Fishing in two different ponds splits the stress!
Marriage and parenting are no longer linked, which means dating while pregnant is now the new norm! Especially for women in their 30’s and 40’s.
Yes, there’s a new wave of woman in the world who are out there taking care of their motherhood desires while searching for her ideal partner at the same time. Yes folks, these are two different people! No woman needs to wait for a romantic partner to start a family and she no longer needs to be gifted with a green light that fits with someone else’s timeline.
As I juggled monthly meetups with my fertility doctor for defrosted squirts of semen I continued with my quest to find ‘The One’. I continually swiped right on a number of men hoping that they would be my reason to hang up my boots on the clinic and lace myself around them instead.
When none of my IUI’s worked through the fertility clinic and a worthy potential baby dadda didn’t magically fall into my lap, I threw in the towel on the clinic and rather than icing my eggs, I iced the clinic.
Thankfully my baby-making mission took a different turn once I discovered mountains of men donating their sperm for free online. It opened up a bevy of possibilities like ‘perhaps I could find ‘The One’ and have his baby or have a baby with the help of ‘Some One’ and then continue in my search for my life long guy?’
The latter sat better with me as I knew it was the fastest path to motherhood as a relationship runway would be atleast 12 months and I’d run out of time. I also knew the legal implications by intimately entwining myself with a known donor so our relationship was best kept at arms length. My revised mission then had me searching for two different hauls and I couldn’t wait to cast out some nets into two very different ponds. At 41 years of age I needed to throw everything at my motherhood dream and the more hooks I had out there, the higher my chances of success.
The boxes I ideally wanted to be ticked by these men were vastly different as they were to achieve very different goals. I urgently needed fresh, robust, marathon swimmers for baby-making. My catch from the donor deeps would have long limbs, good bones, be strong, healthy and agile who circled about nearby and would rise to the occasion every month.
On the other hand, my potential intimate partner needed to be my mate beyond just mating. As I wasn’t driven to mercilessly squeeze him for sperm he skipped over a whole bunch of boxes that didn’t need ticking. And vice versa.
So now there I was sitting at a dinner table opposite my Tinder date, the fifth one that month.
As we politely offered and exchanged tong fulls of mesclun mix onto one another’s plates, I could clearly see I preferred more of a masculine mix than the wilted dish in front of me.
Basically, we were two middle-aged adults hacking our way through our first-ever hour-long meal to find out if we could swiftly merge our life paths. He clearly wasn’t ideal future faux daddy or partner material for me but at that moment I tried to create a life in my mind that would have us fit. He was lugging some past luggage and would so for at least another 6 years. I on the other hand, wanted to create some shiny new baggage as I was done travelling lightly on just one single ticket.
Little did I or he know at the time, I was no longer flying solo. Thanks to an effective well-executed donation session with my known donor catch the night before, I was miraculously baking a baby and didn’t yet know it. Hoorah! I no longer had to sell myself on how I’d make good mother material nor beg a random man to emotionally jump on board and ride alongside me.
I continued to throw out fishing lines in the dating pond throughout my pregnancy as I may have built the bridge to a baby, but I was still searching for a green pasture to cross over to. I was upfront with the men I met with and surprisingly none of them cancelled our dates. Perhaps they were relieved I was not going to go all baby-making crazy on them in 6 months or that they knew it was an easy out for them now or later.
My plan C friend Pim told me a story about going on a date with a woman who had only recently become pregnant. She’d told him she’d had “a little procedure” done since they had last seen one another. It confused him at first as he really didn’t know what to do with that information and what that meant for them both. What it did do, was paint a picture of what was ahead if he was interested in travelling down that same road holding her hand.
This will become more common as so many single women are taking care of ‘it’ themselves. I just think go for it. When you’re high on hormones you might find your date is a great distraction, a really good work contact or possible future babysitter?! Or just maybe he turns out to be your forever guy (or gal) and he’d be thrilled to hold your hand when it’s time to push out your ripe watermelon. Now that would be a catch of the century!
If he’s a child-free guy this could be a way to fast track him to parenthood. Either way, you win. Dinner, night out, distraction, another story to tell when you’re 90 years old.
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