She moved to Colorado and hit the online dating apps, but she met a mix of nice guys she wasn’t very attracted to and attractive guys who weren’t looking to get serious. Around the time of her thirty-eighth birthday, she was so depressed she was regularly waking up around noon on weekends. A child, she realized, would give her meaning beyond the grind of work. What the heck is my life about? she asked herself. Being a mother was the answer to that question.

But unlike Aileen’s parents, Sarah’s are conservative Christians. They grew up believing that children do best in a home with a mother and father. At the church Sarah attended growing up, there were rows and rows of families fitting a traditional pattern: one man, one woman, and their “natural-born” children.

On the Christmas Eve before her thirty-eighth birthday, Sarah went home to tell her parents she would be trying to get pregnant with a sperm donor. They told her she was being selfish. Sarah was so hurt she left the house, checked into a hotel, and spent Christmas Day alone.

As she was going through the process of injections and embryo implantations, her parents didn’t call her. When she called her mom, she says her mother told her, “We’re praying about loving them.”

In 2015, Sarah gave birth to twin boys. Her parents eventually came around, and today they adore the twins. Sarah became very deft at shutting down any questions from strangers about “their dad”: they don’t have one, she says firmly.

Along with the twins’ births came another major change in Sarah’s life: she’s no longer religious. Though she acknowledges that faith can be a powerful force for some people, she says science is what gave her children, not God. Her mother prayed and prayed that Sarah would find a partner, but she never did. “If there’s a God who listens to the desires of your heart,” she told me, “he wasn’t listening to mine.”

I do not know if Sarah would feel the same way if her choice motherhood had gone as smoothly, socially, as Aileen’s did. But it’s clear that norm-breaking isn’t always costless for everyone. And having people in your life who encourage you can reduce the price of difference.

Chapter 8

Comfort with Discomfort

Beverly, Part II

At one point during my visit to Wichita Falls to see Beverly Stiles, the sociology professor, I stopped by a Taco Bell for lunch. When I spelled my name for the cashier, he said, in a deep drawl, “Oh, I know how to spell your name, because my wife and I are really into the last Russian czar. And his daughters’ names are Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia. If my wife and I ever have a girl, her nickname will be Atom, which is a contraction of all of their names.”