For me it wasn’t so much that I couldn’t imagine how I would afford a child, it was more that I couldn’t imagine how I could continue to afford my pre-pregnancy lifestyle.  Travel, restaurants, entertainment, gadgets… altogether I was spending a lot of my income and saving only about 15% of my six-figure salary annually.  And I’d only been earning that much for a few years, so I was really just getting started with emergency and retirement savings.  The good news was that I didn’t have any debt except my mortgage and student loans.

And then, in the middle of the worst economy in recent memory, I decided halfway through last year that it was time to leave my job and strike out on my own.  By the time I actually left my job last December and got my last paycheck, I was pregnant with twins, out $40,000 for infertility treatments, and unable to get much done on my new business because I was sick as a dog from morning sickness.  I started to panic– how was I going to afford everything?!?

But things have a way of working themselves out when there’s no other choice.  I slashed my spending dramatically, going back to doing all of my cooking and eating at home, getting rid of my gym membership and iPhone (in favor of a pre-paid emergencies-only cell phone), and putting the call out to friends for gently used baby items.  I put my house on the market (it hasn’t sold yet), postponed buying a new car, and simply stopped visiting Amazon.com completely.  I got a huge tax refund since most of my infertility expenses were tax-deductible and used it to pay my living expenses for 6 months.  By June, I had booked enough freelance work to make ends meet every month and had inherited enough baby stuff to keep my own spending for Audrey under $300.  Wow!  As her arrival nears (I was due yesterday!), I am happily working from home part-time with a balanced monthly budget and a fledgling business that should start bringing in the money for long-term goals soon.  And the panicked feeling is completely gone.

So here are the top 5 lessons I learned about affording a baby as a Single Mother by Choice:

1. You can’t live your pre-baby life, but then nobody can. Lots of single female friends have asked me how in the world I plan to continue my previous lifestyle with a child.  The answer is: I don’t.  But I don’t know any couples who manage to do this, either.  It’s a matter of money, yes, but it’s also a matter of priorities.  The newest iPhone or a Disney vacation with Audrey?  Um, no contest.
2. You have at least a year to figure it out. When I was considering becoming a Single Mother by Choice I felt like I had to figure out the money situation before I could even start trying to conceive.  The reality is that conception can take a long time, but even if it happens on your first try (lucky you!) pregnancy is still 40 weeks.  And let’s face it, babies don’t really need much more than a basic wardrobe from friends or consignment, a safe place to sleep, diapers (the new cloth ones are amazing!), a breast and love.  It doesn’t have to cost a fortune, and chances are good that any woman over 35 is going to inherit a ton of stuff from friends who have just decided they’re finished with making babies.
3. Not everybody enjoys my level of flexibility, but changes are always possible. I was lucky in that my last job teaching journalism at a university gave me an opportunity to teach online.  That combined with the popularity of my subject (web skills) made it possible for me to work from home on my own business.  So I won’t have daycare expenses, worries about maternity leave, or any of the other problems working mothers usually face.  Not everyone is in this position, but changes are always possible.  You could spend the year before the baby’s birth working out a telecommuting agreement with your current employer, or spending some time upgrading your skills so that you can change employers altogether.  You could move out of an expensive city to the suburbs (see lesson #1… it’s all about priorities!) or even to a small town with a lower cost of living.  And you could decide to work from home, accepting that a cut in pay might be a small price for spending more time with your child.  Change and sacrifice don’t feel as dramatic or difficult when they’re in service of children… I promise.
4. That’s what life insurance is for! As a Single Mother by Choice and cancer survivor with parents in their seventies and no brothers or sisters, I am probably in the worst possible scenario when it comes to providing for my child if I should die.  Who would take care of her?  How could I ensure she gets a good education?  Of course, these worries are common in every family, and the financial system has come up with a way to address them: life insurance.  After decades of living alone, with no dependents and only cats to worry about, I’d pretty much forgotten life insurance even existed.  But it does, and it’s affordable, and it’s the solution to most of my problem.  Now I just have to pick her godparents…
5. Go green and save the planet and your wallet. I went to Berkeley for grad school and got bitten by the green bug pretty hard while there, so I was really interested in reducing Audrey’s impact from the start.  I decided to start by drawing up a baby budget and then attacking it item by item to look for ways to green our lives.  My first baby budget included all of the typical items: crib, diapers, clothes, travel system, etc.  It came in around $3,000 for standard items (Gerber onesies, an Evenflo car seat, Target crib, Sam’s Club diapers).  Wait, $3,000?!?!?!  And that was all BEFORE she was born.  Then I found some interesting websites about raising green kids and the fun began.  Turns out going green can also be great for your wallet– as long as you don’t get caught up in ordering the high-end organic items from specialty websites!  The first thing I found was a series of blog posts called “Baby Essentials That Aren’t” (link is to the first part on cribs) and that gave me some great ideas for things I would simply NOT buy at all.  Like instead of a travel system with infant car seat, I got a convertible car seat (as a gift from my parents, clearance color to keep costs low) and will use a Moby wrap (got as a baby shower gift) to carry her until she’s big enough for a lightweight umbrella stroller.  Instead of disposable diapers for 3 years, we’ll use Fuzzi Bunz cloth diapers (got about half of my supply used from a friend and bought the other half) and resell them for almost half their purchase price when we’re done.  I also plan to introduce the potty early with the goal of getting out of diapers as soon as possible.  And of course I’ll be continuing to make all of my own food, so I’ll make hers as well once we’re finished with breastfeeding.  There are literally hundreds of good ideas online for greening baby’s life… and putting a lot more cash back into your wallet at the same time!

