Jody Day, Author at Gateway Women

Where are the childless voices in the celebrations over IVF’s 40th anniversary?

July 15, 2018 Jody Day 9

If you weren’t already aware, in ten day’s time, on 25th July 2018, Louise Brown, the first person to be born from IVF turns forty – so it’s IVF’s 40th birthday too. There’s going to be a big party at the Science Museum in London and the UK HFEA (Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority), and other fertility organisations are in self congratulatory mood. This tweet says it all (thank you to my colleague Dr. Robin Hadley for this) and a sobering reminder of how often IVF fails – almost 80% of the time. In response to this tweet, the HFEA had […]

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 […]

“Penny” – a movie about childlessness – now in production

July 1, 2018 Jody Day 2

An update – 8th July 2018: I’m very happy to report that PENNY raised $13,115 which was 86% of its target. Much to my relief, I found out that it would be allowed its funding if it made 80% of its target (not 100% as I previously thought). Thank you to ALL OF YOU for donating, for sharing on your social media pages, for retweeting my tweets and spreading the word. PENNY will now go into production!! They will need more funds later no doubt, but we’ve got them started! #TeamGateway supports #TeamPenny! Childless women very rarely appear on the big screen […]

Coping with Father’s Day as a Childless Man. A guest blog by Dr. Robin Hadley

June 13, 2018 Jody Day 3

As a man, firstly, let me say how delighted and honoured I am that Jody has asked me contribute to Gateway Women. I’m guessing that a quite a few readers here had a poor experience of male partners; I am genuinely sorry about how some men have behaved and still behave. In this blog, I aim to give some insight from my own experience of involuntary childlessness, as well as knowledge I have gained through my academic research into childless men. Hence, this blog will cover both the personal and the academic and will end with a poem. I hope […]

“Finding Joy Beyond Childlessness” by Lesley Pyne

June 8, 2018 Jody Day 2

I am very proud to have written the Foreword for Lesley Pyne’s book, ‘Finding Joy Beyond Childlessness: Inspiring Stories to Guide You to a Fulfilling Life’, published on June 18, 2018. You can download the first chapter free on Lesley’s website at www.lesleypyne.co.uk and it is available to pre-order as a paperback or e-book online, with a Kindle special offer of £1.48 (UK Amazon) or $1.99 (US Amazon) up until publication date. In our friendly and positive video chat above, Lesley and talk about how we have both been changed not only by our shared experience of childlessness, but how […]

We are all born worthy; childlessness cannot take that away.

April 19, 2018 Jody Day 4

One of the things that almost all of the thousands of childless women I’ve spoken to, corresponded with or worked with over the last seven years have in common has been a sense of unworthiness: unworthy as women, as ‘real’ adults, as sexual beings, as valid members of society, even (as I mention in my video below), as members of the human race. For those who are childless due to infertility or other physical reasons there can be a deep sense of betrayal by our own bodies. For those of us childless due to circumstance, particularly if it involved not […]

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 […]

Let the new shit begin

January 2, 2018 Jody Day 31

There’s something oppressive about New Year, and all these exhortations to become some new version of ourself. I mean, if I had free choice to select which time of the year to mark as ‘New Year’, one that felt like a promising time for us all to ‘start afresh’ it wouldn’t be NOW for goodness sake! For many of us who are childless not by choice, we’ve just survived the longest and trickiest holiday season there is. It started on 31st October with Halloween and has been careering downhill, picking up speed as it’s snowballed through Bonfire Night, Thanksgiving, Sinterklass […]

Never again, you say, after each Christmas…

December 26, 2017 Jody Day 26

Well, we made it through. Another Christmas done. Thank God: any, all or no God. How was it for you? Did you #ReclaimChristmas and shape it into a celebration that suited your life, your situation, your needs as a solo or couple, or did you endure some version of the same old shit you’ve been dealing with these last few years? Each year, from September onwards many childless women’s concerns about the holiday season escalate, many of them discussed publicly on the Gateway Women Facebook page, or privately in our online community, at our free Meetups or in our weekend workshops. The theme […]

#WorldChildless Week 2017, Day 7: Finding Support & Moving Forwards

September 17, 2017 Jody Day 7

World Childless Week has been created by a British childless woman, Stephanie Phillips as a way to highlight the experience, individually and globally, of women and men who are childless not by choice. Each day of World Childless Week has a theme, and the theme for today, Sunday 17th September 2017 is ‘Finding Support & Moving Forwards’. Please find out more, share your thoughts, images, experiences and stories of being childless-not-by choices either below in the comments, on the World Childless Week Facebook page (where most of the activity is taking place this first year), on Twitter at @ChildlessWeek (using the #hashtag #WorldChildlessWeek) or at www.WorldChildlessWeek.com For the last […]

#WorldChildless Week 2017, Day 6: Let’s Talk Openly About Childlessness

September 16, 2017 Jody Day 3

World Childless Week has been created by a British childless woman, Stephanie Phillips as a way to highlight the experience, individually and globally, of women and men who are childless not by choice. Each day of World Childless Week has a theme, and the theme for today, Saturday 16th September 2017 is Today is the most common birthday in the world Please find out more, share your thoughts, images, experiences and stories of being childless-not-by choices either below in the comments, on the World Childless Week Facebook page (where most of the activity is taking place this first year), on Twitter at @ChildlessWeek (using the #hashtag #WorldChildlessWeek) or […]

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