parent alone.

Choosing You is not the rollicking, grumpy look at single motherhood provided by the other single-mom memoir I reviewed recently, Andrea Askowitz’ My Miserable Lonely Lesbian Pregnancy. Soiseth writes with a lightness that keeps the story moving, but not with the same constant humor and cynicism as Askowitz. Each will appeal to different personalities. Both, however, ultimately show that finding inner strength, and having a support network of friends and family, is what helped them through.

Soiseth’s story will find resonance with single moms of all orientations, especially those, like her, who struggle with weight issues. My one real problem with it is not a fault of the book itself. The back cover states “At thirty-nine, with no husband on the horizon, she takes matters into her own hands,” then, in bold letters “She Googles for sperm,” as if that is still a novel act. Maybe I’ve just been immersed in the world of lesbian parenting too long, but searching for sperm online has ceased to have any radical meaning for me.

I wish, too, that Soiseth had spent more time on the period immediately after her baby’s birth, dealing with post-partum depression, soliciting but also limiting help from family and friends, and searching for appropriate, affordable childcare. Again, this is probably just my own perspective, after having read not only Askowitz’ book, but also Louise Sloan’s guide for single moms, Knock Yourself Up, and Rosanna Hertz’ more academic Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice. I’ve read so many anecdotes about the decision to go it alone that, while Soiseth’s narrative about getting pregnant is personal and moving, it doesn’t stand out for me the way it might for someone new to thinking about single moms. The whole business about searching for sperm and inseminating is even more of a beaten path for me, having been down that road myself and seen it on just about every television show that features a lesbian.

Maybe Soiseth’s post-partum blues will similarly seem like old ground to those who have read or experienced more about that condition. To me, however, that was the more interesting aspect of her tale. How her weight, and one daycare provider’s reaction to it, factored in to her care decisions for her child was also an angle I’d never before seen covered.

Soiseth is aware, too, that she has a bond with the other non-traditional families around her, and this marks her work as one that speaks to non-traditional parents of many types:

The daddy question, of course, has come up. And though I think I’m prepared, I’m not really. I have talked to her all her life about how our family doesn’t have a dad, how there are many different kinds of families. Kaj has seen this herself—in Jaiden and her two moms; in our friend Mary, how had her son Daniel in the same way I had Kaj. . . . Kaj and I talk about how Ali’s dad lives far away now and Ali lives most of the time with his mom, like Kaj lives with me.

Choosing You belongs in the upper ranks of pregnancy memoirs. Despite my own familiarity with single-mom tales, I think it will stand out as a balanced, honest narrative of creating a non-traditional family. It will reassure those, straight and lesbian, who are considering this path themselves, and go a long way towards helping others understand why some women choose the single route. As Soiseth writes of her daughter: “She loves me and I love her, and between us we have all that it takes to be a family.”

(This review was at the request of MotherTalk, which gave me a $20 gift certificate to Amazon.com for doing the review. I also receive a referral fee from Amazon for any purchases made through the link above. My policy is that I will disclose any paid reviews, and will not accept payment directly from the publisher, manufacturer, or creator of the product under review.)