The first person to learn that I was pregnant was my partially deaf, doddering 80-year-old father. I would imagine that, after learning she is pregnant, a woman first announces the good news to her partner or her mother. But I had neither.

A year and a half ago, in my father’s home in suburban Sacramento, I woke up to a congratulatory voicemail from a nurse at the New York City fertility clinic I’d been going to for two years. I burst from my room at 6:30 a.m. to run downstairs to tell, well, someone. It seemed appropriate it would be my father, but he wasn’t in his usual position on the ground inches away from the television blaring satellite news programs from India.

Worried, I yelled “Papa” outside his bedroom door a few times. He finally emerged, hair standing on end and muttering under his breath, “I think I have Alzheimer’s. I’m sure of it.”

“Papa, I don’t think you do. Let’s go downstairs,” I said.

Still disoriented, he sat down at our kitchen table and I took his warm palm in my mine. “Papa, I have something to tell you,” I said. My father had begrudgingly accepted my decision to have a baby on my own when I first started treatment at the eleventh-hour age of 43, but his befogged state betrayed no inkling of what I was about to tell him.

“Papa, I’m pregnant,” I said, to which he gave no response. Soon I realized he wasn’t censuring me with his silence, he’d fallen asleep. I nudged him awake and repeated, “I’m pregnant,” several decibels louder. After a few seconds, he seemed to finally register what I’d said but remained quiet.

“Papa, aren’t you going to say anything?” I implored.

He shrugged and delivered the most joyless reaction to ever accompany a pregnancy announcement: “Beta, I just wanted so much more for you.” I acknowledged that I’d dashed his hopes that I’d come by a family by more conventional means. I said, “I know, Papa, I know. I wanted more for me, too.”

The truth is I couldn’t blame him. Since the day I was born, it had been his singular, urgent, all encompassing wish that I get married, the 50% divorce rate be damned. Even when I was 45 years old and pregnant, he could think of little else.

A decade ago, I wrote a memoir called Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India, which chronicled my own attempts at marriage in India — where I lived for five years — while bearing witness to a once traditional nation hurtling headfirst into a technology-addled future.

When I left the U.S. for Delhi at the age of 32, I might have been pushing the limits of marriageability by conventional Indian standards, but in New York City terms, my single status hardly marked me an outlier.

India was in the throes of its own sexual revolution, and many of the young men and women I met were enjoying this new openness. I certainly encountered commitment-phobes who resembled ones I’d met in New York City, but I also found myself too Westernized for overly traditional men.

Five years later, at 37 and still single, I moved back to New York City. I consoled myself with the fact that I had plenty of time to get pregnant. Maybe I was lying to myself, but I found warnings of a woman’s diminishing fertility to be faintly alarmist. Hadn’t the vast majority of my friends given birth in their late thirties or early forties?

Also, I was keeping one eye on those statistics and my ebbing fertility. In fact, the month before I left India, seemingly on a whim because I would never need them — and wooed by the cut-price rate — I froze my eggs under the care of a highly regarded fertility clinic in Bombay, one that had helped a former Miss India (and subsequent Miss World) get pregnant from an egg that was frozen for eight years.

Back in New York, 37 turned to 38 and 39. And then, as the logic of time and mathematics dictates, 40 and 41 and 42. Like the final years of a great empire, the last years of a woman’s fertility speed by, leaving historians struggling to account for them. (Why couldn’t Rome fend off the Goths? Why was I dating that unemployed actor?)

Thus marked the desperate years, when my dating life took on a monomaniacal quality as I tried to find somebody to have a baby with. Around this time, I began hearing of women within my extended circles who were having children by themselves — with no man. Slowly, grudgingly, even self-pityingly, I began to think I might follow this same path.

David, the art director I was dating at 41, stepped into this maelstrom. Our sensibilities lined up in so many ways I hadn’t encountered for years, and we haltingly began envisioning a future together — despite my desire to bear a child and his equally matched aversion to raising another child. He already had a teenage son.

Panic and pressure aren’t the only characteristics of the desperate years; denial balances out the third side of the triangle. I was determined to have a child the “normal” way and David was the likeliest candidate. We juddered along for a year-and-a-half, taking weeks- and months-long breaks after which we would joyfully reunite.

Nearing my 43rd birthday, I could no longer put off the inevitable and began to contemplate having a child on my own. By this time, I knew about a dozen women who were pursuing motherhood alone, including my high school frenemy turned friend, my undocumented cleaning lady (she was using donor sperm at a fertility clinic), and several friends of friends and colleagues.

Yet I still couldn’t square this with my own fate. My upbringing had been a modest and traditional one, worlds away from this newfangled era in which women substituted frozen sperm from an anonymous donor for a husband.

At two years old, in the cramped Baltimore apartment my parents rented when they first arrived in the U.S., I recited the mantra of our Hindu religious sect, Jainism, by heart. My parents wed in an arranged marriage that lasted half a century, and while I had flouted this and other Indian traditions, I always expected to have a child with a partner, even one called “husband.”

Most women I’ve spoken to who pursue single motherhood invariably say they always wanted to be a mother. I’m the same — I took it as incontrovertible that I would someday have a child. I wanted to nurture and guide a baby from birth to adulthood and experience the unconditional, nothing-like-it love that all mothers profess for their children, always as if it comes as an utter revelation.

Not only did I feel the proverbial twinges of longing when I saw babies, I also felt the urge to help 12-year-old boys decide on a science camp, or take a 17-year-old girl on college tours as some of my friends were now doing with their own children. Sometimes I would surprise myself when, in the course of supervising a 22-year-old intern or a 26-year-old colleague, I would imagine myself as their mother.

One Buddhist teaching asks us to avoid frustration and anger by imagining others, such as the difficult boss or the loud subway passenger, as our mothers. I seemingly inverted the teaching to position myself as the mother of all those I encountered in my daily life.