Moving On Archives - Gateway Women

[Watch now] ‘Why Your Story matters’ – a free GW Masterclass with Australian author Sian Prior, hosted by Judy Graham & Sarah Roberts

April 15, 2022 Karin Enfield de Vries 0

Childlessness can feel like a dance between opposites – hope and despair, grief and renewal, freedom and longing. In her new memoir, Childless: A story of freedom and longing, Australian author Sian Prior takes us beyond words to the place where we grieve our losses and re-learn ourselves and the world as childless women. Hosted by GW’s licensed Australian facilitators, therapists Judy Graham and Sarah Roberts, this free Gateway Women Masterclass explored the healing power of storytelling and the unfolding nature of what it is to live a childless life. It was a powerful, nurturing and expansive conversation between three […]

‘Where Is My Home?’ – Navigating the sense of not belonging that can be caused by the intersectionality of race and childlessness. A free GW Masterclass Webinar with Yvonne John and Sophia Andeh.

February 26, 2022 Karin Enfield de Vries 0

Historically, for women of colour, shame in telling our stories has prevented us from healing from the trauma of the racism and oppression we’ve experienced. In parallel, being childless not by choice or by circumstance can lead to feelings of shame, and add not only to isolation and exclusion from wider mainstream society, but also from within our own communities and cultures. Join Yvonne John, author of Dreaming of the Life Unlived: Intimate Stories and Portraits of Women Without Children activist and Licensed Gateway Women Reignite Weekend Facilitator, and Sophia Andeh, an award-winning childless coach, Founder of Butterfly & Beyond and […]

[WATCH NOW] ‘Childless vs. Childfree: Does Age Soften this Distinction?’

February 24, 2022 Jody Day 0

Watch our March 2022 Equinox Session of Fireside Wisdom:‘Childless vs. Childfree: A false binary that ageing without children subverts?’ Recorded live on Sunday 20th March 2022 Join some of our regular #NomoCrone childless panel, plus some very special childfree elderwomen guests to discuss the ways that ageing without children impacts our identity and lived experience of non-parenthood. We’ll also discuss the difference between being a childless vs. childfree stepmother/stepgrandmother; whether childless/childfree are helpful terms or whether we need to think of it more as a spectrum; about what can be challenging in opening dialogue between childless/free women and SO MUCH […]

‘Childless’: a new radio documentary. Download the podcast and/or watch the live Q&A with the Director, Hilary Fennell [Recording now available]

January 23, 2022 Jody Day 0

TO LISTEN TO THE DOCUMENTARY AS A PODCAST: On the Newstalk.com website: ‘Documentary on Newstalk’: episode ‘Childless’ Apple Podcasts: ‘Documentary on Newstalk’: episode ‘Childless’ Spotify Podcasts: ‘Documentary on Newstalk’: episode ‘Childless’ Hilary Fennell’s website: www.hilaryfennell.com “It’s hard to imagine that there remains a subject so taboo that although shared by one in five women over 45, it is never discussed. That subject is being childless, but not by choice.” Hilary Fennell, programme maker and journalist is one of a growing number of such women in Ireland. In this documentary she explores what it means to be childless in a child-centred […]

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; […]

What happens at a Gateway Women Reignite Weekend?

December 19, 2020 Jody Day 10

Since Jody created the Gateway Women Reignite Weekend in 2012, it’s helped thousands of childless women shift the way they experience their childlessness. So what’s so special about it? And how might it help you? Well, first of all, let me go back in time to 2012… I was still in my own early days of recovery from childlessness and this blog was just one year old. Being around families and children was incredibly painful for me and, on many days my grief felt so familiar that I presumed this might just be what being middle-aged felt like! I struggled […]

#LTLU Living the Life Unexpected (2nd Edition): World Blogtour, 1-19th March 2020

March 1, 2020 Jody Day 45

I’m so proud to announce that the fully-revised and updated 2nd edition of my much-loved book, ‘Living the Life Unexpected’ is being published by Bluebird (PanMacmillan) in the UK on 19 March 2020. With fifty (I know, fifty!) prestigious endorsements inside the front and back jacket, a lovely new cover, a new subtitle, How to Find Hope, Meaning and a Fulfilling Future Without Children, and new content, (including a new introduction from me which outlines what’s new), I hope you’ll find it exciting whether you’re a returning reader or a brand new one. 25+ chances to win a personally dedicated […]

Distressed chicken looks at broken egg www.gateway-women.com

Forty, Single and Childless dammit!

February 12, 2020 Jody Day 9

From the archives: first published in October 2011, GW’s first year. I’m 55 now. Have you ever stopped to question why you want (or wanted) a baby so much? Do you find the question shocking? Taboo even? Well, I didn’t question it. And because I avoided this level of deep introspection, I failed to realise that I spent fifteen years of my life chasing a dream based partly on the premise that someone or something would make me feel fulfilled, content, satisfied, real, right, good… I thought a baby, a family, a home, what Zorba the Greek calls ‘the full catastrophe’ – […]

World Childless Week 2018: 10-16th September – sign up for my free webinar

August 19, 2018 Jody Day 0

The 2nd World Childless Week is happening from 10-16th September 2018 and I’m proud to be a World Childless Week Champion. World Childless Week was started by a British woman, Stephanie Phillips, in 2017 and, like so many grassroots initiatives, was born of personal experience and frustration – in Steph’s case that that our stories were missing from National Infertility Awareness Week (which tends to gravitate towards ‘miracle baby stories’), and that for those of us childless for any of the many other reasons, there was no awareness at all. Steph was already involved in administering and creating Facebook groups […]

10 Tips for Healing from the Heartbreak of Childlessness

July 18, 2018 Jody Day 13

Birthdays can be very hard work when you’re childless not by choice – reminding you of yet another year passed without the family you longed for and also socially excluded from the milestones and rituals that others around you get to experience and you don’t. That’s something that m/others often fail to grasp about our situation, that it’s not just that we didn’t get to have a baby, but that for the rest of our lives we’re either excluded or on the far reaches of the socializing and shared conversations that parenthood involves. Well, some good news for you… Today […]

“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 […]

Can love heal the pain of childlessness? A guest blog by Katherine Baldwin

July 6, 2017 Jody Day 11

“How on earth did I end up here?” I asked as I sat cross-legged on my bed, tears dripping onto my pyjamas. I was 41, single, childless and living alone in a beautiful but empty one-bedroom North London attic flat – no man in the kitchen buttering toast and no grubby little fingers smearing raspberry jam on my John Lewis duvet. The silence was deafening. Fast-forward five years and today I woke up to a different scene – to a smile, a cuddle and a kiss from my fiancé in a house with a garden close to the sea on […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

1 2 »