Thinking About Having a Baby Solo? Here's How This Musician, Teacher, and Mom Did It

Jessica Ivry with her daughter, esti.

By Salma Abdelnour Gilman

Women who want to have a baby—with or without a partner, and at a time when they’re ready for this massive life change—now have more options than ever before. (Well, Roe v. Wade protections may vanish before our eyes, but that’s another story.) Deciding to become a solo mom by choice is one example of a path that wasn’t as available in decades past—and it can lead to an incredibly fulfilling life as a parent.

But the path isn't easy, by any stretch of the imagination. Solo pregnancy and childbirth come with their own built-in challenges, layered right on top of the struggles that all parents face.

At Crunch Time Parents, the women we’ve met who have had babies on their own are an inspiring, tough, loving (and funny!) bunch, and we’re proud to be able to highlight some of their experiences here as part of our Crunch Time Q&A series.

Meet Jessica Ivry, an acclaimed Bay Area musician, educator, and mom to two-year-old Esti. Here, Jessica opens up about what it took to get where she is now: a happy, fortunate, and very hard-working parent of a beautiful and active little girl.

Jessica (left) with Esti at her one-year birthday party.

Crunch Time Parents: Jessica, at what point in your life did you decide to try to have a baby on your own? Was the decision based more on timing pressures, or on being in a place in your life where you felt ready to do it?

Jessica Ivry: There was the reality of my biological clock ticking, but more than that, I wasn’t dating anybody who was going to be a life partner, as much as I’d tried. I wanted to take action because I didn’t want to just keep dating, knowing I wanted to be a mom.

I was in a serious relationship when I was 38, and I thought it had potential. When it ended, I thought: In two years I’ll be 40, so at 39 I went to a fertility clinic to get my eggs tested and to see about my egg reserve. At that point, my sister was trying and wasn’t having any luck, and she was 41. My doctor said 39 is better than 41. Everything was fine and I was healthy, so I thought: Ok, I have one more year.

When I turned 40, I decided I can’t keep trying to look for a partner because no matter how much I look, that person isn’t suddenly going to be the father of my child, unless it was a one-night stand in a bar. And I absolutely did not want to get pregnant by a random guy in a bar, especially when I didn’t know his health history.

It did help that it wasn’t just my sister who was doing it [having a baby solo], but I also had an old roommate who did it before my sister and she was 36 when she got pregnant. Back then, I decided I didn’t want any part of that, and that I wouldn’t give up on meeting someone. But age 40 was the big cutoff for me.

CTP: How much did you wrestle with the solo-parenting decision? Did your friends or family try to talk you out of it, or into it?

JI: My oldest sister, the traditional one in my family, got married at 26 and had her first kid at 28. She was the one who encouraged me to be a mother by saying, “Don’t worry about the traditional option. Go for what you want.” But my parents were like, “It’s too hard, you don’t have to do it.”

My other sister [who’d already had a baby on her own] was telling me, “This is fucking hard. I’m not gonna lie to you.”

My parents grew up in a traditional, no-one-gets-divorced kind of world, and their biggest concern for me was that I haven’t led an especially conventional life and have always been a freelance musician. At the time, my sister who had the baby on her own had a 9-5 job with really good benefits. So my parents thought she had more financial stability than me, and how would I ever make it work? I was always aware that there was no way I could do it without my family helping me financially.

My parents are very happy for me now. I mean, this great person has arrived. Even though afterwards I was so depressed, and I was like: What was I thinking? I have music, and that’s enough. But I always knew [my music career] wouldn’t be enough.

CTP: Once you decided to try for a baby, what happened next?

JI: I went to the Sperm Bank of California, in Berkeley. They’re like, no bells and whistles, and their website is shit. They don’t even have a waiting room. It’s in a very busy part of Berkeley, near downtown, with a lot of hustle and bustle. You have to wait outside, and they tell you when to come up.

You feel like you’re doing a drug deal, and then you walk out with a canister worth thousands of dollars, and you’re probably walking by students who donated that sperm.

Sperm donors have to go to the clinic multiple times and talk about their family on both sides, and give lots of family history, physical and mental, then get tested. One of the questions the donors get asked is, "Why do you want to donate sperm?" Some guys said, "I did it for the money." I felt like they were being honest, at least. Some said, "I want to help people have a family."

