March 2018 - Gateway Women

Poster affixed to telegraph pole: "lost mojo"

Surviving the childless weekend blues

March 30, 2018 Jody Day 39

There, it’s said. Weekends can be absolute hell as a single, childless woman. “They creep up on you,” said one friend recently. Many of us are so busy with work commitments and after-work activities Monday-to-Friday that we can’t wait for the peace and quiet of the weekend in order to recover. And then, when we wake up on Saturday morning to an empty bed, an empty house and an empty weekend, it doesn’t feel relaxing; it feels hideously oppressive. Alternatively, we pack our weekend schedule to the gunnels with activities and appointments only to feel burnt out and resentful and […]

An album about coming to terms with childlessness – Seamonster, by Chiara Berardelli

March 19, 2018 Jody Day 1

Seamonster is a new album by the Scottish singer/songwriter Chiara Berardelli. In it, she chronicles her own journey through grieving her childlessness, the support and solace she found in the Gateway Women online community, and her Plan B life that gradually took (and is taking) shape in place of the family she always expected to have. As she says on the notes for the album here: The songs on this album have been inspired by the loss of a dream, my dream of one day becoming a mother. It’s an invisible loss, hard to put into words, even harder to […]

Getting through Mother’s Day as a childless woman

March 11, 2018 Jody Day 8

“Mother’s Day” – the two words that signal the most dreaded time of the year after Christmas when you’re grieving childlessness. For UK readers, Mother’s Day falls today on Sunday 11th March although, thanks to social media, we get to experience it all over again when international Mother’s Day happens in May… I was interviewed at length for an article which was published today in the The Observer about being childless on Mother’s Day. One of the questions really made me think was this: “Does the notion of Mother’s Day upset/anger/depress you?” I thought about it and although whilst I was […]

IWD2018: Celebrating women means childless women too

March 8, 2018 Jody Day 17

Today is International Women’s Day 2018. Started by the Suffragettes in the early 1900’s, the first International Women’s Day was celebrated in 1911 and this year’s theme is #PressforProgress. Yet it can be hard if you’re a childess-not-by-choice (CNBC) woman sometimes to feel that you belong to the global tribe of women, as womanhood and motherhood are routinely conflated. Whether it be the way that Facebook algorithms target you with nappies, ‘back to school’ offers and prams, the rise of terms such as ‘Mumpreneur’ or even, for heaven’s sake, a local women’s running club calling themselves ‘MumsRun’, it seems that whichever […]

The Black Woman in the Room

March 5, 2018 Jody Day 12

A guest blog by Yvonne John, author of Dreaming of a Life Unlived: Intimate Stories and Portraits of Women without Children, and a licensed Gateway Women Sister who will be leading Gateway Women’s first Reignite Weekend for Women of Colour in London in April 2018 and in Luton in September 2018. Click here or scroll down for an video interview with Yvonne where we discuss childlessness after abortion, the impact of infertility on marriage, Yvonne’s difficult experience as a single, childless women in a charismatic Christian church, race, identity and more… One of my earliest memories of childhood was when […]