Tired of waiting for the prince on a white horse and desperate to meet «the same man», they make a bitter and difficult decision. The psychotherapist Fatma Bouvet de la Maisonneuve tells the story of her patient.
Not because, as the song goes, «dads are out of fashion,» but because they can’t find them. Among my patients, one young woman stopped using contraception with her «one night stand» to get pregnant, and another decided to have a baby without the knowledge of a partner who did not want to commit. These women have things in common: they are successful, they have sacrificed important moments of their social life for the sake of work, they are at that “critical” age when you can give birth.
My client Iris can’t stand the sight of pregnant women outside anymore. Her parents’ attempts to find out how her personal life is going turned into torture. Therefore, she avoids them and met Christmas alone. When her best friend was in labor, she had to take a sedative so as not to break down when she saw the baby in the hospital. This friend has become the «last bastion», but now Iris will not be able to see her either.
The desire to become a mother consumes her and turns into an obsession
«All the women around me have a mate» — I always look forward to this statement, which is quite easy to disprove. I rely on numbers: the number of single people, especially in large cities. There is a real emotional desert around us.
We list all Iris’s friends by name, discuss who they are with now and what time it is. There are many unmarried people. As a result, Iris realizes that her pessimism means only low self-esteem. The desire to become a mother consumes her and turns into an obsession. We discuss how ready she is to meet “the right person,” whether she can wait, what her needs are. But at each of our meetings, I feel that she does not finish something.
In fact, she wants me to approve a plan that she has been hatching for months: to have a baby by contacting a sperm bank. The child «from the fast train.» This will give her, she says, the feeling that she is in control again and is no longer dependent on the now unlikely encounter with a man. She will be the same woman as others, and will cease to be lonely. But she’s waiting for my approval.
When we thought about the emancipation of women, we forgot to consider what place is given to the child
We often encounter similar situations where an ambiguous choice has already been made. We should not impose our values on the patient, but only accompany him. Some of my colleagues in such cases look for a defect in the image of the father or family dysfunction in the patient’s personal history. Iris and the other two show none of this.
Hence the need to comprehensively study this growing phenomenon. I attribute it to two factors. The first is that when we thought about the emancipation of women, we forgot to think about what place is given to the child: motherhood is still an obstacle to career. The second is the growing social isolation: meeting with a partner is sometimes equated with a feat. Men also complain about this, thereby refuting the conventional wisdom that they tend to avoid commitment.
Iris’ request for help, her bitter decision, compels me to defend her against the moralizing and ridicule she will face. But I foresee the consequences will be difficult — both for her and for two of my other patients who do not want to have a child without a man, but are close to it.