Rachel Sarah book

Marshall Weiss

The Dayton Jewish Observer

Single Mom Seeking: Playdates, Blind Dates And Other Dispatches From The Dating World by Rachel Sarah, Seal Press, 200 p., $14.95

Four years ago, Rachel Sarah began writing a column about dating as a single mom for literarymama.com. At the time, she was surprised she couldn’t find a first-person narrative book written by another single mom about dating.

That’s when she decided to write Single Mom Seeking: Playdates, Blind Dates And Other Dispatches From The Dating World.

Rachel is known to readers of The Dayton Jewish Observer for her monthly singles column, which originates in J., San Francisco’s Jewish newspaper.

Released last month, Single Mom Seeking shares Rachel’s innermost thoughts and experiences: from when her boyfriend abandoned her and their infant daughter, Mae, in New York six years ago, up to last summer, when Rachel, 34, and 6-year-old Mae moved in with Rachel’s Israeli boyfriend in Berkeley.

Nothing from her parenting and dating exploits is left to the imagination.

“As a reader, I love reading the real stuff,” she says as she prepares for a trip to New York to promote her first book.

“I’m really drawn to writers who write down the real, hard truth and bare it all,” she says. “I definitely set out wanting to write that kind of book.”

As a result of the hard truth, Rachel says her mother is no longer talking to her.

“She was really, really upset about what I wrote in the JDate chapter,” she said. “It was one paragraph and I wrote how disappointed I’ve been in our relationship. I warned her ahead of time. I told her I wasn’t really comfortable with her reading the book. And she was extremely upset. I’ve apologized and said I might have made a mistake in writing from such a painful place. So, we’ll see what happens.”

Late in the book, Rachel reconnects with her Jewish identify.

“Signing up for JDate, I knew I might meet some men who have an issue with the fact that my mother is not Jewish, although I was raised Jewish,” she says.

“I met a lot of American Jewish men who said, ‘Really, it would be difficult for me to be with you. I would need you to convert.’ ”

After a few of these experiences, she decided to tell Jewish suitors in the first few minutes, “I need you to know that my mother is not Jewish, I was raised Jewish, I’m raising my daughter Jewish, and if that is an issue, I just want to be up front with you.”

To her current boyfriend, often referred to in her column as “The Israeli,” this wasn’t a problem.

“What’s important to me,” Rachel says, “is being with someone who is culturally Jewish, and so my values — I have really strong values about family and friends — he said that’s what really matters.”

Rachel says she receives e-mails every day from “a lot of single moms who have recently been divorced or just have been considering dating but haven’t had the courage to get back out there.”

Her advice to single moms: “Get a tribe.”

“Find your clan of friends and family. And for me, my clan is and was my Jewish single mom friends. And they are really going to be your backbone when you’re having a hard day. And also your clan, your tribe, are going to swap off childcare if you need a little time for yourself or you need to date.”

She said a clan is also important when a single mom starts dating, for its role as “bogus detector.”

“So when I’ve introduced potential boyfriends to my single-mom friends, they have said, ‘You have to get rid of that guy. We don’t get a good feeling from him, to tell you the truth.’”

Last summer, she was a guest blogger for The Washington Post. “I wrote a short piece about dating as a single mom and I was shocked because I got so many angry letters that people wrote in to the Web site,” she says. “They called me pathetic, and I was a loser and I should have had an abortion, a couple of people said. And so it just surprised me that people had an issue with a single mom dating.

“But what happened was single moms all over the country read this, came out and wrote in really, really supportive, saying, ‘We do have a right to move on in our lives.’ And I came out and said, ‘I know I’ve made many mistakes, but having my daughter was not one of them. And I deserve to get back out there.’”

Rachel has also written for Family Circle, Parenting, Tango, Ms., Baby Center, ePregnancy, and The Christian Science Monitor. She is currently working on her second book, And Boyfriend Makes Three.

“In New York, I’m going to be meeting with an agent and hopefully that will get off the ground.”

© 2007 The Dayton Jewish Observer