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[March 2022] “Social Infertility & the transformative process of grief with Gateway Women Founder, Jody Day” – Geeta Pendse’s 1 in 5 Podcast [audio + transcript]

March 17, 2022 Jody Day 0

Geeta Pendse is a British journalist and TV presenter and her podcast features stories and topics relating to both childless and childfree women. You can listen to Jody’s episode 7 here or search ‘1 in 5 – Leading a Life Without Children’ wherever you get your podcasts. You can connect with Geeta on Twitter @geetapendse and Instagram @geetapendse. Do also check out episode 1 with Gateway Women facilitator, author and activist for childless women of colour, Yvonne John. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW Geeta: Hello, welcome to the 1 in 5 podcast, a space to explore all sides of leading a life […]

Jody Day interviewed by Laura Behnke for ‘The Life Actually Podcast’ on childlessness across the life course; working to deshame ourselves as part of healing; how understand the grief process helps us deal with all of life’s changes and much much more! (Audio + Transcript)

October 14, 2021 Jody Day 0

[October 2021] Jody Day interviewed by Laura Behnke for ‘The Life Actually Podcast‘ in which we discuss, amongst other things: the data around the numbers of childless/free women, and why it’s on the rise; about shame as a powerful tool of social control; about how not having children means you also won’t get to be a grandmother either; about my own unplanned pregnancy and abortion at 20 and how this is a hidden part of many women’s stories, both mothers and childless women; about how our childhood experience of being mothered may influence our later thoughts about becoming mothers ourselves; […]

Jody interviewed on ‘That Grief Relief Podcast’ with Katie Overy on friendships, dealing with awkward questions, grandchildren-grief, the fetishization of motherhood, holding ourselves back in life whilst ‘waiting’ for motherhood, the unrecognized, unsupported and unspoken nature of ‘disenfranchised grief’ and more…

September 10, 2021 Jody Day 0

September 2021: Jody Day interviewed by Katie Overy for her ‘The Grief Relief Podcast’. The clip above is about how Jody answers intrusive questions about whether she has children. You can listen to the full episode here in which Katie (who is childfree by choice) and I discuss my story, about the experience of the disenfranchised grief of childlessness, about the bingos that childfree women experience as well as childless women, about my new ‘conscious childless elderwomen’ project, about the shifting nature of friendships when you’re childless and your friends all have kids and how this can shift again when […]

About normalizing how hard it can be for parents and non-parents to have the ‘hard conversations’; the deep unconscious roots of society’s discomfort with childless women; the gifts of grief and what envy can teach us… Jody interviewed on the Sara Avant Stover podcast, June 2021

June 21, 2021 Jody Day 0

You can listen to the full interview by following the links here, or search ‘Sara Avant Stover’ wherever you get your podcasts. The full transcript is below. In this interview with author, yogi and feminine spirituality teacher, Sara Avant Stover, we go deep into the experience of involuntary childlessness – both my story and, at a much deeper level, the archetypal ‘stories’ that attach to childless women and perhaps lead to much of some people’s evident (and mostly unconscious) discomfort with us. I also talk about what it will take for us to begin to ‘normalize’ that having honest conversations […]

‘The Plant-Woman’ – a guest blog by Rachel Giles about nature, healing, grief and finding your Plan B

April 30, 2021 Jody Day 0

RACHEL GILES is a writer, lecturer and editor on art and design and has worked for the National Gallery, Tate, V&A, Gagosian and other galleries and museums. She grows and sells flowers from her cutting garden in London and is passionate about nature’s ability to heal. In 2014 she attended one of Gateway Women’s Reignite Weekends and in 2016 she completed her art history MA dissertation on the visual representation of infertility and childlessness at Birkbeck, London, with distinction. She spoke at Fertility Fest 2018 and co-curated Arts at ESHRE – Fertility Fest’s visual art exhibition – in Barcelona in […]

Jody’s lecture on disenfranchised grief for York University’s ‘Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience” Project

March 14, 2021 Jody Day 0

The disenfranchised grief of involuntary childlessness: A living loss that society dismisses: a talk by Jody Day, psychotherapist, author and founder of ‘Gateway Women’ Delivered 4th March 2021 for York University’s ‘Grief: A Human Emotional Experience’ – a 4-year AHRC-funded project for the Department of Philosophy, University of York, UK. The overarching aim of ‘Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience’ is to develop a detailed, wide-ranging, and integrated account of what it is to experience grief, focusing on aspects of grief that are of considerable theoretical and practical importance but remain poorly understood. For more about the project go […]

Embracing the Grief of Childlessness – a video recording of my More to Life webinar in July 2018

July 9, 2018 Jody Day 5

Click the image above or this link to watch or share: https://youtu.be/6M4EE7UIBfQ Learning that the despair that I was feeling around my childlessness was GRIEF was the beginning of my healing. That was seven years ago, and I’ve been in a good place with my childlessness for five years now – in fact, I’m pretty sure I feel as at peace with my childlessness now as if I had chosen it – although I still have my ‘griefy moments’ – usually when a new aspect of my loss that I hadn’t been aware of before comes into view and my heart […]