I didn’t see a picture of the donor that I chose, but at some other clinics, you can upgrade your membership and get things like an audio recording, or a baby picture of the donor. My clinic gives you an extensive health history and their own impression of the donor, and they’ll even compare his looks to a famous star you might recognize. They told me that the guy I chose looks like Justin Long. I thought: He’s not a very good actor, but he’s sort of OK-looking.

My criteria were, I wanted someone who did not have any mental health issues himself, and I didn’t want his parents or grandparents to have any. There was a guy whose mother committed suicide at age 50. There was another guy who had a history of alcoholism in his family, and I didn’t want that. Some guys had a family history of cancer in their 40s, and I didn’t want that either. But a family history of cancer after age 70 or 80 seemed more normal; those people had had a long and healthy life.

The guy I chose answered the questions in a kind of cocky way. He seemed like a braggart, but I wasn’t going to be dating the guy.

CTP: What was it like to get the fertility treatments? How many cycles did you go through?

JI: My old roommate hired a midwife to come and inseminate her with frozen sperm. She got pregnant after one or two tries, with soft lighting and quiet music, the closest you can come to actually having sex. That’s what I wanted to do: Get a midwife to come to my room late at night!

With the IUI [intrauterine insemination], you can try every month, like you would with a partner. You just monitor your ovulation. I wanted to try that way and not pump up my body with all the meds. I did my first attempt in the fall of 2013.

I would pick up the sperm in a container with dry ice, and I had acupuncture afterwards. But I didn’t get pregnant. I tried four times that way and it didn’t work.

When I went back to get more sperm there wasn’t any more from the same donor. It was frustrating, because I had to start that process of finding the right donor all over again.

That was the year I had really good health insurance. I went to Kaiser, my HMO, and had a basic fertility test that many women get if they’re having fertility problems. My midwife made it seem like that wasn’t important, though.

It turned out that I had polyps blocking my fallopian tube, so I was never going to get pregnant through IUI, and if I had taken the test early on I would’ve avoided all the failed attempts and jumped to IVF from the beginning. It was frustrating to have delayed the process. I could have chosen more IUI attempts after getting the polyps removed, but I went to straight to IVF.  I had surgery to remove the polyps in February 2014.

My first time trying IVF was in May 2014.  I had eight embryos that were good, except only five of them survived until day 6; if cells are splitting by the sixth day, it looks good. I implanted two of those that were fresh, but I didn’t get pregnant.

The next month I implanted the remaining three good frozen embryos but also didn’t get pregnant. It was probably a random chromosomal problem.

I was told that the next time I try, I should do genetic testing on the embryo before I implant it. That’s expensive, $2000 or $3000, but I decided to do this because I didn’t want to put in any embryo that wasn’t good and then go through more heartache.

I decided to try again after the summer, because I had a gig at the La Jolla Playhouse that summer and I wanted to relax. I had my last hurrah affair with one of the actors, knowing I was going to try IVF again in the fall.

The next time, in the late fall of 2014, I had five good eggs but only made two embryos that I got genetically tested, and both were good. One was Esti, my daughter, and another is still frozen in the clinic.

CTP: What was it like to go through pregnancy while single? Was it comforting to have women around you who’d done the same thing?

JI: The pregnancy was my loneliest time in terms of being a single mom. Everything about being pregnant for most other women has to do with you and your partner together. So every class, every conversation seems like a babymoon. Everything about being pregnant is not geared to having a baby alone. It’s geared to you and your partner.

So I didn’t want to go to yoga class, didn’t want to have to explain to everyone that I was doing it alone. I’d always hear, "You’re so brave." Which is fine, but it’s also, you know….

A midwife was leading a support group for women trying to get pregnant and having a baby alone. I joined it for about a year. Sometimes we’d get to commiserate about things like: I’m going to a labor class at the hospital, but I’m doing it alone.

My sister who eventually had her son on her own was very far into toddlerhood when I got pregnant, and couldn’t remember all the things about pregnancy. So the support group was helpful for me at the time.

