The Stories Behind Just Mom and Me. This one hour documentary film tells the story of how five different women are coping with the challenges of parenting alone. As they learn to juggle their jobs, romantic lives, and motherly responsibilities, each of the women discover frustrations and rewards in creating a template for fatherless child rearing.

There are more than 25 million single mothers heading households in America. What does this statistic say about our society and how motherhood has evolved over the last 50 years?
Filmed over a period of three years, these realistic stories create a new paradigm of motherhood.

Isayana | Diana | Adi | Tracey | Beth

Isayana was born in Nicaragua and came to San Francisco when she was two years old with her mother and father. She dropped out of High School at age 14 during a tumultuous relationship with her boy friend. "He wanted us to get married... I had my engagement ring and everything, we were getting our wedding rings set. I think we were trying to have a baby... " Her baby's father left her when she was four months pregnant. "The day that I decided to have sex with him I knew that I would have to take everything with it, I mean, sex wasn't even all that good for me... "
Diana, Asian American mother to 3 year old Leslie, works four days a week as the company lawyer at BusinessWire in downtown San Francisco. "I've done many settlement negotiations with a child on the breast which the other side never knew (laughs), 'say excuse me a minute, I have to change sides'." Diana, 44, was in a relationship with boyfriend, Warner, when they decided to have a baby. After one miscarriage they were able to conceive. "I don't know if I ever really loved Leslie's father. I think I loved the idea of having a nuclear family and I put him into my little dream... My dream burst when I realized I was doing this on my own, I went to the hospital on my own and I came home on my own. I've always been on my own."
In 1989, Adi's husband Julius, died of lung cancer leaving her to care for their daughter, Amaya. Julius was African-American and Adi is Jewish. "For the first couple of years it felt like we weren't quite a family, having dinner was just the two of us, we really missed Julius' presence a lot...gradually that changed and we became the family that we are, we're a family of two. " "I'm always going to miss him. I'm always going to wonder what I would have been like with a dad. If someone could say, 'If I could bring back your dad would you want him?' I would say no. This is an all woman house now and if suddenly there's a guy living there I think that'd be really weird," says Amaya.
The best thing about being a single parent", says Tracey, "is that you get to make all the decisions, and I like that." An African-American mother of three children, Kristy, 17, Michael, 15, and Jonathan, 10, Tracey, 35, obtained a teaching credential from Mills College in 1995. "I was married at 17 and divorced at 20...my life was raising my first two kids!..." "Every relationship my mother's been in, as far as having a male in her life, has always ended up hurting me or my mother...there's never been anything really positive that's come out of her marriages... " says Kristy. "I look at my life as if it's a small company," says Tracey, "...and that I have to get the other people in the company to manage their time, their energy and their space...I have a pager, I probably need a cell phone. They know that they're supposed to call and check in and say 'I've arrived.'"
At 39 years old, Beth decided to be donor inseminated because "I didn't really have a partner at the time. I didn't know if I waited that there would be opportunity to have one later." She was impregnated on the 4th try. "This is the best I've ever felt in my life. I feel this is really meant to be", says Beth at 6 months pregnant. She is a Human Resource Specialist who has worked at Chevron for over 17 years. Her daughter Kaitlyn was born on August 18th, 1995, by cesarean section. Two weeks after the baby was born she said, "It's overwhelming to think that I'm the only person, there isn't a male partner...I've had a lot of tears about that thinking why didn't I do it with a partner. It's a lot at 3 a.m. in the morning to have no one to hand the baby off to."