PIPPA CURTIS is a very happy woman. Five weeks ago she adopted a gorgeous toddler called Becky Lee Xiaoguan from China. During the past few days, at home in southwest London, Becky has started to call Pippa Mummy. “She’s fantastic. She melts me several times a day,” says Pippa. “She’s challenging, but I’ve been out with men who were more challenging and more hard work.”
At the moment there is no man in this family. Pippa is single and, of course, Becky is no accident, as the children of single or casually attached women sometimes are, or are sometimes said to be. She may have been abandoned at two days by her biological mother, as many girl babies are in China, but as far as Pippa is concerned she is wanted, she was meticulously planned for, and she is loved.
If you look at the statistics, there is nothing remarkable about the make-up of this family: in Britain, one baby in five goes home to a single parent, and a third of our children grow up in a household in which they are not genetically related to at least one of the adults. What is significant is that Pippa has openly and deliberately decided to be a single parent, and in that she is far from alone.
So many women are making this choice that Channel 4 has gathered 30 who are either contemplating such a step or have already embarked upon it. Pippa will feature in the series, Baby 2005, to be shown this year. And as you talk to these women you realise quickly that something significant is happening. There have always been single parents, but never before have so many women sought to have children without the support of the conventional family unit, not by default, but as a positive choice. Family life, they observe, doesn’t always work.
You might assume that they are high-achieving, career-focused women, but there is no template for these solo mothers. They come from all social classes, and the only thing they have in common is that they have grown up in the post-feminist era knowing that they have choices. They see independence as preferable to an unhappy relationship, and they see plenty of those around them. For many of them this means that when they reach their mid-thirties and realise that their time to have children is running out, they have the freedom not to seek a partner, but to go for a child because this is something that they believe they can do. We are not talking about teenagers who don’t see a future for themselves and think a baby might fill the gap, but about women who are independent, mature, resilient and realistic, and who have worked out that the romantic dream is probably just that. They are not looking for a man, but a baby.
Pippa is 43, the head of communications for a national charity and nothing if not pragmatic. “It’s not my first choice to have a child on my own,” she admits, “I would love to have a loving, willing partner who wanted to be the father of my child. But I don’t. So you have to say there isn’t the right guy at this time and the reality is that blokes can still have their own biological children at 65. I may end up in a relationship but the guy can ’t have my children for me. You have to think about this harsh reality: what am I going to do about it?”
For Pippa the process began only when she had built her career, travelled, was financially stable and felt ready to become a mother. “I had a mixture of priorities and I wanted to experience life before I had a child,” she says. “In my thirties there were several years grieving for the birth children it looked as if I wasn’t going to have. I recognised I wasn’t afraid of having kids on my own and considered all the options, but for me it made sense to adopt because there are millions of children out there who need loving parents. The alternative was to go through any number of processes that don’t necessarily give you the result you want and may leave you very miserable.
“No one can walk out on me, I know exactly what I’m letting myself in for. Even if I had a partner, there is no guarantee that he’d be around to help, or stay. If you do it on your own from the start, there are no false expectations. I wanted love in my life and now I’ve got it.
“People overrate freedom and independence. Waking up day after day with no one close, pleased to see you, it’s very, very tough. We all need to be wanted and loved and Becky does both.”
Adopting Becky took three and a half years, during which Pippa had to prove to her local authority that she would be a good mother, and the local authority’s representatives insisted that she was pursuing a risky option. Persistence was key, Pippa says, and she believes that she was discriminated against because she is single. Although single motherhood no longer carries a stigma, she is far from alone in having encountered prejudice.
Kate Beerling, 36, is a clerical officer who lives in Kent. At 18 she was told that she was unable to have children (she later had polycystic ovary syndrome diagnosed). Then, five years ago, a doctor suggested that if she wanted children, she could have fertility treatment, and the idea “reared its head like a ferocious lion”, she says. She is now four and a half months pregnant after IVF treatment at a London clinic using donated sperm. The first clinic she went to in Kent refused to treat her as an unpartnered woman, she says.
“The doctor was abrupt about it and seemed shocked that I would even consider doing this on my own. I’m not the kind of person who stands out, I’m very much a wallflower, and there’s no way I would want to be the centre of attention about anything. But we shouldn’t be treated like pariahs.
“My family and close friends are supportive, but I feel I have to justify it to other people. They say ‘I didn’t think you had a boyfriend’. ‘I haven’t, I had IVF’, I say. ‘Why?’ ‘Because I wanted a child’. ‘Oh, right. Well, congratulations’.”
