Woman devoted life to her job, now aged 36 has fatherless child from friend sperm donor
Thomas McDonald
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Lindsay Bryan, from Springfield, Missouri, chose to have a child with her friend who does not want to be the child’s father after focusing her life on her job and going through multiple failed relationships.
“Being so career-focused through the years, I just had a bad line of relationships. I ended up with two guys who cheated on me and one guy just wanted to hang out all day playing video games,” Bryan said.
She eventually decided to go about being a mother alone instead of waiting for the right guy to come into her life.
“I opened myself up to the idea of doing it on my own. I have a good job, a stable home, and a good family support system,” the 36-year-old single mother said.
Bryan says she looked into using a sperm bank service before sharing her feelings with her friend who offered to help her out. Her friend, who remains unidentified for privacy reasons told her that he had no intentions of wanting to be involved in the child’s life, emotionally or financially.
“We were having a beer together one day and I mentioned that this was something on my mind,” she said.
“I never asked him but he said that he thought it would be really cool to be able to give me something that I really wanted. At first, I didn’t take him seriously but a month later, I said: ‘Were you actually serious about that?'”
Her friend told her that he was serious and the two quickly laid down ground rules for the arrangement.
“We had an agreement from the beginning that I wouldn’t list him on the birth certificate,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to get money out of him or get him to be a co-parent.”
After sleeping together once, she found out she was pregnant in October 2020. She was so surprised that she became pregnant she thought she had COVID due to the symptoms she was experiencing.
“It was the first attempt and I wasn’t expecting that I’d be able to get pregnant. “I went to the doctor thinking I had COVID because I was feeling so awful and tired,” she said.
She expressed that she sometimes feels conflicted about the fact that he does not want to see his baby boy, named Jack.
“He has not met Jack,” she says. “I texted him on the day that I was in labor and he checked in and asked how everything was. We still chat from time to time.”
“It is a little conflicting for me as part of me would like him to meet him but I know that he’s chosen through our agreement to not be involved,” she said. “I told him that in my ideal world he could be a male figure in Jack’s life. He is my friend and there’s no reason he can’t be Jack’s friend.”
“I do have an underlying fear that he could change his mind and want to be a bigger part of Jack’s life,” she added.
Bryan says she doesn’t regret her decision to raise a fatherless child and says it’s great because she doesn’t have to deal with in-laws and gets to make all decisions herself.
“I get to be the decision-maker,” she said. “I don’t have to deal with in-laws.”
“You already have enough people giving you their opinions on how to parent, I can trust my gut instead of having another person with their own feelings and viewpoints.”