And if you have tips or ideas I didn’t think of, please post them to the comments of this post.

Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten so many phone calls in the past few months from women I went to high school or college with, all asking about my experience because they’re considering doing the same.  You see, I was born in 1970, so we’re all turning 40 this year.  It seems to mark a turning point for women, when “do I want kids?” becomes “I better get on it NOW if I want kids.” Turns out we all have the same list of worries and concerns about going it alone.

Or maybe it’s because I went to see Jennifer Lopez in The Back-up Plan earlier this summer.  My neighbor’s daughter turned 13 and I treated her to lunch and a movie.  She was trying to decide between The Back-up Plan (PG-13, with it’s obvious appeal for a newly-minted 13-year-old) and Marmaduke (somewhat less enticing at PG) and chose to go with The Back-up Plan.  Sitting in the theater with her that afternoon, I watched Jennifer Lopez be inseminated with donor sperm, meet the man of her dreams outside the doctor’s office, and then spend the rest of the movie trying to get over her emotional baggage from a father who walked out on her mother.  Most of it seemed pretty contrived, but there was just enough truth in some of the script to remind me that choice mothers all struggle with the same questions.

Or maybe it’s just because I’m about to have Audrey, so all those theoretical concerns from two years ago are now very real and in need of a solution.  Now.  Or at least soon.

Regardless of what triggered it, I’ve been forced to revisit some of my concerns and fears about having a child on my own, using donor sperm.  I thought I’d share these concerns, and my solutions to them, over the next few posts in the hopes that it will help women who are thinking about or already trying to conceive on their own.

Here’s are the three best ones:

Nesting: Feeling the need to prepare for the arrival of the baby by cleaning, organizing, etc. Often happens toward the end of pregnancy.

Ok, so now that I found this definition I feel a little bit better about what I’ve been doing the past few days.  I started week 35 yesterday and decided that I needed to prepare food for the remaining weeks and for at least a month after Audrey is born.  This probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows me well– feeling prepared and cooking go hand-in-hand for me.  (Just ask my friend Toree who was the beneficiary of enough home-cooked meals to feed an army last year.)  Sometimes I think I should have been a caterer. But I digress…

I already knew about nesting and got to see it firsthand with my neighbor Heidi, who is two weeks ahead of me in her pregnancy.  She cleaned out their entire garage and had a garage sale in her second trimester.  Then she set up her baby’s closet and did a thorough cleaning of her house more than a month ago.  Me?  Well, I decided the house was clean enough (!) and that I would focus my efforts on food preparation.  Rereading that last sentence I realize now what an understatement it is.

