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child had taken root. I believed I would forever be fond of Paul. He was tattooed under my skin.
    I was happy to be a single mother. If the choice was between not being a mother and being a single mother then I had no qualms. Again, millions of women around the world had been or were single mothers, not all by choice—granted. I have several friends who reached the same impasse and made a different and difficult decision. They couldn’t see how they would be happy as a single mother, how they could manage the financial pressures,the squeeze of time, the sole responsibility. Some thought that it wouldn’t be best for the baby, that a child needed more than one parent, that the bond between a single mother and child could curdle or suffocate. Other friends were perfectly content not being parents; childlessness didn’t bother them in the slightest. “Why do it to yourself?” a male friend asked me. He was single, mid-forties, without a child but patiently hoping for a family.
    My 42nd birthday passed without celebration. In March 2012 I arranged to visit Paul at home because I needed his signature on a new consent form. Same as before. Our most recent form had expired, each was only good for six months. It was so strange to be standing in the living room, looking at the sofa and rug we had bought together, the chairs we’d upholstered, the framed map on the wall that was an exact replica of the map on my own living-room wall, an Operational Navigation Chart of the South Atlantic Ocean, a map I’d pinned up wherever I’d lived ever since I first came across it over a decade ago. My period was due and I was prepared to begin treatment. For the past couple of weeks I had been slowly gathering strength, adding pregnancy multivitamins to my iodine-folate pill (I’d been on that for ages); cuttingdown my coffee; doing more exercise; talking to a counselor about proceeding alone. I’d been gathering strength and weeping and weeping. Paul refused to sign the consent form. He announced he had changed his mind. He didn’t think I should be a mother; I was too selfish; I didn’t know how to love. “You had no commitment to my happiness.” What he needed was a clean break. “I’m a decent man who wants nothing more than to live and love simply with family at the center of my life.” Plunge into the deep circular pit . He tried to bundle me out the door, took hold of me, and I scratched him, hard, broke his skin. I refused to leave, sat down on the sofa. He threatened to call the police and then left. I waited for him to return. I thought about taking a knife to the sofa, ripping it open, ripping my leg open. When he got back he said that earlier that morning, in anticipation of my visit, he had called my parents for their advice. My mother had agreed with him.
    Was it true! Outside on the street I called my mother and she confirmed that yes, she didn’t think I should be a mother. “And anyway, how would you get to the hospital on your own?” I told her that I would never speak to her again. Then I called one of my sisters. We have longexperience with our mother’s Honest Tourette’s. My sister called my mother, my mother called me back. She didn’t think I should be a mother, not with him as the father. I hung up. Mothers and daughters—not always sunshine stories. She never really got on board with my IVF: she thought it a bad idea and because she is so forthright, never insincere, she couldn’t fake support. My father took the same view. With wax in my ears I reassured myself that making babies in the lab was virtually unknown in their generation, hence the cool reaction. All updates went through my sisters. In the last months my mother softened and sent kind messages, chicken soup. After one particular disappointment, the latest in a long chain of disappointments, she reminded me of how surprised she’d been when I came home from