Plan B -- a single mom's decision to go it alone

I'm in my ob-gyn's office, feet in the stirrups. Dr. Bakas peeks up over the paper sheet draped across my knees and pulls his gloves off with a snap. "So? Do you want a cigarette?"

My friend Bev laughs, as does the nurse, but I try not to because I don't want to jiggle or move or do anything to disrupt those tiny little sperm as they make the long journey up through my uterus to my little waiting egg.

They've already had to do a lot of traveling. I bought them from the Scandinavian Cryobank, which shipped them from Denmark. They're from Olaf (not his real name), who's 22 and blond, blue-eyed, and tall.

Olaf (well, his sperm) arrived packed in dry ice a week before I ovulated, so he hung around with me as we waited. He became my dinner companion. I set him up in his large round container on the chair across the table from me. I told him about my day.

A part of me thought it'd be lovely to not have to drink both glasses of wine — and he could have done more than just agree with me all the time. But then I took him into the living room to watch TV, and he didn't complain when I kept changing the channel. We became pals, Olaf and I. We took pictures.

Dr. Bakas hasn't done this before, though he did see the procedure when he was a resident. It's nothing, he said to me when I first talked to him about artificial insemination. We can absolutely do it here.

So now the deed is done. Intrauterine insemination. It has a higher success rate than the vaginal insemination I could have done myself at home. And I'll take any advantage I can get.

"If it's going to happen, it's happening right now, so just lie here for ten minutes. Let the magic begin," Dr. Bakas says, nodding as he and the nurse leave. Bev and I look at each other. Yes, I think, I'm getting pregnant right now.

(I don't know where I got off thinking that way. I knew even then that my chance of getting pregnant through artificial insemination was only 5 to 25 percent per try.)

I'm so excited it's hard to remember how reluctant I was about all this.

For years I had stuck faithfully to another plan.

The Plan

The Plan: Live life. Get married. Have kids. (I was hoping for two, but could have been talked into one or five or 20.)

In grad school at 36, I thought, This is good! But where's the rest? The men? The dating?

At 37, graduated, I turned to my friend Rebecca and said, That's it. I'm getting married.

She had found a wonderful husband by combining hard work, sheer determination, and a little luck. So I did what she did: Yahoo, Match, Nerve. Never mind that I'm shyer than Rebecca, and not nearly so slender, and I don't have her brilliant red hair. Still, I dated up a storm at 37 and 38. I met many nice men. And at 38 I began to settle in with Juan, a screenwriter who was between jobs.

He wanted kids, too — though it became more and more clear that he wanted them later, after he hit it big. I pulled out a BabyGap ad for strength, put it on the floor beside me and told him: We need to break up.

And then one day, watching the high school students in the summer program I run, I thought back to being 16. And I realized, holy smokes, I'm Thirty-Nine and One Half years old.

The kids went back inside to their classes, but I stayed in the sun and twisted a lock of hair around and around my finger. Well, I thought, I haven't asked Steve out yet. I could ask if he wants to go for a drink sometime. I also have a date coming up next week with a friend of a friend of a friend. It's not so bad. Don't panic.

But I was panicking. Because it struck me that even if I did fall in love right then, say with Steve (or the guy next week, it didn't matter), and he fell in love with me, we'd have to wait a year or so to get engaged and then a year to plan the wedding and then, well, he wouldn't be ready to have kids right away...I mean, jeez, I'd be 50 before we could even try for a baby.

I'm going to be alone, single, and childless for the rest of my life, I thought. This isn't the life I imagined when I was 16, sitting around listening to Love, soft as an easy chair and reading those romance novels, one after another.

He was supposed to have rescued me by now. He was supposed to have surrendered to my feminine wiles long ago: my doe eyes, my blonde tresses.

I stood up, fluffed my tresses, and faced the facts with my doe eyes.

He isn't coming.

I am absolutely on my own.

I'd suspected this to be my fate even as I dreamed of the other, more romantic life. When I was a teenager my parents said, "You'd better lose that weight or you're not going to find a boyfriend." And embedded in this warning was the fate-worse-than-death scenario that my mother's sister was living: 40, single, childless.

They shook their heads with pity. Poor Aunty Hanne.

I felt it like a curse on my head. Be thin! Or die alone!

Somewhere deep inside me I knew I'd be there, at the threshold of 40 and alone. I just knew it. And I swore as I watched Hanne get older and older that no matter what, I wouldn't miss out on having a child. Even if I had to go to some random bar and leave with a random guy and ravish him in some random motel. Then disappear.

Plan B

It'd be more dramatic to say that I immediately got on the phone, ordered some sperm, and got on with it. But it took another several months to officially move from The Plan to Plan B. Most especially there was the deep, hollow sadness to be worked through in watching The Plan fail.

Then, of course, there were things like money to be considered. And Rebecca helped me with a dirty little secret fear: Up until then it'd been hard to find a man ...but with a kid in tow, would it be impossible?

Come on, she said. It's not like the old days. Look around you: Over 40, single with a baby, is hardly shocking. Just move on with your life. Do what you want. You have the rest of your life to find a man. This you have to do right now.

Eventually I understood. I am absolutely on my own...for now.

At the doctor's office, after I keep still for ten minutes, Dr. Bakas lets us go. At home I lie on the couch beneath my front room window. The couch where Olaf's sperm lounged for most of the seven days they were with me. I prop my butt up a little and focus on getting pregnant, just in case Dr. Bakas isn't right about the instantaneousness of insemination.

Two days later, while I'm visiting a friend, waves of dizziness almost knock me over. There's a strange pinging deep in my pelvis and — most strangely — an awful metallic taste in my mouth. I know I'm pregnant. I just know I am. It may not stick, but at this moment, I know I am.

It does stick, and my daughter Kaj arrives nine months later, one day after her due date. My miracle first-try baby. Meant to be, my mother says.

Kaj is long and thin — 8 pounds, 9 ounces. She's yanked out of me after 35 hours of labor and a near cesarean (which was most definitely not part of The Plan or even Plan B). But I can tell you this for sure: Epidurals are the miracle of the 20th century, and I have the best obstetrician in the entire world.