Childless & Childfree Role Models Archives - Page 4 of 5

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 […]

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 […]

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 invisible grief of the childless-by-circumstance woman

April 4, 2017 Jody Day 18

*** Childlessness has always been around, mostly because of reproductive infertility, as there are still very few parts of the world where it is possible for a woman to choose a life other than motherhood and tosupport herself economically to live that choice. However, whilst we think of ‘social infertility’ or ‘circumstantial infertility’ as something very new, in the UK, we’ve been here before. Whilst currently, one in five (20%) of women like me, born in the 1960s turned 45 without having had children (double that of our mother’s generation), this was also the case for those women born around 1900. […]

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 […]

Talking About Childlessness: Jody Day interviews Alicia Orre of www.aliciaorre.com

November 1, 2015 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 […]

Talking About Childlessness: a video interview with Karen Malone Wright, Founder of TheNotMom.com

September 19, 2015 Jody Day 11

One of the thing that has helped me so much in my recovery from unchosen 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 with their lives in ways that felt meaningful to them. Firstly, because I didn’t know women like that, and secondly […]

Talking about childlessness: a video interview with Christine Erickson, author of ‘The Mother Within’

June 11, 2015 Jody Day 12

One of the thing that has helped me the most in recovering from childlessness has been, and continues to be, hearing other women’s stories. Over the last few years I’ve got to know some amazing childless women as sisters, role models and friends and it’s been a privilege and a delight that I wanted to share with you. This video interview, recorded in June 2015 is with Christine Erickson, the American author of The Mother Within: A Guide To Accepting Your Childless Journey, published on Amazon Kindle in May 2015 and nominated for an International Book Award. It is the first in a […]

Honouring Your Childlessness on Mother’s Day

March 13, 2015 Jody Day 33

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 […]

Things I wish I’d known at 40

July 16, 2014 Jody Day 60

This week, I celebrate my 50th birthday. It feels like a heck of a thing, to find myself turning 50 at peace with the past, happy in the present and excited about the future. It didn’t come easily and, looking back over the screenplay of my 40s it does seem to include just about everything from farce to tragedy… So that got me thinking about boldly going into a new decade where no Jody has gone before – if I could talk to my 40-year-old self, what would I want her to know about the decade ahead? Here are some […]

This Wild and Precious Life

April 8, 2014 Jody Day 7

Gateway Women turned three years old last weekend. It’s now 3 years since I published my first blog about being childless-by-circumstance titled Light at the End of the Tunnel and in which I described the space that had been my uncomfortable home for many years: Welcome to ‘the tunnel’. That narrow, cramped claustrophobic space that gets more cramped as each year passes. Made for one. The only view ahead is a very narrow shaft of light, somewhere off in the distance. And behind you in the dark is every wrong decision, every failed relationship, every missed opportunity. The tunnel. A lonely, pressurized […]

DoubleWhammy: Single & Childless

October 29, 2013 Jody Day 142

Very soon it will be the UK’s third National Fertility Awareness week which is being organised by Infertility Network UK, the British charity which supports those undergoing infertility treatment. Cue lots of ‘miracle baby stories’ in the press about couples that despaired of ever having a child but who managed thanks to the help of this amazing science. The week even ends with the annual hopefest that is The Fertility Show at London’s Olympia, an entire exhibition hall filled with stands from fertility clinics and associated industries looking to ‘educate’ (sell to) potential new ‘parents’ (customers). But what I bet we […]

Be part of the conversation that ends the taboo of childlessness

September 23, 2013 Jody Day 1

Perhaps one of the hardest things for me in dealing with my childlessness, and one of the driving forces that led me to start writing this blog in 2011, was that nobody would let me talk about my situation. I was so frequently closed down with a ‘miracle baby story’ or even a stinging remark like ‘can’t you talk about anything else?’ that I gave up trying to talk about it at all. I shut-up and shutdown. But why wouldn’t anyone let me talk about it? Why was the fact that I wanted to have a family and it didn’t work […]

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 […]

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 […]

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