"I never planned to become a solo mother. Now I am one, at 45."

1 June 2026

Guest Contributor

If you’re a solo woman over 40 wondering where to begin, this is for you.

Guest Post by SoloFertility40s.

“For years, I assumed solo motherhood was something other women did. Women with certainty. Women who woke up one day and decided: yes, I’d like to have a baby alone, and I’ll begin immediately.

I was so glued to the conventional two-parent family narrative that I waited, and waited, for the right partner. And then, at 42, sitting in a café in Goa with some fertility test results in front of me, I realised that Plan A wasn’t going to be my story.

I didn’t feel empowered at that moment. I felt late. The Anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) test indicated I had Diminished Ovarian Reserve, a very low egg supply. I felt the grief of the conventional family I’d imagined, and underneath it, something that felt like failure. As if there was more I could have done to meet the right person.

Then I felt the weight of everything that I perceived (at that time) solo motherhood would mean: the expense, the responsibility, the loss of freedom, the absence of anyone to share the load with. Though I had solo mum friends thriving with their gorgeous donor-conceived children, I struggled to imagine how solo motherhood would look for me.

Truthfully, I didn’t want to become a solo mother.

The decision by default

For women in their 40s, there’s a fork in the road that nobody really maps for you. One path, the one you’d always imagined, has been removed. So you have to decide whether to pivot and proceed without a partner, or stop. Although terrifying, there was never any real doubt, for me, that I would attempt motherhood on my own. What I didn’t have was any idea how to begin. This made for a rocky start.

Books were written for couples, full of advice on sperm health, lifestyle changes for men, and “supporting your partner.” Webinars for solo women involved younger women who still had time to freeze eggs, not someone working to my timeline. And fertility service providers on social media seemed to treat solo women as an afterthought, tagged onto services built squarely around couples. By 2024, the fertility literature available to me left me feeling like an anomaly.

Then the panic took hold. I normally approach important decisions strategically. I research, I plan, I weigh things carefully. But fear that I’d left it too late overwhelmed all of that. Instead of taking my time, I invested in the first clinic I consulted with. There were red flags from the outset, but I didn’t know what to look for or what to avoid. I had no real framework for evaluating whether a clinic was right for me.

The mistakes I made weren’t dramatic, but they were expensive and traumatic. They were the entirely predictable result of someone making high-stakes decisions without the right information at the right time, and without anyone in her corner who truly understood her specific situation.

It was a very lonely beginning.

Plan C

Two IVF cycles, one in Spain, one in Greece, were difficult experiences for different reasons. I was preparing to begin treatment with a third clinic when something unexpected happened: a chance encounter with someone who offered to be a known donor.

A known donor was something I hadn’t planned for, hadn’t even considered, really. The risks were clear to me. I talked it over with a friend in detail. I created an agreement, although I knew it wouldn’t be legally binding, but having a record of our intentions felt important to me. I’m usually risk-averse, but in this instance, I knew I had to try.

I contacted my clinic and told them, a month before I was due to start treatment, that another path had opened up. They were generous about it. They encouraged me to follow what felt right.

My next message to them was to say that I had given birth to a healthy baby girl. I was 44 and a half years old.

What pregnancy and the early days of motherhood actually felt like

Pregnancy was uneventful, in the best possible sense. Leg cramps, acid reflux, insomnia, and shortness of breath were real, though none of them unbearable. And with a small baby at home now, I sleep considerably better than I did in the third trimester.

I was the only solo woman in my antenatal classes; everyone else had a partner beside them, and I got on with it, because that’s what you do. My community midwife was supportive, which helped ease spikes of anxiety. As someone who had been through IVF, I was more aware than most of how precarious early pregnancy can be. I didn’t allow myself to fully believe it was happening until around 30 weeks. Baby purchases were mostly last-minute decisions.

The practical day-to-day is more manageable than I’d anticipated. Our home is free of conflict. I’m the primary decision maker, which makes life uncomplicated. Our routines work around each other.

A decade ago, the weight of being the sole parent would have felt overwhelming. Now it feels like a natural extension of the independence I’d built across four decades of living life on my own terms.

