2016 - Gateway Women

Coping with those childless holiday blues…

November 21, 2016 Jody Day 16

As I’m based in the UK, we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. However, because unchosen childlessness is a pain shared globally, there are many US and Canadian women who read this blog, and who are members of the private Gateway Women online community. It’s from them that I’ve learned that it’s like having to do Christmas…twice. Whilst I was still grieving my childlessness, topped off with being divorced and single, Christmas was like a thorn in my paw from September onwards, so I get it what a big deal it is. I’m wondering what the focus on ‘gratitude’ (which seems to be […]

The private hell of failed IVF: a review of Julia Leigh’s ‘Avalanche’

September 21, 2016 Jody Day 29

Julia Leigh is a novelist and film-maker from Australia who has written an exquisite gem of a memoir of going through unsuccessful fertility treatments, to be published in the UK on 6th October 2016 by Faber & Faber. Avalanche: A Love Story is a short, compelling read and has stayed firmly (and sometimes unsettlingly) in my mind since I read it a week ago. It has caused a storm of protest over at the New York Times where an author I respected for her honesty about the difficulties of motherhood, Rachel Cusk, hauled Leigh over the coals in much the same excruciating and […]

Skydiving with cats, and other ways to age without children

June 20, 2016 Jody Day 5

One week today, on Monday 27th June 2016 I’ll be part of the UK’s second Ageing Without Children conference. It’s the next hurdle (of many) to face when coming out of denial about not being a mother when you’d wanted to be, and it’s one of the scariest. Because when you add ageism to pronatalism and sexism what you get is not a high score in Scrabble but a cold shiver. Because who’s going to look after me when I’m old? Yep. That thought. For many of us, the first time we really start to ‘lean into’ that thought (thanks […]

But what if I don’t want to wear purple when I’m old?

June 4, 2016 Jody Day 38

I don’t really know how to start this, as there are so many taboos and niceties banging against my consciousness, as a woman, as a feminist. But here it is: I’m nearly 52 and men don’t notice me any more and it turns out that I mind that quite a lot. This new awareness was brought home to me at Easter whilst on holiday in the south of Italy. The first week I was staying with friends; middle-aged parents with young children and, fully released from the grief of childlessness I found I was able to open my heart to […]

Mothers in Our Hearts on Mother’s Day

May 6, 2016 Jody Day 9

As dawn was breaking over London on UK Mother’s Day morning, I was on my way to one of London’s most iconic churches: St Martin in the Fields on Trafalgar Square to take part in their Mothering Sunday service being broadcast live on BBC Radio4. As my black cab passed under the shadow of the iconic lions, a big lump came up in my throat. I remember the young woman I was who, aged 19, stood in a then rather grubby Trafalgar Square and protested against apartheid in South Africa, or who slumped exhausted against those same lions as dawn broke […]

The 5 most important things I’ve learned about recovering from childlessness

April 6, 2016 Jody Day 38

This essay was published in 2016, so some of the links may no longer work. But the 5 points hold true! Gateway Women was 5 years old yesterday. It was on 5th April 2011 that I published my first blog here, reaching out blindly to the world in the hope that someone (even just one person) would have some kind of clue as to what I was going through as a divorced, single, infertile, childless women in her mid-forties, wondering what the hell had happened to my life! I was almost 46 and had been trying to get my head […]

Honouring your experience of Mother’s Day

March 1, 2016 Jody Day 5

In the UK, we celebrate Mother’s Day as “Mothering Sunday”, three Sundays before Easter and so this coming Sunday. It was originally a day when all domestic servants were given a coordinated day off so that they could visit their families and together attend a service at their “Mother” church. It was a family day. However, gradually that original meaning has been lost and has been overtaken by the “Mother’s Day” first introduced in the US by Anna Jarvis in 1914 and falling on the second Sunday in May. Interestingly, Anna Jarvis was childless and the scope of her Mother’s Day also […]

Talking About Childlessness: a video interview with Sasha Cagen www.sashacagen.com

February 8, 2016 Jody Day 6

One of the thing that has helped me enormously in my recovery from involuntary childlessness has been hearing other women’s stories. Over the last few years I’ve got to know some amazing childless women and it’s been a privilege and a delight that I wanted to share with you. I know that it would have made a huge difference to me when I was still struggling if I’d been able to eavesdrop on conversations between women who’d recovered from their childlessness and were moving on in ways that felt meaningful to them. Firstly, because I didn’t know women like that, and secondly because these conversations weren’t (and still […]

May your light shine in 2016

January 1, 2016 Jody Day 21

It’s 11am on New Year’s Day 2016 here in India and last night I had a lovely time at a fancy hotel who had a fireworks display at midnight. I was struck by a deep sense of gratitude and joy for another year of this adventure called ‘my life’. When I think back to the place of despair I was in 7 years ago when I realised (rather late at 44!) that I wasn’t going to be a mother, I could never have anticipated the extraordinary transformational journey my grief would take me on. In many ways now, at 51, […]