Lately I have been hearing from women who would love for me to return to creating new podcasts. I took 2011 off from the work, but hope to return this year with new shows -- and perhaps a webinar series! I currently have 46 shows available, with more than 39,000 downloads. Here's what's available.

Once upon a time we all think we know how our lives will turn out. Then, bit by bit, year by year, we discover that we don't have quite as much control over that as we think we do. Some control, yes. But sometimes the control we have about our destiny has more to do with perspective than actual wish fulfillment.

I'm about to send my son off for a week to a camp near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area with two families (married couples, each with one child who is a good friend of his).

Many of our children ask questions about their fathers, and right now, with Father’s Day approaching, we are all thinking and talking more about it. When we made the decision to become an SMC, this subject was, for many of us, the one which we were most concerned about, and rightly so. Deciding to raise a child without a father has a real impact on our children and on us.

How do we celebrate Father's Day?

A San Francisco Choice Mom wrote to me recently, asking how to address the half-sibling topic with her son. She's been in contact with two lesbian couples on the East Coast who have sons from the same donor.

This has come up so frequently lately that I want to focus our attention again on responses to these topics: What do we tell our children, and others, about how they were conceived? About why they don't have a dad?

Choice Mom Stacey MacGlashan (author of "Just You and Me, Kid") is working with Choice Moms LLC on a 24-page storybook for kids. It is a lovely story about a girl who gets asked by another child, "why don't you have a dad?" And it needs illustrators.

Several years ago there was some measure of relief among Choice Moms -- and consternation among some others -- when author Peggy Drexler published Raising Boys Without Men that revealed that boys in homes headed by single mothers by choice and lesbian couples were doing quite well. Now she's published a book about the impact fathers have on daughters.

As we develop more (largely FREE!) e-books and other special guides for the Choice Mom community, I thought this would be a good place to list everything so far available. This list will grow, so keep checking back.

Here it is...the end of the month when we focused on Conscious Conversations, and it took me weeks to get to THIS conversation with you. Isn't that the trickiness of our lives? How to make time for what matters, when the minutia of everyday gets in our way.

Three noteworthy news items to share with you this week....

We're kicking off February with a few stories of Choice Moms who intended to build a family with a partner -- and for various reasons didn't find the right One. In this story, we hear from a woman who has been through the wringer and is still torn.

It's great to find this community, and I'm so excited to get to know you all! My story goes like this. I was married to a wonderful man, John....

We tend to know how to set and achieve goals. But sometimes we need a nudge, or we're feeling low, and our competence as strong-minded women prevents us from seeking help. I'm always looking for ways to help us find the insights we need.

As a Choice Mom, this black woman wrote to me to say she'd been invited to contribute to the September 22nd No Wedding, No Womb blogging campaign to bring attention within the black community to the idea that single black women should stop having children on their own.

A woman who is preparing to write about the Choice Motherhood lifestyle in a community that doesn't think single parenting is such a good thing asked me to offer some resources. I realized that many of you might benefit from some of it, in your own conversations with others.

On this 9/11 day, I wanted to reflect on the impact that day had on me as a Choice Mom. My daughter and I were living in New York City, about 20 blocks away from the World Trade Center, and until then I had no intention of leaving the city that had been my home for 18 years.

I've become acquainted with the very interesting work and brain of Harvard professor Steven Pinker, and have been reading his 2002 book "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature." So it was with pleasure that I read (pages 398-399) some of his thoughts on the nature vs. nurture debate as it relates to how we raise our children.

I get more melancholy about the end of summer than my kids do. They love school, and started the new school year today. About my own sadness about this time of year, I know that it's largely because my kids are the ones who teach me to play, not to work all the time.

A few years ago a producer for noted conservative commentator Bill O'Reilly called to test me for a potential debate with his boss about why Choice Moms dislike men. Maybe it's because I was pretty easy-going in my responses, but I was never booked for the show. In his recent remarks about Choice Motherhood, however, I see he still has a bug up his

We recently read about Diana's decision NOT to become a Choice Mom. Here is Part 2 of her story, when she decides to move into the Trying stage after all.

While in London I had the pleasure of meeting a woman at the Choice Mom gathering who told me about how she had decided some time ago that she definitely would not become a single mom -- partly after reading my "Choosing Single Motherhood" book. 18 months later, however, she's back on the path. I asked her to share her story about the thinking process.

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My daughter is 2.5 years old. She is a little girl who doesn't need to ask a lot of questions, doesn't seem to need a lot of prep information, and simply adjusts at the time to whatever is happening around her. She doesn't yet ask why she doesn't have a dad, or who her donor is. But other kids are now starting to do so.

I'm often asked how Choice Moms handle Father's Day. And we often wonder -- especially before we have kids, or when our children are quite young -- whether they are missing out on something important by growing up without a father.

I returned from a great primitive island camping trip with another Choice Mom, two dads, and the seven kids we have who have known each other for years. And one of the 30 emails waiting for me from the long weekend was the link to a blog from Kat Wilder, who is trying to understand who Choice Moms are, and why we do what we do.

Susan Golombok is the Cambridge University-based researcher who did the first large-scale study of the Choice Mom community in 2008. Some of those findings are posted here. Now she's published a new report of other research into female-headed families.

We love reading stories with our kids about non-traditional families. Here are some of the books that have been recommended by Choice Moms.

Well here it is...the public debate between a Glenn Sacks father's rights crony (Robert Franklin) and myself on PublicSquare.net. Read, laugh, seethe, comment. I actually love the opportunity to offer a rational perspective, even if my opponent has a decidedly different viewpoint. Such as Franklin's view that Choice Moms often trick men into having kids and then lie to keep them out of the child's life. Here's a synopsis, with links to the full debate.

A woman wrote to say that her friends were sharing the news of her Choice pregnancy with others, including the fact that she conceived with an anonymous sperm donor, even though she asked them not to. She turned to the community to get advice.

When your uncle is also the sperm donor who helped your lesbian parents conceive, you might presume "the" conversation about your origins would be a hard one. And what happens afterward?

A 40-year-old woman has been involved for five years with a man who doesn't think he wants a child. They broke up a few years ago because she wanted a child, and he said he'd go along with it. But she now realizes that's probably not going to happen.

I was asked by American Fertility Association to write an op-ed about my reaction to the stories, issues and disapproval I've heard about a single parent's ability to be the best they can be for their child.

Years ago, when my daughter was in kindergarten, the infamous family tree assignments started to come from school. To allow for the fact that Choice families don't have a "father's side" to fill in, we came up with our own solution.

We're building an audio library featuring the best of our Choosing Single Motherhood radio show and Choice Chat podcasts. You can order the first of this collection, "Choice Moms Answer the Tough Questions: Do I Have a Dad?" (formerly a CD product, available here for immediate $7 download).