And the bonding. I feel an extraordinary closeness with my daughter that I’m genuinely not sure I’d have been capable of in my thirties. Back then, a baby would have been competing with a packed diary and a life still full of things I hadn’t done yet. Now, having lived a great deal of that life already, I’m ready to prioritise another in a way I simply wasn’t before. The sacrifices that might have felt like losses at 34 don’t feel like losses at all.

Being home on a Friday night watching Gardeners’ World with my baby snoring gently next to me is an unexpected bliss. Creating our garden together, a place in which we can both thrive, is a happy project I didn’t know I needed.

The village you think you won’t have

I moved to a rural area before starting IVF. My parents are unwell. I had no friends nearby. The prospect of doing this without a support network was one of the fears that kept me awake at night.

What I didn’t know was how quickly a village could form and how willing people were to become part of it. I met a local woman who would become my birth partner, a fellow Shiatsu practitioner. She has become our bedrock. In the early weeks of motherhood, neighbours dropped off soup, watched my baby while I had a long bath, and picked up food from the supermarket. A newborn turns out to be remarkably magnetic to the people around you, and the generosity I’ve encountered has surprised me at every turn.

There is also a well-developed solo mum network in my area. Women I’d never met loaned me books, donated baby equipment, and when I was in the hospital shortly after my daughter’s birth, one of them turned up with vital supplies. This group meets regularly, celebrates holidays together, and operates as a genuine community of people who understand without needing explanation.

Though I didn’t find fertility social media easy to navigate during pregnancy, with its careless, strong opinions and misinformation, it has connected me with other mothers through my Substack and Instagram. Some partnered women who went through IVF have been among the most supportive, even though their circumstances were so different. Regardless of relationship status, we are still women who have birthed a human being and find ourselves navigating the many challenges of early motherhood, delightful and challenging, in equal measure.

The health of children in solo-mother families

I know this question sits underneath everything else for women considering this path.

Professor Susan Golombok, Director of the Centre for Family Research at Cambridge, has spent decades studying children raised in solo-mother families. Her research consistently finds no meaningful differences in psychological adjustment or well-being between children raised by solo mothers and those raised in two-parent families.

“In some measures, solo mother families showed lower levels of mother-child conflict than two-parent families.”

Professor Susan Golombok, Centre for Family Research, University of Cambridge

What matters, the research suggests, is not the shape of the family structure but the quality of the relationship: being present, healthy, and genuinely able to parent.

I read Golombok’s work at the start of my IVF journey and found it reassuring. It replaced fear with evidence.

For women standing where I was standing

I am not a medical professional or fertility expert. What I offer is something different: independent, impartial guidance on the non-medical aspects of starting fertility treatment as a solo woman over 40, from someone who has been through it, made the avoidable mistakes, and built several resources to better support other solo women over 40.

I have no affiliation with any clinic or fertility service provider. I do not earn commission. My only interest is in helping other solo women over 40 walk into this process informed rather than overwhelmed.

If I could go back to the woman sitting in that café in Goa, I would give her one thing: a clear, structured starting point built specifically for someone in her situation. That’s what I’ve built with the 5-Step Get Started Roadmap. It covers organising your fertility tests and learning to advocate for yourself; creating a financial plan that makes your money last across multiple cycles; choosing the right clinic and knowing which questions to ask; managing consultations so you walk in prepared and leave with answers; and building a constellation of care so you’re never figuring this out completely alone.

Solo motherhood wasn’t my plan. I resisted it, grieved around it, and walked into it without ever fully choosing it. My daughter arrived via a path I’d never even considered when I started: what I’ve come to call Plan C. Now that she is here, I find it impossible to imagine that any other route could have led to something that feels this right. Maybe the plan I’d been waiting for was always this one; I just couldn’t see it when I was sitting in that café in Goa, crying over my AMH results and thinking I’d gambled away my chance at motherhood in the hope of meeting the right partner.”

Further resources:

Solofertility40s.com/resources

Solofertility40s.com/programme

Or follow Sarah on Instagram at @solofertility40s