Christine Coppa is having a normal mom day. Before she sits down for this interview, she has been out on a walk with her 20-month-old son, Jack, who has stopped to hug every tree on the block. "He slows me down," she says with a laugh, and it is clear that this is a good thing.

Coppa, 28, is a freelance writer living in Wayne, New Jersey. She has been writing about her life as a single mom at Glamour.com for nearly two years, in a blog called "Storked!" and she's written a book about her experience, "Rattled!" Her journey to parenting is not a traditional story, and that's what makes Coppa so engaging. "I was excited," she says about her pregnancy. "People want me to tell them that I was scared and it was horrible and I curled up into a ball. That's not the story."

This is the story: Coppa was 26 when she got pregnant. She and her boyfriend had been dating for about three months; they were seeing only each other and were, she says, fairly serious. "One night we didn't use a condom and I got pregnant," she says matter-of-factly. "It was irresponsible." Faced with a pregnancy she hadn't planned on, Coppa says, "I decided to be responsible."

She is quick to qualify this, though: "I'm pro choice -- having the baby isn't the only responsible version of my story." For Coppa, responsibility means being prepared to take care of a child, not becoming a single parent; she sees adoption and abortion as equally responsible choices. "I don't want to be the directions on how to deal with finding yourself pregnant." Her story, she says, is just one version of what can happen.

In Coppa's version, the story goes like this: At 11 weeks, her boyfriend decided that he wasn't ready for fatherhood. "After my son was born," Coppa says, "I contacted him and told him, 'Hey Jack is here, he's a beautiful baby, it would be great if you would like to meet him.'" Jack is 20 months old now, but his father has never seen him, and Coppa has mixed feelings about this absence. She is very close to her own father, and admits that because of that, she is baffled about why her son's father has chosen to step away. "On the other hand," she says, "I feel like I've done what i could do. I'm quite independent and I can take care of my son financially and emotionally on my own." The bottom line is this: "I would like him to be around, for Jack -- I don't need him to be around for me."

But she does worry about the long-term effect this will have on her son. "One day Jack is going to come to me and ask about his father, and that breaks my heart. I'm going to have to explain to him why his father's not around. It makes me really sad that no matter what I do in the present, I'm not going to be able to amend the fact that his father is not around."

So is single motherhood that different from parenting with a partner? "I always chuckle when people say, 'What's it like to be a single mother?'" Coppa says. "Motherhood is just hard in general. If someone walked into Gymboree and saw me, they wouldn't be able to say there's the single mom. I work, I go to the grocery, just like other moms." The difference, of course, is that at the end of the day, there's no one there to relieve Coppa, no Daddy walking through the door at dinner time to give her a break. "My married friends say, 'I love when my husband comes home!'" Coppa says, because that's when they get their "down time." "I don't really get 'down time.' My down time is sort of jumbled up with doing other household chores -- when my son naps, that's when I balance my checkbook, or do the dishes or fold the laundry."

But Coppa isn't complaining. "I knew it was going to be like this -- I went through my whole pregnancy alone." Coppa lived briefly with her parents during her pregnancy, while she was between apartments, but she and Jack live in an apartment in the city now. And of course, she's not entirely alone; she has a small army of friends and family who help her out. "I have a lot of girlfriends in New York City and in New Jersey who call themselves 'Aunts' -- that's really special to me," she says. Her family, too, have always been there for Coppa, and now for Jack, particularly her older brother, Carlo. Coppa says that when Carlo found out her boyfriend was bailing on her during the pregnancy, he "stepped up to the plate and said, 'I'm going to help you.' I wrote about him in nearly every chapter of my book." She talks with him twice a day, she says, and he never comes to visit without a gift of some sort for Jack, who adores him.

These days, Carlo often gets mistaken for Jack's father when the family is out and about in the city, and Coppa is ok with that. "It's a little strange," she admits, "but it's also beautiful." She is grateful for her brother's presence in her son's life. "I'm really lucky to have wonderful people around me; I am very lucky to have wonderful men around me."

Coppa says that while her life has changed completely since her son was born, it's not necessarily in the ways people imagine. "When people hear about your job, they're like oh my god, it's like in the movies! So glamorous!" she says with a laugh. And, she admits, in her pre-mom life, there were some glamorous events -- parties and celebrity interviews. But, she adds, her life was never like Carrie Bradshaw's, the "Sex and the City" character she is most often compared to. "I would have days where I could pay the rent or eat this week," she says. There were never days where she could spontaneously buy a pair of Manolos.

These days, though, her life is less SATC and more Gymboree -- just like the rest of us. "Now it's not about me. Every decision I make is about my child," she says. "How is this going to affect Jack? Is Jack going to benefit from this?" But at the end of the day, Christine Coppa knows that this is where she's supposed to be. "It was sort of like an obstacle course, my entire pregnancy, but at the end of it was the silver lining. I always wanted to be a mom." She adds, "Everything changes -- I have different priorities now. It's supposed to change."