The invisible grief of the childless-by-circumstance woman

April 4, 2017 Jody Day 18

*** Childlessness has always been around, mostly because of reproductive infertility, as there are still very few parts of the world where it is possible for a woman to choose a life other than motherhood and tosupport herself economically to live that choice. However, whilst we think of ‘social infertility’ or ‘circumstantial infertility’ as something very new, in the UK, we’ve been here before. Whilst currently, one in five (20%) of women like me, born in the 1960s turned 45 without having had children (double that of our mother’s generation), this was also the case for those women born around 1900. […]

The love and grief at the heart of a childless Christmas

December 25, 2014 Jody Day 52

A blog of mine from Christmas 2014 It’s done. Another Christmas Day is over. Never an easy time for us childless women, even if we are ‘through’ our grief, as I am. I had a griefy moment in an English country church this morning when the vicar’s adorable children were running around the alter, looking very much like one of them was about to actually get into the manger with the baby Jesus in it! A moment of such cheeky freshness that it took my breath away and I felt the sadness that I never got to enjoy the mischievousness of […]

Hello grief, my dear old friend: why making friends with grief and doing your ‘grief work’ is a good idea

September 27, 2014 Jody Day 21

The number one question I get asked by other childless women is this: ‘Have you really got through your grief? Really?!’ The next one is often ‘So, how long does it take?’ And yes, I am through my grief over not having children. I am absolutely, definitely on the other side of it now and have been for about 3 years. However, what I’m discovering is that my experience of being in this new state continues to evolve and the gifts of grief keep getting delivered. For example, the ‘freedom’ that felt like a life-sentence of misery 5 years ago today […]

The Gifts of Grief: Saying Goodbye to Lost Babies

September 13, 2012 Jody Day 4

This Saturday in Exeter Cathedral sees the first ‘Saying Goodbye’ service of remembrance for babies lost at any stage of pregnancy, at birth or in early years. This is the first of seven cathedral services this year, with up to 22 services planned by the end of 2013 in the UK. The Saying Goodbye services have been created by Zoe and Andy Clark-Coates, who have personally suffered the loss of five babies. They are now blessed with having two vibrant little girls, one aged three and the other just 12 months. Grief is something that is poorly understood, tolerated or […]

[WATCH NOW] Free Gateway Women Masterclass: ‘Navigating Friendships, Old and New’. (Recorded Feb 2024)

February 3, 2024 Jody Day 0

Childlessness can be experienced as a relational wound and can ask a lot of us and our friendships – Sometimes more than they can bear. As many of our friends move into parenting, coupling and families, we can find ourselves increasingly isolated and feeling like outsiders in family-centred relationships, social spaces and workplaces. Yet childless people have much to give as friends, and we deserve relationships with others who can be authentic, empathetic and available. In this free Gateway Women Masterclass, Sarah Roberts, Judy Graham and myself explored the different types, purpose and contexts of friendships in our lives, and […]

To the Childless Woman at Christmas – I See You

December 25, 2023 Jody Day 18

I originally published this post in Christmas 2020, when many of us across the globe were under pandemic-related restrictions. However, although that may have changed, much of the experience of being childless at Christmas hasn’t… Many of us are hanging out in the round-the-world round-the-clock live chat in our private online community – come and join us there for empathic company and some random and often frivolous chat to distract you! However you are spending your holidays this year, I send you a warm hug. Hugs, Jody x I see you sitting at home muting the rolling TV ads of […]

[Watch now] ‘Challenging the Lazy Stereotypes of Childless Women in Fiction and Films’. A free World Childless Week webinar: Thursday 14 September 2023, 7pm BST

August 14, 2023 Jody Day 1

This special World Childless Week webinar, ‘Challenging the Lazy Stereotypes of Childless Women in Fiction and Film’ was filmed live on Thursday 14th September as part of the ‘Childless in the Media’ themed day of World Childless Week 2023. From fairy tales through to modern fiction, childless women are often portrayed as damaged, deranged and deviant. Whether it’s Snow White’s evil stepmother, the psychopathic puppy-killer Cruella de Vil, Glenn Close’s bunny boiler in ‘Fatal Attraction’ or the unreliable and half-cut narrator of ‘Girl on a Train’, we never seem to come out well! Unconsciously, it seems writers default to using women […]

WHO ARE THE NOMOCRONES?

June 21, 2023 Jody Day 0

The #NomoCrones are a group of Childless Elderwomen from all over the world that Jody Day, founder of Gateway Women, gathers around the Zoom Fire each Solstice and Equinox. Guests vary from session to session and may include: YOUR HOST: JODY DAY (UK/Ireland) is cusping 60 and is a World Childless Week Ambassador. She is the founder of Gateway Women, the global advocacy network for involuntarily childless women, and is a childfree ally too. Jody is a psychotherapist and the author of ‘Living the Life Unexpected: How to Find Hope, Meaning and a Fulfilling Future Without Children (Chapter 12 is […]

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