For me, the brit of my firstborn son was, first of all, a celebration of the start of my family. I didn’t have a wedding to celebrate: I had never married, and my pregnancy had been achieved using the sperm bank. The beginning of the pregnancy was something too private to celebrate in public. The brit was the first public acknowledgment of my new path as a family.
The celebration of a brit is often a male thing, with the mother standing far behind, sometimes in the ezrat nashim. However, for the brit of both my sons, I wanted to participate in the brit, rather than being a mere spectator. I would have wanted to be involved even if the children had a father, but as it was, it was even more important for me to be part of this mitzvah.
The halakha does not acknowledge the part of the mother in the brit. The mitzvah of making the brit is on the father; the mother has no formal obligation to perform a brit on her son. When there is no father, it is actually an obligation of the kehillah, the community, to make the brit.
I wanted my role as the mother of my sons and the person who is going to bring them up in the covenant of Avraham to be acknowledged. It was very important for me to be the one making the brakha of the brit and saying the p’sukim.
One of the mohalim whom I first asked about this before I gave birth refused. He said that he is a Yemenite, and in the Yemenite tradition, if there is no father, no one says the brakha; therefore, he could not agree to my saying it. I wondered if he would have given the same answer had I said my father would say the brakha. Anyway, I found another fine mohel who checked to see that there was no halakhic problem in my reciting the brakha, and then agreed.
After the brit, the mohel told me that he doesn’t often feel such simha at a brit. I think many people were celebrating my new family with me, and were happy to see a single woman finding a way to start a family on her own. There were very few such religious families at the time. Since then, it has become more common.
At the brit and simhat bat of my twins, three and a half years later, there was also excitement and simha, but of a different kind—my twins were born into an already existing family.