I also took a weekend class on mindfulness at UCSF. I learned about slowing down in ways that had nothing to do with going into labor, but were also useful for labor. But it was hard because everyone who showed up was a couple. We had partner activities, and I had to use the teacher as a partner. I had a total meltdown at that moment.

After you have the baby, there are so many divorced people with kids, so it’s not so unusual to be a single mom. But I don’t usually say I’m solo by choice.

CTP: How was the childbirth experience? Were you alone in the delivery room, or did you have a doula or friends join you?

JI: I hired a doula named Meadow who lives in Bolinas, a place where people hide the town sign because they don’t want anyone to visit. She’s kind of a hippie. I ended up having an unplanned C-section, and Meadow sang a little lullaby in my ear the whole time. My doctor wasn’t the one who ended up delivering me, but my doula was there, and I had two good friends in the room too.

I labored for a while but I wasn’t dilating. Turns out I developed preeclampsia and the HELPP Syndrome. Suddenly the doctors and nurses were moving very swiftly, and I knew something wasn’t right. Esti was fine, she came out crying, eight pounds or something. I, however, was hemorrhaging and had to have a blood and platelet transfusion. I threw up and was kind of a mess. I was in a lot of pain, so that was rough. I was in the hospital for a week. I’m sure that contributed to my postpartum depression..

CTP: What was it like taking the baby home and coping with newborn life in those first few weeks?
JI: My parents came to visit, but for just a week because I was 12 days late, and then they drove back to the East Coast before it got snowy. On my sister’s recommendation, I hired a night nurse. That was a great thing that couples often don’t do. It was awesome to have a night nurse. It was a big expense but it was worth it.

It’s funny to think now about how afraid I was of a little infant. I was afraid to give her a bath, like: What do you do? A lot of babies lose their birth weight and [the doctors and nurses] freak you out that you have to get them back up to weight. The night nurse would wake me up and say, "You have to nurse."

CTP: How long did it take you to adjust to your radically new lifestyle?

JI: It took five or six months to adjust. Hardly any of my friends had postpartum depression, and that was a separate blow to me. I don’t think it has anything to do with being a single mom. Two of my other single mom friends from a support group felt like instant mothers. They weren’t freaking out and uprooting themselves for two months to go and live with their parents.

Because of my postpartum depression, I flew out to see my parents when Esti was a newborn. It was scariest for me when the days got shorter and it was nighttime. I didn’t want to be alone.

Thirteen days after Esti was born, I went to a postpartum support group because I needed to be with people. And I felt that I needed someone over for dinner. I’d had people coming over every night and bringing me food, and I really wanted my parents to just come over and make me dinner. My brother came to visit for a week around Christmas, and I would sit and nurse, and he and I would talk.  My oldest sister also came to California for a weekend to help me fly with Esti to New York. When I went to my parents’ house in Connecticut, I had nothing else to do besides slow it down. Two months into motherhood, I became less anxious and more confident. 

CTP: Would you have a baby on your own again?

JI: I’d love to do it again, but I don’t have the money and I don’t have the space where I live. I’d love to have someone else use my frozen embryo as a surrogate. I’m going to save it for now. It’s not very cost- efficient, though.

My doctor told me she and her partner paid for a frozen embryo for 10 years before they donated it. I’ve had a fantasy that I’ll meet someone and have the baby via surrogate. I think Esti would be a great big sister, but I don’t think I can do it alone.

CTP: For people who are thinking of having a baby solo, do you have any advice?

JI: For single women, the cost can be a deterrent. You think you can’t afford it. And I don’t want to be one of those people who are like, "You can do it. Everything is fine." Because it can be really hard. But getting all your ducks in order before you do it isn’t going to make it happen any sooner. So if you really want to do it, you should go for it but try to deal with all the financial planning concurrently.

I got nervous about how I couldn’t afford it. Of course if you can’t afford IVF, then you can’t afford it, and maybe you’ll decide to foster or to be the auntie to your friends’ kids. The challenges can seem overwhelming and can be a deterrent. In my case, I was letting some of that budget and planning get in the way of action.

In the Bay Area, all the single moms I have met seem to be really well off. They work for tech companies. They have au pairs. It’s hilarious. I’m like, where are all the starving artist single moms? Oh right, they can’t afford to do it. It is a luxury that I chose to do it, and that I have family who could help me. I am very grateful.