Jen is a single mother by choice to a daughter she conceived using a sperm donor to get pregnant. She is one phenomenal woman, having graduated from some of the most elite institutions in the world - the Naval Academy and Dartmouth. She was one of the few female U.S. navy officers leading teams of men on multiple international high-stakes missions, and was also a consultant at the prestigious consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in London. I had the pleasure of meeting and getting to know Jen in grad school. She made an impact on me because she is such an inspiration (and also an incredible cook)!

In this interview, we discuss Jen’s path to motherhood: how she made the decision to become a single mom, the process of choosing her sperm donor, the emotional and financial considerations, and her experience raising a child on her own. I’m confident you’ll be as moved by her story as I am!

Let’s talk for a minute about what you did before you became a mom - you were a navy officer. What caused you to want to join the military? It’s not a path that many women take.

I visited the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland when I was 13-years old, and basically just fell in love with it. It was challenging and it was elite. I've been accused by ex-boyfriends of being obsessed with adding elite things to my resume, which I can't really disagree with. From a very young age, I have always been up for a challenge. If somebody told me I couldn't do something, it made me even more inclined to want to do it. People started to tell me that the Academy was really competitive and I probably wouldn’t get in, and I was like, “Challenge accepted!”

If I were to reflect on why I haven’t always had the best relationships with guys, it might be because I’m always fixated on showing I can do it myself. I don't let guys spoil me or carry my luggage because every time they do that, I'm worried they’ll think I can't do it.

I joined the Navy because I have always believed in being part of something bigger than yourself and giving back. And I think part of my persona and my ethos is contributing to the world at a bigger level.

I’d love to dive into that a bit more. I’m curious, what was it like to serve as a woman?

I joined in 1997, and the Combat Exclusion Law - which is the law that precluded women from serving in any sort of combat roles - was lifted in 1993. So when I graduated, my Commanding Officer and Executive Officer had never worked with women. They didn't know what to do with us. Now it seems ridiculous, but it really wasn't normal back then.

Professionally, what I realized was that as long as you're competent, work hard, and care about your people, no one ever cared that I was a woman versus being a man. It was also very easy to stand out for good performance as a woman because people had low expectations of women. I enjoyed the art of leading sailors and I was very technically proficient at the nuclear engineering I was doing, so it was rewarding.

What was it like dating in that environment?

It was hard being a 22-year-old female figuring herself out and trying to date in a hyper-masculine environment. It was challenging for me socially because there were a lot of rules about who we could and couldn’t date. And there are also a lot of stigmas around the type of woman that would be in the military, so a lot of civilian guys were intimidated.

I think that's been true for my whole life - I've always been intimidating to men and the military just made it worse. The social fabric didn’t value women being independent, breadwinner, put-your-career-first type people.

People in the military get married really young. When I was serving, the average age people got married was 23. By the time I was in my early 30s, I felt like I was never going to meet anybody if I stayed in. I moved 7 times and deployed 5 times in 12 years. I was consumed by my work, and it became really difficult to figure out what the other side of my life looked like.

“The social fabric didn’t value women being independent, breadwinner, put-your-career-first type people.”

So, at what age did you decide to have a child on your own and how did you make that decision?

I was 33 when I decided to go to business school, and I thought to myself, ‘If I'm going to do this and then go have a professional career afterwards, it's going to be a while before I'm going to be able to have kids because I'm still putting my career first’. I considered freezing my eggs, but decided against it because it was expensive.

Fast forward: I was 36 when I graduated in June, and I had until October when I was beginning my new job in London [at McKinsey & Company]. So I decided I would date full-time. I went to London and I joined 4 dating websites. I went on a lot of dates. Online dating is like a full-time job and I really hate it. It's such an artificial construct, there's nothing organic about it. You're not just getting to know someone, you're filling out this mental checklist to decide if you can procreate with that person. It was terrible. But I felt like I’d been able to do everything else I wanted in life by putting my mind to it, and I wanted to find my husband.

That year, I met a guy on Tinder and we went out for 4 months. In my mind, I had cooked up when we were going to move in and get married. Then there was this one particular event that happened: It was a Monday morning, I woke up, made breakfast for us, and packed my bags because I was traveling for work. I went to take a shower and saw that the bed he had gotten out of last was still unmade. He stood in my hallway looking at his phone while I did the dishes and made the bed. I had this aha! moment where I felt like it wasn’t worth it.

