Last week I listed a URL for sale. According to the GoDaddy estimate, my site, StorkMate.com, has a value of $1,261.
After some clicks and resetting of passwords, I got the digital real estate listing live. Will anybody buy it? Probably not. And then it will go back into the ether of claimable web property after April 2022 when I don’t renew it.
I bought the site in 2015. It started as an April Fool’s Day joke that was also a “not bad” idea. At the time, I had finalized my divorce and was feeling very much 39, with a biological clock loudly ticking and pulling me this way and that on the topic of motherhood.
What started as a joke actually then turned into a minor passion project. I bought the URL and I added some basic content. In 2016, I even entered a start-up competition with the idea to build out an “everything you need to know” platform but I was not successful in getting into the incubator program. I wrote a few essays that were published about my ambivalent longing and the financial obstacles to becoming a single mother.
Then in 2019, I actually went through the process of selecting a sperm donor, retrieving eggs, and creating an embryo that I planned to freeze to keep my options further open. I was 43 and single at the time, and it was unsuccessful. That was the conclusive end to this open question.
After that, I basically forgot about StorkMate.com, but I wasn’t quite ready to abandon it. Each year I allowed the auto-renew to keep the lights on. I tried to leverage lowkey SEO should anyone be in the wilds of Google on this topic. The general message was that you are not alone if you are navigating the hard questions around single parenthood. Over time, exactly one person reached out to me because of that site.
If this site was a failure as an external beacon, it was more successful as an internal one.
For the last six years, StorkMate served as some emotional connective tissue between myself and the idea of motherhood. I felt it was important to document to the outside world that I had longing for motherhood; that my narrative of grapple and poor timing validated my actual experience of not having children at all. It was a sympathetic and approachable angle on the topic. It made me feel like a legitimate part of sisterhood; it was my first position in a world that is binary on this topic. You either want or you don’t want.
However, in an unexpected way, my feelings on this topic have shifted. Now I feel an edge of anger that I even had to emotionally justify not having children through this lens of desire. The real issue, to me, is that feelings of ambivalence, or nuance, or mutability, are harder to express. And in fact, wasn’t that the genius of Olivia Colman’s performance in The Lost Daughter? Discomforting ambivalence as the third rail?
Santa Fe is the perfect backdrop for this storyline of my graduation from one idea on motherhood to the next. It’s a retiree town. I can’t tell you the last time I encountered a child under 10 here. There are many women over 50 in Santa Fe who never had kids. I take particular interest in the ways they have carved out lives for themselves without the default structure of family-raising. In short, it’s easy, common, and acceptable to just be a grown-up, child-free woman here.
But as a freshman in this new graduate class, I do feel grief about separating from my peers. I mostly enjoy hanging out with kids. I miss my mid-40s girlfriends looking harassed and tired from yelling at their eight year olds. There’s sense of relevance and future vision that accompanies the parenting chapter of life—even if it’s stressful. Without momentum of small people, you’re on your own to generate milestones.
Yet the real truth is I have moved on. My body certainly has—it’s squeezing out a sad excuse of a period every month though both my ovaries and my brain are like “Why?” My mind is fully trained on adult-only topics these days—writing, running, housing, Succession, pet care, reading the New Yorker cover to cover, cooking an interesting dinner. I gladly tune out conversations about childcare, schools, or summer camp sign-up season, for better and for worse.
Today I get most of my exposure to children in the form of your Instagram stories and through my work colleagues who are all in some “Under 10” hellscape of remote school and COVID uncertainty. I also see how much parents are struggling, especially right now. Thank you for doing the hard work of raising people. Seriously, well done. (Also to insert my political view on supporting families—support the Child Tax Credit and Paid Leave now!)
But to bring this back to where I started. I am selling StorkMate. This is no longer a website I need to own. I hope someone else buys it who has a bright idea for this embryonic brand. As the kids say, I am done holding [square]space.
Stork Mate
I love your writing so genuine and also I was on a similar path in my early 40s I was really dreaming of having a second child
I was chatting to the pope recently, and he mentioned he wanted a word with you and Bruno. He just let me know though that he changed his mind pronto after reading this.