Twin mom Connie shares her experience of being a solo mom by choice and becoming pregnant with twins over age 40. She shares the honest tribulations of her fertility journey as well as the realities of bringing two babies into the world as a single parent.
In this episode of the Twiniversity Podcast, Connie Rutherford—a New York finance professional turned tech sales mom and author of Searching for Tadpoles—shares her journey of becoming a solo mom by choice, but with a surprise twist: twin girls.
She explores how and why she chose single motherhood on purpose at an age when every statistic in the room was telling her not to bother. She also shares what it’s been like so far raising twins as a single parent.
Watch her insightful episode here, or keep reading for the biggest takeaways.
Takeaway 1: Freezing your eggs is an insurance policy, and you are allowed to shop around
At 38, Connie looked up from the corporate ladder and realized time had been quietly passing right on by. So she took some measures to give herself options with family building down the road.
At one point she asked the clinic point-blank what made them worth more than the cheaper startup down the street. Their honest answer? Nothing. Those doctors had actually trained right there.
With that information, she chose to go with the startup, got 16 eggs, and had a phenomenal experience. You are allowed to ask hard questions about where your money goes. And just because one clinic is more expensive than another doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the better option. So do your research!
Takeaway 2: Sometimes life sets the deadline for you
After the egg retrieval, Connie went right back to her old dating patterns. What actually spurred her to action with her family building was her father’s stage four prostate cancer diagnosis.
The thought of her future children not being able to meet grandfather was heartbreaking. On top of her father’s diagnosis, her best friend her partner bluntly pointed out that the way she was dating wasn’t healthy. And she reminded Connie that in this day and age, you don’t need a partner to have a baby. From those two sparks, Connie decided to move forward with the process she had begun back when she was 38.
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Takeaway 3: Choosing a donor is far more personal than a checklist
For Connie, the top criterion for her sperm donor was ethnicity. She is a self-proclaimed daddy’s girl, her father is Black, and she wanted a child who reflected that.
What she ended up discovering is that there is a real and under-discussed shortage of Black sperm donors. This and a CMV requirement narrowed the donor pool for Connie quite a bit.
Ultimately, the thing that actually led to her making a decision wasn’t any sort of stat. It was a personal message that the donor wrote saying that his dad was his number one supporter and that he wanted to be just like him. Knowing her children would not have a father in the home, Connie liked the idea of having a donor who loved his father.
Takeaway 4: Embryo testing is not the whole story
Connie’s first round of IVF produced five embryos. Four came back abnormal for pregenetic screening, and one was undetected. With that information, she decided to transfer the undetected one and “just let God decide.”
That transfer didn’t end up working out, and Connie was incredibly saddened. She thinks about those other four discarded embryos constantly. The process of creating an embryo can be brutal, and there’s a heaviness that comes with having to “throw away” the ones that don’t make the cut of medical standards.
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Takeaway 5: “It only takes one” — the sentence that carried her
For a fresh cycle at age 40, Connie told her embryologist to skip the pregenetic screening entirely and go old school. This meant looking at the embryos under a microscope, assessing morphology and symmetry, and ranking them.
From there, her doctor gave her relatively grim odds: a 2% chance for one embryo working out, and under a 1% chance for both taking.
Despite listing out the odds for her, he ended with the same line he always ended with: it only takes one. He wasn’t trying to mislead her into unrealistic expectations, but he refused to leave her without any hope. And in Connie’s perspective, that combination is exactly what a good fertility doctor does.
Takeaway 6: She expected zero. She got two.
Connie was already planning the next month’s tweaks when her pregnancy results came in. As she puts it, God pretty much laughed at her: you thought you were in control, you thought you wanted a child, so I am giving you two.
Her father is in Oklahoma, her mother travels back and forth to Taiwan, and she had no family in New York. As much as she was beyond happy about being pregnant with twins, she was also in a panic.
Takeaway 7: She wrote the book she needed, 95% of it while pregnant
At four-months pregnant, Connie flew to Taiwan for Chinese New Year. It just so happened to be at the very start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Jet-lagged and awake at 3 a.m. in Taiwan, Connie started typing away. What came of that typing was her book Searching for Tadpoles.
Unlike many other fertility journey books out there, Searching for Tadpoles isn’t a manifesto telling women to do. It’s a technical and honest account of what the path she took actually involved so the next woman is not making those decisions blind.
The wild part about her book is that she wrote almost all of it while pregnant. She knew once the twins came that her window would close. Case in point, the last 5% of the book took nearly five years to write—partly because life with twins is life with twins. And partly because postpartum complications made the ending hard to write until she could land it somewhere positive.
Takeaway 8: With twins, you need a crew, and then a crew inside the crew
Connie had family and friends who were willing to help. But what she didn’t have was someone who could genuinely empathize with her. They tried and they said they understood, but how could they?
What actually got her through was Twiniversity: she submitted questions, several got published, and the community answered back. If you have twins, you need a twin crew. If you are solo, you need a solo mom crew too.
Whatever boxes you can fit yourself in, there are usually other folks out there who check them too. You may just need to do some digging to find them!
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Takeaway 9: Solo parenting doesn’t mean short-handed.
When Connie told her mother she was pregnant, the response she got was that she felt sorry for the babies because Connie had denied them of a father. And yes, for Connie, that landed exactly as badly as it reads.
But Connie has told her daughters how they came to be since they were tiny, and they have never once asked where their dad is. They know dads exist, they know their friends have them, and it simply is not weird to them. The only reality they have ever known is their mother, and there is nothing wrong with that reality.
Connie is honest that she’s still figuring out the logistics of not having a parenting partner. For example, when one twin needed the emergency room, she called a neighbor to sit with the sleeping one, and she still has no designated emergency contact.
But she is clear-eyed about the trade: what would truly wreck her is relying on a partner for a level of help that never came. Nat points to friends with twins who would give anything not to have a court-ordered co-parent. Going in alone by choice is not the sad version of this story.
The bottom line of Connie’s single mom by choice twins by surprise sotry
Connie makes an extraordinary decision sound ordinary. She’s not selling solo motherhood as a lifestyle. She’s a woman who wanted a family, ran out of patience with waiting, did the research, spent the money, absorbed the losses, and ended up with two daughters who have never felt like anything was missing.
Along the way she got told no multiple times by statistics, by a clinic that treated her like a file number, by a career that punishes visible pregnancy, and by her own mother. She kept going anyway and then wrote it all down so the next woman would not have to walk it blind and alone.
Watch Connie’s full story as a single mom by choice with twins:
To see Connie’s full podcast episode, click here!