I had this pattern where I had dated two types of guys: 1) Guys who needed me to take care of them or 2) Guys who were intimidated by my success and worked to demean me so that I felt lucky to have them. I was dating him because he was a lawyer, was decent to look at, and was a nice enough guy. But at the end of the day, he needed somebody to take care of him and I realized I didn’t want to take care of someone. I wanted a partner, and if I couldn’t have a partner, I wasn't going to do it.

I realized I was still with him because I really wanted to have a kid. In my mind, the way to have a kid was you meet a guy, fall in love, get married, wait a couple years, and then have a kid. I realized I was entering into relationships with people just so I could tick off those steps and get to the having a kid part. So I broke up with him.

At this point, I was 37 and started talking to friends about possibly having a kid on my own. I spoke with a few single mothers by choice. One was a partner at my company. Another was this Greek woman. Her family was not at all in favor of her choice and had completely alienated her because in their culture you just don't do that. I knew my Mom and friends were really supportive, so I thought if she could do it without the help of her family, I could definitely do it.

After I met those women, I knew I could do it. I went to a fertility doctor to assess my fertility situation. I really think it's super important for anybody who's even thinking about this to do that sooner rather than later, because it helps you to not kick the ball down the field too many times if you know where your fertility stands. Having data and facts helped me make my decisions. I was 37 when I got pregnant and 38 when I had my daughter.

Jen’s multiple positive pregnancy tests after using a sperm donor to get pregnant

When you talked to other single mothers by choice (SMBC), what did they say that made you feel confident about doing it? And now that you are a SMBC yourself, what can you share with women trying to decide?

It wasn’t so much what they said, it was more just seeing that they were okay and were happy with their lives and their decisions. They were successful in their careers, and had built a community around themselves and their children. They’d been able to find balance and they were thriving. It was also fun to hear them tell stories about the benefits of solo parenting. You don’t have to share decision-making, parenting philosophy, or discipline choices - you get to make all of those decisions. I’ve really enjoyed that. I'm not saying this to toot my own horn, but I think it's a very courageous thing for any woman to do, to step outside the societal construct and say, ‘I'm going to do this on my own’. It's scary.

I have a friend who splashed all over Facebook that she was becoming a single mom by choice. I never did that. I was so worried about what people would think. The 20-year-old me would have looked at the 40-year-old me and thought she was a little bit pathetic. I'm so ashamed now that I felt that way and that I cared for so long about what other people thought. Looking back, I’m so proud of what I did and I want my daughter to know that I’m proud of what I did.

If I could do something for women out there, it would be to give them confidence and courage. I have not had a single person disparage my choice when they find out about it. Everybody tells me how inspiring and awesome it is. I wish I had given people more credit for what their opinions would be.

I also wish I had not seen this as a failing. I did not fail in life, I'm crushing life! Deciding to have a child on my own might have been giving up on one dream to pursue another, but that's life. We do that in our career without batting an eye. But I think as women we’re made to feel some sort of shame if we can't find a partner.

We grew up watching Disney princess movies that color the way we view the world. (By the way, my daughter does not watch Disney princess movies or any of the damsel in distress stuff). I grew up believing that my first purpose in life was to get married and have children, but I look at that now and realize that was a construct and was never my true desire.

Many of my friends that have children in marriages do so because it’s what is expected. My married friends who've chosen not to have children also get judged harshly. People need to live their own truth and get out of other people's way. Getting married and having children is not the way for everybody. I think it’s similar to how much the acceptance of homosexuality has changed over time - I believe that will be true of people having children in atypical ways in 20 years.

“If I could do something for women out there, it would be to give them confidence and courage. I have not had a single person disparage my choice when they find out about it. Everybody tells me how inspiring and awesome it is.”

The SMBC community also includes women who chose to adopt. Do you have any insights for a woman who is considering having a child via sperm donor vs. adoption? How did you personally navigate that decision?

Like any community of women, there are a lot of opinions! For me, because I was living in the UK at the time, adoption felt like it would be more challenging because I didn't have citizenship there. I felt that if I wanted to be a mother, having a child by myself was going to be the least red tape way. I also wanted the experience of being pregnant and breastfeeding. I had romanticized what that would be like for so many years and I wanted to experience it.

I am loosely considering adopting a second child. I'm 41 now. It took me a long time to feel my body was semi-normal again after I had my daughter. I do think that is one of the benefits of youth for women having children - when you’re younger, your body just recovers faster. That was challenging for me, and birthing a second child is not something I want to do.

