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Childless and Miserable? You need to get off Facebook!

April 20, 2013 Jody Day 41

Sunny holidays, funny moments with her kids, her lover taking her away somewhere special for her birthday so that they can have some time, ‘alone’… How come her life worked out and mine didn’t? What about me? How to meet your soul mate, arranging the perfect hen-night, your dream wedding, what to expect when you’re expecting, keeping the passion alive in your relationship… Where’s my soul mate? Isn’t there meant to be one for everyone? Where do I exist in women’s magazines? Where are the articles about coping with a lodger in your 40s just to pay the electricity bill? When […]

You’re not crazy, you’re grieving

March 27, 2013 Jody Day 36

Do any of the following sound like you? You find yourself hiding out in the bathroom at the office because of your colleagues’ endless babytalk… You walk home alone across town, in the freezing rain, just to get away from your ‘last’ childless friend’s announcement of her ‘miracle’ pregnancy… You avoid family events and spend most of your cash on holidays and retreats abroad during the Christmas season… You snap and bitch at your partner so much that you wouldn’t be surprised if they left you… You’ve given up dating all together… You couldn’t give a shit what you look […]

Why is there a taboo around childless women?

March 2, 2013 Jody Day 4

Today, to start the debate that will take place next Saturday at WOW (Women of the World Festival) on the Southbank (London), the WOW website has posted a question: Why is there a taboo around childless women?… The answers are going to be projected 50ft high on the side of the Royal Festival Hall this evening! If you’d like your voice to be heard (doesn’t have to include your name) in letters 50′ high opposite the Houses of Parliament – click here! Let’s end the cultural invisibility around being childless or childfree. Wherever you are in the world, please add your […]

Mind the Gap! Friendships & childlessness

February 22, 2013 Jody Day 59

One of the most surprising issues that comes out of the woodwork when dealing with unchosen childlessness (and often when chosen too), is the nature, health and continuation of our female friendships. As someone who spent 15-years expecting to become a mother, but for whom it didn’t work out, I was in such denial about my ongoing infertility that I actually didn’t find keeping up my friendships with mothers all that hard. After all, I was convinced it would be ‘my turn’ one day. But since that day several years ago when I knew for sure that I would never be a […]

Welcome to the Sistership – The Online Gateway Women Forum

January 24, 2013 Jody Day 0

If you’d like to connect, rant, support and laugh with other childless-by-circumstance women, please come and join us on the Private G+ Gateway Women Community. And it’s not on flipping Facebook! Whether you’re still hopeful, not sure or getting stuck into your Plan B, you’ll find good company and candid chat here… Usually busy most evenings (and with women from all over the world joining us so getting busier round the clock!) it’s proving very popular and some great new friendships, ideas and connections are being made. Click here for more information and to apply for membership Welcome to the […]

Will I Ever Get Over Not Having Children?

January 17, 2013 Jody Day 278

There are two sides to the question “Do you ever get over not having children?” And it really depends on who’s doing the asking. One is incredibly insulting, as in, “Aren’t you over that yet?!” Whilst the other is “Will I ever feel good about my life again?” The fact is that if you were to have had children, and by some tragic event, they had died, nobody would ever expect you to be ‘over it’. Indeed, if you ever were, you’d be considered heartless – that terrible fairytale nasty: a bad mother. Every Christmas or Mother’s Day, people would be sensitive towards how […]

Still Hopeful – But the Hope is Killing Me

January 11, 2013 Jody Day 16

As I’ve written before, sometimes I think ‘hope’ can be one of the most toxic of fertility drugs. But the fact is, you don’t have to be actively going through fertility treatments to be harpooned by hope. Just try being around the age of forty, single, childless and longing to become a mother. Forget ‘bushtucker trials’ (making celebrities eat insects, as far as I understand), you try remaining hopeful, optimistic and upbeat when it feels like every fibre of your being is yelling: “If you don’t get a bloody move on we’re finished!” Meanwhile, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is […]