I started by deciding how many weeks I would cook for in preparation.  Since I’ve been lazy about cooking the past month or so I’ve found myself eating ingredients instead of meals: corn on the cob, a slice of bread with butter, milk, some cherries.  Not terrible on the nutrition front, but not very satisfying either.  So I decided first that I would cook enough lunches and dinners to last through my due date, August 20th.  That’s about 5 weeks away, so:

5 x 7 lunches + 5 x 7 dinners = 70 lunches and dinners

But then I also wanted to cook for about a month after Audrey is born.  My folks will be here for a few weeks and my mom has promised to cook, but I want to make sure I have enough to get us through (yes, you can already see where this is going).  I figured I might as well cook for 6 weeks and then rounded it off to 7 so that I would have a round 3 months (5 weeks before my due date plus 7 weeks after).

7 x 7 lunches + 7 x 7 dinners = 98 lunches and dinners

Grand total: 168 lunches and dinners.  I really should have stopped right then and there to reconsider, but…

The next step was to make sure I had enough room in my freezer for all of that.  I do.  I measured.  Enough said.

How do you plan for 168 meals?  Well, if you figure your average recipe makes 6 to 8 servings, I’d need about 24 entrees to get to 168 servings.  I figured I’d go a little heavier on meat than I normally do to make sure I was getting enough protein, something I think has been a little lacking since those first weeks when I craved beef before morning sickness struck.  So I decided on doing 8 beef entrees, 8 chicken entrees, and 8 vegetarian entrees.  I’ll still broil my fish fresh and use canned salmon as needed for salmon cakes and salmon chowder (two of my favorite recipes).

I also figured I should choose a variety of flavors and textures, so I looked for tomato-based dishes, cream-based dishes and some soups and chilis.  Finally I wanted to keep prep and cooking time down to a minimum (can you believe I was still thinking like that?!) so I looked for an even mix of recipes for the oven, stovetop and crockpot.  At the end I threw in five recipes for various breads as breakfast and accompaniments… because at that point, why not?  Right???

So here’s the final recipe list (everything will be doubled):

• Snappy Reuben Rolls
• Big Batch Chili
• Meatball Stroganoff
• Simply Wonderful Beef Stew
• Chicken with Tomatoes and Thyme
• Leslie’s Favorite Chicken and Wild Rice Casserold
• Caribbean Black Bean Soup
• Quick Turkey Chili
• Pesto (already make 8 ice cube trays full earlier this summer and used it up!)
• Sun-dried Tomato Pesto
• Black Bean and Chocolate Chili
• Eggplant Lasagna
• Pumpkin Date Loaf
• Evelyn’s Cornbread
• Ham and Cheese Scones
• Walnut and Rosemary Loaves
• Caraway Soda Bread

You’d think this list alone would have stopped me in my tracks, but noooooo!  Instead, I made a shopping list.  It includes things like:

• 24 eggs
• 12 c olive oil
• 6 lb ground chuck
• 11 cans diced tomatoes
• 8 cans black beans
• and about 100 other items!

Did I stop there?  Too late.  I was on a roll.  The more I planned the more doable it seemed.

So I hit the road Thursday and yesterday and went to all of my usual grocery stores: Sam’s Club for bulk items like olive oil and Parmesan cheese, Walmart for packaged and dry goods, Ward’s for produce and bulk spices, and Publix for whatever I couldn’t find at the others.  To conserve my flagging energy I used the electric shopping carts at every store.  I was a woman on a mission.

The result?  I spent $400.01 and now have a stuffed fridge and overflowing island… oh, and now it’s time to cook!  I’ll let you know Monday how it went.  In the meantime, please, please, PLEASE tell me if you did anything half as crazy as this when you or someone you know was nesting.  I need the reassurance to know I’m not going crazy!