I think some women are scared of childbirth and some women can't have children naturally, so adoption makes sense for them. My mom was adopted so I like the idea of being able to pay that forward and adopt a child. I think everybody has to come to their own truths about what parts of motherhood are most important to them. If the experience of birthing a child is important to you, then birth a child. And if not, I think adoption is an amazing thing.

I think they used to have this perception that having two parents was important, but I think single mothers (single parents in general) are becoming more normal. So the red tape for adoption is slightly less than it probably was in years past. So yeah, I think there are a variety of factors to consider.

Thank you, that is super helpful. I want to take a minute to really understand what going through pregnancy alone was like emotionally for you?

When I was growing up, every woman in my life was a wife and a mom. So I spent my whole life feeling like the path I was supposed to take was to fall in love, get married, and have children. So when I decided to move forward by myself, it felt like I had to let go of that as a dream for my life.

Maybe that's not true. You could argue that I could still fall in love, get married, and have a kid. But, I think the day I walked into that doctor, it was firmly closing the door on that being what I wanted. So I had to grieve and accept that it was okay. It didn’t take away anything from the choice I had made. It didn't make less of the choice. I think it made it even more profound that I was able to take something that I'd wanted forever and say, ‘You know what, I'm not going to get that, or I'm choosing to not pursue that anymore and I'm going to pursue something else that works better for me’.

I did a lot of therapy and a lot of talking with friends, and I think the more I talked about it, the more I was able to realize that there were elements of that journey that weren't important to me. It helped to tell myself that it was okay to be sad, and it was okay to be angry and feel like it was unfair. There are still times that I feel a little bit sad about it. Just like when you lose somebody that you love - it doesn't mean that you forget them or that you don't occasionally think about what it would have been like if this or that had happened instead.

Sure, I have those thoughts. But, then my daughter climbs into my bed in the morning and tells me she wants to cuddle and tells me she loves me. I think it's much easier when the child comes out because you realize that if all of the things hadn't lined up exactly as they had, I wouldn't have this child. If I had made the decision a month later or if I had used a different sperm donor - all of these micro-factors and stars in the universe lined up to bring me the child that I have and I wouldn't change a thing about that. That makes it a lot easier to release the dream that I used to have because I realized that dream was minor compared to the reality that I got.

Let’s get into the specifics of using a sperm donor to get pregnant. What did the process entail?

Finding a sperm donor varies depending on the country. The UK is highly regulated in this way, and the US is very unregulated. The website Donor Sibling Registry has a lot of guidance about sperm clinics that are good in the US and ones that are a little shifty. Because the US government doesn't have regulations and doesn't track on a governmental level, there is the possibility that any donor in the United States could have donated to dozens of clinics and have lots of offspring, which is a concern a lot of people have.

I was living in the UK and was under a time crunch to get it in the cycle that I was trying to get it done. Given that, there were only a couple banks that I could have chosen from, so I ordered my sperm from a bank in Denmark because that was the one that I knew could get it there in time. That helped narrow it down, otherwise I think I would have suffered massive decision fatigue.

There are some clinics in the United States where you can see adult pictures, but you can only see baby pictures from the clinic I ordered from in Denmark. For me, it was important that my child look like and had an identity of being part of my family. When I was looking at physical characteristics, I looked for characteristics that were resemblant of people in my family or me. As a result, my daughter looks almost like an exact clone of me. That's not because my genetics are super strong, it's because I picked a donor who had similar features.

Once I chose the clinic, it was just like online dating. You have a bunch of criteria that you can filter by. Everybody's going to have their own criteria that are important to them. The ones that I chose based off of were height, eye color, hair color, and an extended profile. Not everybody has an extended profile, and you pay more for people with it. I narrowed it down to 30 or so, and then I more thoroughly pored over their profiles. I looked for family health history and the way they responded to questions. I paid attention to the general tone of their responses. I tried to read between the lines to figure out their career because I wanted intelligence.

I narrowed it down to four profiles and sent them to a handful of my inner circle. I let everybody weigh in, and ultimately chose one that was nobody else’s first choice. I had 3 days to select the donor so the sperm would reach the clinic in time for my cycle. I'm so glad I did it that way because otherwise I would have just thought it over and over. I would have built a spreadsheet. You can over-engineer anything and you can't control the outcome. So I'm glad.

I want to understand how long this whole process takes. Step one: Go to the fertility doctor and get an ultrasound and bloodwork done to understand your fertility situation. Step two: Decide who your baby daddy is, which only takes a few days. Step three: At your next period, they implant it and you become pregnant. So the whole thing could take less than two months?