No More Nice Girls

January 5, 2013 Jody Day 17

When I was a young girl, there was a nursery rhyme that we used to sing in the school playground which went: What are little boys made of? What are little boys made of? Slugs and snails And puppy-dog’s tails, That’s what little boys are made of. What are little girls made of? What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice And everything nice, That’s what little girls are made of. We would chant it in the playground, but I always presumed it was ironic, even though I didn’t know what ‘ironic’ meant then (I still get a bit […]

Christmas will be different next year…

December 25, 2012 Jody Day 13

Having made it through yet another childless Christmas, all of us childless by circumstance women can breathe out a huge collective sigh of relief! It’s over and we can get back to our daily lives, and the coping mechanisms and busy routines that serve to protect us, most of the time, from the feelings of isolation, sadness and loss we often feel. Now Christmas is over, we can move back into the mainstream again; we can pass for normal women again. Well, most of the time, anyway. But there comes a day, maybe after we’ve had just one too many […]

Childless at Christmas: The Perfect Storm

December 19, 2012 Jody Day 34

For many childless by circumstance women, the best day of Christmas is the 26th December… when it’s all over again for another year! Earlier this December, I hosted an online webinar for Gateway Women on the theme of ‘Coping with Christmas’. Women from all over the world joined us on the call and shared their very different experiences, but very similar feelings, about the upcoming holidays. Themes such as loneliness, isolation, stress, secrets, pressure, exposure and dread came up in many of our stories. I’ve come to think that Christmas is, in many ways, the perfect storm for us childless […]

Your biggest fear – dying alone

November 18, 2012 Jody Day 27

This article is over a decade old! Since then, Jody was one of the four pioneering original founders of what has now become the UK charity ‘Ageing Without Children’. Now almost 60 herself, she has an @ApprenticeCrone account on Instagram and is nurturing her emerging ‘Gateway Elderwomen’ project. Chapter 12 of her book, ‘Living the Life Unexpected’ (published in 3 editions since this blog), also has a whole chapter (12) on how to face the practical and existential issues facing those ageing without children. Well, that cheered you up, didn’t it! “Dying alone” seem to be the two words best […]

The Lust for Transformation (and the illusion of self-improvement).

November 3, 2012 Jody Day 31

Being ‘us’ is just too damn hard some days. We long for the transformation of motherhood, as much as for the delight of meeting our children. We are bored shitless of our inner worlds, of trying to ‘realise our potential’, tired of self-help books that promise to make it all better. But without motherhood as our existential “Get out of Jail Free” card, we are thrown back onto ourselves and into what I think of as the lust for transformation. At its core, transformation, self-improvement and self-development all carry the same toxic message: “You’re not OK. There’s something wrong with […]

Elegy in an English Country Churchyard

October 17, 2012 Jody Day 28

Just recently I was on a residential training as part of my psychotherapy studies. I arrived at the venue, a gorgeous tumbledown old Abbey in the English countryside without having given the days ahead much thought – after all, I’ve been training with some of my fellow students for three years now. I had no real anxiety apart from whether the beds would be OK and whether I’d be able to sleep. Turned out I was right to worry about the beds, but what did come as a great surprise to me was to feel my scar of childlessness touched […]

Only 88 Days Left to Your Next Childless Christmas!

September 27, 2012 Jody Day 11

A blog from 2012 There’s nothing quite like the nights drawing in as Autumn arrives to remind you that yet another childless Christmas is on its way. And if you combine it with being single, it can be particularly trying. Recently, over at The Bitter Babe (a fantastic US blog that pulls no punches as the author is anonymous), she writes of looking at her “12th holiday season alone.” Unlike the author of The Bitter Babe (tag line: Never Married. Over Forty. Slightly Bitter) I was in a 16-year relationship from my early twenties and married for 12 of them. And […]

Why don’t you just adopt?

September 17, 2012 Jody Day 16

It’s the ‘just’ that gets me every time. Sometimes I wish I had the nerve to face-palm myself and say “Damn! Why didn’t that occur to me!” The bizarre thing about this throwaway line that so many of us childless women have had tossed our way is this: If we were to say casually to the same person that we were thinking of getting a dog, quick as a flash they’d say “But who’s going to look after it in the daytime?” Yet they think adoption’s an option? In the UK, married couples where one partner can afford to stay at home […]

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