The Shriver Report – No Man Required: One Woman’s Journey to Motherhood
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No Man Required: One Woman’s Journey to Motherhood

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Ever experienced a time when life wasn’t panning out exactly as you had planned? Filmmaker Nina Davenport found herself in that same situation. As she neared the age of 42, and still hadn’t found the man of her dreams, but had always dreamed of having a child. So she decided to take matters into her own hands and have a child on her own. Davenport, who has been making feature-length documentary films since graduating from Harvard College in 1990, decided to make a movie about the process and experience called, First Comes Love.

She took a few minutes to speak to The Shriver Report about her decision, the film and life now as a single mother. Here is an excerpt from our conversation.

TSR: How did you come to make the decision to have your child on your own, without a partner?

Davenport: For me, I did have to get over a really big hump of thinking, “Ok, I’m not going to wait for a man.” [It was difficult because] I come from a traditional family. We were together until my mom died in 2006 and I felt like – it’s not like they had the perfect marriage – but coming from that background you think that is how your life should go. So to take a major departure from the past, it was hard.

So after years of thinking about it, worrying about it, including dating a guy who couldn’t commit for way too long, and then I just had in my mind the figure of 42. I just sort of remembered a couple of different doctors saying to me after 42 its almost impossible [to get pregnant] even with IVF (whether or not that is the case I’m not sure, but that’s what I thought) so once I got to be 41, I completely panicked.

I started talking to my really good friend Eric who I’ve known since college and is gay and asked him if he would consider giving me his sperm. He thought about it for a few months, and talked to his parents and his family and his friends and really thought about it from every different angle and eventually said yes. So you see in the film the whole process of talking to Eric and doing IVF and I actually got really lucky, I got pregnant on the first try.

And so it was a long process of sort of accepting that my life is not going the way I thought it would and yet, you know, I felt like while I would be sad to not be married I would be miserable for the rest of my life if I didn’t have a kid.

So I felt like I had to do it. It was that important to me.

Related: Should you Fight the Urge to Control Childbirth?

TSR: What made you decide to make the documentary?

Davenport: I’m sort of known for making personal documentary films. I had made this film called Always a Bridesmaid about my love life and how I was a wedding photographer for a living and all my friends were getting married and I was dating this guy who couldn’t commit.

So having made that film, I kind of felt like wait, this is a perfect sequel to that. The first one is about a woman who is dying to get married and, lo and behold, she doesn’t get married and decides to have a kid on her own. I thought how could I not make that film?

I was also a filmmaker who found myself in sort of the center story of my generation of women, i.e. struggling with a fertility issue, which is true for many more women than become single moms. [Fertility] is something that weights on women’s minds in our generation and causes a lot of anxiety so I felt like this was such an important story about women that I couldn’t turn my back on it and I had to do it, even though I knew it was going to be really hard.

And, in fact, I’ve had literally hundreds of emails, tweets, Facebook messages from women, and men as well, saying, “I feel like you told the story of our generation.” It’s been a real amazing experience to see how people have been responding to the film. You meet women who are like 25 and they say, “Yeah, I’m never going to be able to get pregnant, I’m never going to be able to find a husband.” It starts really young and by the time for me, it was like ten years that I wanted a kid. And I think the playing field is not equal because men don’t have the same biological imperative. They can sort of take their time in a way that women can’t.

The more that women feel like that, it creates a certain dependence on relationships for women that men don’t feel, which then creates that power dynamic. I think what would liberate women would be if they felt that they could do it on their own and that that is a perfectly good option.

I’m not saying people should do it on their own but I feel like you can do it on your own. If I can contribute to women feeling like they can do it on their own, that’s good. Obviously there are financial issues to factor in that I do not get into in the film because that is just too complicated. My film is more about parenting and what it means to be a parent, a lot about my mother’s death and my relationship with my father. I was covering so much ground that I couldn’t get into every nitty gritty thing.

TSR: Now that you are a single mom, what has been the most challenging part for you?

Davenport: Honestly, the image I had of being a single mother years ago….was lonely, depressing, pathetic – all of these things. But it could not be farther from that. It’s so awesome being a parent and the love for your child is so intense and I feel like I hit the jackpot with my kid. He is incredibly social and loving and funny and it’s just joy most of the time.

It’s very hard but I feel like it’s mostly hard because being a parent is hard. There is this one scene in the film where my friend, who is becoming a single mom, and I are at an OB appointment and I say, “Do you see a lot of single women?” and he says, “In New York? Yea, of course we do.” And I say, “What do you think of it?” and he says, “It’s hard being a parent period. It’s hard for everybody.”

[Being a single mom] is more hard in the sense that you have to account for every hour that you are not with your kid but I’ve gotten really lucky. We have a little bit of a family that has coalesced around him, [consisting] of me and my friends who don’t have kids and they treat him like he is their kid.

Related: To Lean In or Opt Out?

TSR: What has been the surprising thing about being a single parent?

Davenport: I knew that being a parent was great, which was why I was willing to go to great lengths to become one, so that is not a surprise but I guess it still is in some ways. Even if you know it is, it’s still a surprise how wonderful it is. It’s just, its so fun.

TSR: What has been the most memorable moment for you as a mom to date?

Davenport: With a child, every day there is some sort of unbelievable thing that they do or say that just feels like it has completely rocked your world. But yet you can’t remember an hour later what it was because you are so busy and then, you know, the next day something else.

Yesterday morning I woke up to him kissing me on the lips to say good morning.

TSR: What or who has been imperative to your success in being able to go through this experience solo?

Davenport: Definitely my mom. She was a specific part of First Comes Love. She was an incredible mom. She’s a huge reason why I wanted to have a baby because I wanted to experience the bond we had but from her perspective. She was just really good at being a mom in terms of unconditional love.

She also had a great sense of humor so she made everything really fun, which I think is hugely important, especially since it is so easy to get beaten down by life and having a small child is do demanding. Having a sense of humor and teaching them to have a sense of humor, I think, is really valuable.….and she just encouraged me to follow my dreams. A big part of the film is she was really supportive of my film career while my dad wasn’t.

Another huge aspect of the film is my relationship with my best friend Amy, who was my birth partner. So the film is really a feminist film. It’s all about women doing everything.

TSR: What advice would you give to another woman who is considering having a child on her own? What would you want them to know?

I think there’s a minimum amount of money that you need and emotional stability, but assuming those two things are in place you don’t need a man to do it. I would encourage women to feel as liberated about this as they do about their careers. Women are pursuing their careers, yet when it comes to a man, you find women who feel are like they can’t do it alone.

I would just encourage them to feel like they don’t need one. It’s great if you can find one and [the relationship] is good, but it also puts a lot of pressure on a relationship. There are a lot of upsides to doing it alone. You don’t have to fight about every single thing. There’s also adoption. It’s a great choice. I have a few single mom friends who adopted.

The point is to feel like they can do it on their own. Don’t wait ’till it’s too late. Don’t wait too long.

Nina Davenport is a Reporter for The Shriver Report.
Nina Davenport has been making feature-length documentary films since graduating from Harvard College in 1990. Her films include First Comes Love, Operation Filmmaker, Always a Bridesmaid and Parallel Lines. Learn more about Nina and her films at firstcomeslovemovie.com.
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