I think two months is optimistic. I think everyone should take the time to do fact finding. In the UK, they required me to go see a fertility counselor because they wanted to make sure that I had thought through it. I would recommend that to anyone. I really think it's important to go talk to somebody about why you're doing it and what you're thinking.

Deciding to use a known donor versus a sperm donor is a big decision. I went through a whole process of asking different men in my life if they would be interested in donating, and had very serious conversations with two different friends about it. Ultimately, I'm glad I didn't go that route, though other people have gone that route and are perfectly happy with it.

Go look at a sperm bank website and get a feel for it. People have very visceral reactions when they do that. Go get your eggs counted and figure out where you are and what process you’ll need to use. My doctor felt really confident that we could use medicated IUI before IVF, and it’s a lot less invasive.

I decided on a Saturday, and two Fridays later I was pregnant. It doesn’t happen like that for everyone, but that just reinforced for me that it was meant to happen and Ellie is the child I was meant to have. I'm very much a believer in God. There's some song, “I loved you before you were born.” That's definitely true for her - she's the best. I can't effervesce about my child enough. She makes me very happy and makes me very frustrated.

Having a three-year old is very different than having a one-year old. I understand why they come out of the womb so sweet, tiny, and needy. It gets a lot harder when they're toddlers. Newborns are a warm-up period for the first five months. You can put them in their car seat and take them anywhere: go out to lunch or have a glass of wine with friends. The first five months are bliss, and then they start moving around on their own and the rest is history.

Once you were pregnant and after you’d given birth, what life changes did you have to make?

I stayed at my job and in London while I was pregnant. My mom was there for the birth and stayed four weeks after. The day my mom left, I sat by myself and cried. I was like, “Oh my God, how am I going to do this?”

I did fine the next couple months, but it became pretty clear to me that I could make my life a lot easier by moving back to the United States. A lot of my close friends had left London, so I was left with a very thin network. When I really thought about who I could call at 2 AM if I really needed something, the number was very small in London. So when Ellie was four months old, I decided to move back to the States and my mom moved in with us. She lived with us from the time Ellie was five months until she was 2.5 years old.

Now I have a full time nanny, and my mom lives one street over so I still have support. That’s not to say you can't do it without support because I know there are plenty of single mothers by choice who are raising a child alone. I just think it's a lot easier if you have a family member or close friends who live nearby. I think it would be really hard for me without that.

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What are the financial realities that a woman should think through before moving forward? Do you need to have a six figure salary to have a child on your own?

No. There are plenty of women in the SMBC community who mortgage themselves up to their eyeballs to pay for IVF. They'll spend $50-100K just to have the baby, and they are making $50K a year. These women are remarkable and their dedication is so great.

People do it at all income levels so it really depends. Breastfeeding is often for people with privilege. Somebody who is an hourly wage worker isn't going to get maternity leave and probably isn't going to be given time to go pump four times a day during a workday. Formula is shamefully expensive in this country. The same box of formula costs $30 in the US and $6 in the UK, where the government doesn’t allow price gouging for formula and where it’s a basic right to feed your child.

I breastfed but I also got a year of maternity leave, whereas there are a lot of companies in the U.S. that require you to come back after 6 or 8 weeks. It's the expectation that women will be part of a monogamous, heterosexual relationship and won’t work after having a child, and all the laws are written to support that. Really great companies that value human capital will give much more leeway and maternity leave.

To answer your question about costs: Formula would be about $1500 per year, and diapers another $1500 per year. So that's $3,000 for just the baby. Now when you add in childcare, that’s another $20K per year. You could do a lot of things on the cheap, but I think it’s substantially easier if you have a support network that can help absorb some of the childcare costs. If the child gets sick, they can't go to daycare. So you either have to take the day off, or you need to have a backup and somebody else who can provide childcare. It helps to have a community of other moms. My favorite friends are stay-at-home moms with husbands who work because they're available to help. That's really nice to have because a lot of women don't have that luxury, and single mothers never have that luxury.

Not every child in the United States costs $25,000 a year. People find creative solutions for childcare, they figure out ways to work from home, and they share childcare burdens. And I think it gets cheaper as kids get older. You can buy clothes from thrift shops and the amount of adult supervision required decreases. There are so many women who do it making so little - you figure it out. I wouldn't let money stand in the way.

Was it difficult to go through the pregnancy, Lamaze class, and delivery without a spouse?

No. I went to all of my Lamaze classes alone, and it gave me an opportunity to meet other soon-to-be mothers and their partners. I didn’t feel self-conscious or judged. Everybody was super kind to me, and they all have remained really good friends to this day, as have our kids.

