What It's Like When You Decide to Become a Single Mom

I love my work and I want to keep doing it. It fills me in a different kind of way than being a mom. I’m someone who loves to think with people, collaborate with people. And that gives me energy. And because I fill myself up in feeding that part of my identity, when it’s time to get on the floor and do Legos and ask someone to brush his teeth five thousand times, I can do it. Because I am also taking care of myself. I do not feel guilty about the time I spend away from Dexter. Nothing makes me happier than hearing our nanny and Dexter chattering away with each other while I’m in another room, working. My goal is for him to feel at home in the world with lots of people. I don’t think I’m the best at doing all things with him. And there are different people that he gets different experiences from and nurture him in ways I don’t necessarily.

I was interviewed for an internal piece on balance. I do not like that word, “balance.” The word I like to use instead is “blend.” And my boss, Secil, allowed me to blend. If I volunteer to go to Dexter’s school to read stories, then I am not taking a meeting then. If I am on a conference call at home and I’m not the one speaking, you know I am on mute and doing some domestic thing like folding laundry or putting dishes away. But I am always bringing my whole self to work and this allows me to do my best work as well as to be a good—or maybe it’s good enough—mother.

To be honest, I didn’t find a lot of camaraderie in general in the single mothers by choice community. I don’t know if it’s my own internal bias, but I pretty quickly decided I didn’t want to build a whole identity around being a single mom. I just wanted to be seen as a mom. I feel deeply, maybe strangely deeply, connected to the moms of my son’s half-siblings. I consider them to be part of my family, even though with some of them, we may not have anything in common, superficially, other than this one thing—that our children 50 percent share the same DNA.

I met my nanny when my son was three months old and she’s still with me years later. She’s my co-parent. She’s the hugest relationship in my life, outside of my son. And he also has two married godfathers, and they have really stepped in and filled in that gap of bringing a child into the world without a father. My son’s godfathers, our nanny, the baby mamas—I now have this family I could have never imagined having, that I wouldn’t have had unless I had stepped outside the culture to do things differently.

I think Mother’s Day this year is going to be fun. At first, I hated it, because it reminded me how alone I was because no one was doing anything for me. Later, [my son’s godfathers] would take Dexter for the day because they had noticed how exhausted I was, and that became my experience of Mother’s Day. But this year, we’re having a picnic in the park with Dexter’s godfathers and some of his friends and some of my friends and some of their friends. I’m really excited. Someone’s going to need to make a record of it, ‘This is the first time Robin enjoyed Mother’s Day!’