
DATE: Sunday, October 26, 1997              TAG: 9710160709

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY JUNE ARNEY 

                                            LENGTH:   81 lines

ON OUR OWN

Unmarried Motherhood in America

MELISSA LUDTKE

Random House. 465 pp. $25.95.

It was a Saturday morning, while she was rinsing the breakfast plates, that a mother suggested her unmarried daughter consider using a sperm bank to have a child on her own.

That daughter was Melissa Ludtke, a career journalist, who writes in her new book, On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in America:

``My mother's aim this morning is perfect. Tossed like darts in a splendid arc, her words land in the innermost circle of my emotional core. This moment engraves itself in my memory. Our exchange alters forever the way I will think about my life.''

At the time, the author was a 37-year-old divorcee, without a serious romantic relationship - and aching and obsessed with being a mother.

Ludtke is the same writer who drew national attention in 1978, when, as a reporter for Sports Illustrated, she took Major League Baseball to court to gain equal access for female reporters to athletes' locker rooms. She then became a correspondent for Time. Her more than 20 cover stories have focused on family and children.

Ludtke was used to making things happen, and this baby project would be no exception. She fought a battle within herself. She asked over and over again if she was doing the right thing. Then, encouraged by the blessing of family and friends, she tried artificial insemination. She did it for more than a year. That was as long as she could stand trying to create a baby with the sperm of a man she and her child would not know - an anonymous donor. She never got pregnant.

In her well-researched book, Ludtke examines the volatile topic of unmarried motherhood from every angle. She brings together nearly diametrically opposed worlds, those of the never-married teen-aged mothers from low-income homes and the aging, single baby boomers with degrees and good jobs who want a child. She shows the common ground.

Her story is part memoir, part scholarly analysis, woven together with real voices. She plays historian to keep the perspective. By the mid-1990s, three of every 10 families with young children had only one parent living with them. In 1970, such family arrangements were found in about one in eight homes, she writes.

Childlessness among college-educated women is higher than among less well-educated peers. By the time they reach their 40s, 28 percent of them, writes Ludtke, do not have a child.

One of the mothers Ludtke interviewed was Shanika, who gave birth to twin girls when she was 18. She earlier had aborted three pregnancies. But when she found out she was having twins, she felt she was ``receiving a message.''

Shanika explained that she'd never really had a dream about her life. ``I just lived day by day. It happened. That is just the way I feel about it. It happened.''

As Ludtke practices her storytelling skills, she looks for insights, for motives and solutions.

From her research, Ludtke concludes that how well a young woman does with child rearing is related to her temperament, how she's been raised, the support she receives from the larger community and the role of her own mother or another adult in her life.

Ludtke also talks to older women for whom biological clocks have started to sound like time bombs. By whatever means these women elect to become ``single mothers by choice,'' they are entering uncharted territory.

``Faith in themselves,'' Ludtke writes, ``is just about all these women have to go on. Social scientists know virtually nothing about how well one-parent families being created by older, better-educated, and more financially secure women are doing. Nor do researchers yet know much about how these children are reacting to not knowing their fathers, or to the absence of `Daddy' from their lives. . . ''

As Ludtke's book project neared completion, so did her quest for motherhood. This year, the author traveled to China to adopt an infant girl named Maya Xia Ludtke.

On Our Own is ambitious. It's not light reading. Ludtke's book will interest those who care about unmarried motherhood, especially mothers embarking or long-committed to such a journey - whether by choice or by fate. MEMO: June Arney is a staff writer and single mother of a 4-year-old

adopted son.

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by CNB