Women are delivering alone all the time right now because of Covid. I hired a doula because I like the holistic way they think about childbirth. So I had her, my mom, and a close girlfriend in the delivery room with me. I had a support network. I think having a birth partner is great, but I think that most of us have a woman in our life who is a sister.

Are you worried about when your daughter asks about her father and/or might want to meet him? Have you thought about how you're going to handle that?

Yes, there is tons of literature out there about this. She already knows she doesn't have a father and that she has a donor. My nanny’s friend is a child of a sperm donor, and she advised me to talk about it really early to normalize things. I’ve also let her school know that it’s important to me that they don’t just talk about the concept of “family” as a straight Mom/Dad/Sister/Brother unit. I make sure that the other people in Ellie's life understand how I'm approaching this so that they use the same terminology and know how to answer questions.

I specifically use the word “donor” and tell her there was somebody out there who was so kind that he gave us a gift. I also make sure she knows that the donor is not her dad. A dad is somebody who loves you into being, whereas this person wanted me to be able to love her into being. I'm sure we'll talk about it a lot. Those questions will come up, but I’m proactively talking about it now so that she understands that there are different types of families. Yes, I think the bulk of families still have a mom and a dad, but that's not the only type of family out there anymore.

There's nobody that abandoned her. There's nobody that didn't want her, or who found out that I was pregnant and didn’t want anything to do with it. So the psychological issues you might face in other situations don't seem to be as present with single mothers by choice where the narrative is “I wanted you so much that I went to great lengths to have you.”

She'll have the opportunity to get the donor’s information when she's 18. It's her choice, and I will be there to support her no matter how she wants to handle it. I don't think she'll have any more issues than any normal child growing up.

“My friends tell me all the time that I’m living my best life, and that they’ve never seen me happier. I think that’s true - I’ve never felt more content. I spent the better part of my 20s and 30s feeling so uncomfortable in my own skin, and unable to reconcile the choices I had made between my career and personal life. It’s a relief to be where I am now. ”

How do you feel about where you are at in your life now? Are you dating at all?

My friends tell me all the time that I’m living my best life, and that they’ve never seen me happier. I think that's true - I've never felt more content. I spent the better part of my 20s and 30s feeling so uncomfortable in my own skin, and unable to reconcile the choices I had made between my career and personal life. It's a relief to be where I am now.

I still wouldn't mind having a partner someday, but it's become so low on my priority list because it was never about that for me. It was always about being a mom. I also feel like my daughter fills my need for human connection so thoroughly that I don't feel a wanting for someone to love me. I have someone now who loves me much more unconditionally than a partner ever would, so my cup is just tremendously full.

I’m not dating. I have very little space in my life for it. I worry sometimes that I'm not inspiring to younger women. I remember meeting a woman who was 40 and still single when I was in the Navy, and I was repulsed by it. I recall that feeling so keenly that now I worry when I talk to younger women, they will see my life and hope they don’t end up in my position. That feels ridiculous to me because I'm super happy, but I am sensitive to girls growing up and having dreams of a husband and white wedding. It took me time to evolve and recognize it was a societal construct. I had opportunities to get married and I was even engaged before, but I just don’t know that it was ever my way.

Having been through everything you've been through, what would you say to a woman who is on the fence and trying to decide whether or not to have a child on her own? Any final wisdom to offer?

I’d say keep gathering information and keep talking to people. Read books - one that really helped me is Untamed. Talk to single mothers by choice, and not just one but four or five. There are forums on Facebook. Talk to fertility counselors. There are professionals out there who are trained to help you work through some of the questions you might have. Also talk to the people who love and support you.

The more people I talked to, the more sure I became. My friends gave me so much courage, and I have a supportive family. If you talk to somebody that isn’t encouraging, it’s important to understand if it’s because they have your best interests in mind, or if it's because they're overlaying a construct that they can't break themselves out of.

The other thing I’d say is to have confidence in yourself and your ability to do it. If your heart cries out to be a mom, honor that. I'm not the best mom all the time, but I look at some women I’ve met who had children just because it was expected, and I think I'm a way better mom than a lot of them because I wanted to be a mom desperately.

If there are people who want to talk to somebody, I'm here.

Jen has let me know that she will be happy to speak with any woman who is considering single motherhood. If you would like to be connected to Jen, please contact me and I’ll put you in touch! And if you loved this post, pin it! This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase through them, I may receive a small commission at no cost to you. I donate 10% of all proceeds made from this blog to charity. Find out more about the charity I am supporting here.