Single & Childless Archives - Page 3 of 6

[WATCH NOW] World Childless Week 2021 Free Masterclass: Childlessness & Sexual Intimacy

August 9, 2021 Jody Day 0

RECORDED ON TUESDAY 14TH SEPTEMBER 2021, 7PM UK TIME FOR WORLD CHIDLESS WEEK 2021 Since we hosted the Gateway Women Masterclass on Childlessness & Sexual Intimacy in May 2021, it’s proven to be one of our most popular and most watched discussions. It was an incredible experience for us to Host and for the Panellists to take part in too. So, when the discussions about this year’s World Childless Week ‘themes’ came up, we suggested that this should be one of them and it is. Tuesday 14th September 2021 is ‘Childlessness & Sexual Intimacy’ Day for World Childless Week. This […]

If you’ve ever wanted to have a productive conversation about childlessness with your friend, colleague or HR Director and found it too hard, listen to this brilliant interview by Doryn Wallach @It’s Not a Crisis Podcast – and maybe even share it with them? This is bridge-building in action.

July 26, 2021 Jody Day 0

You can listen to the clips above by clicking on them and find the full interview here or by searching ‘It’s Not a Crisis podcast’ wherever you get your podcasts. The full transcript is below. In this interview with Doryn Wallach, who is a mother in her 40s (as are most of her audience) we talk about the challenges of being childless in a world full of parents, how pronatalism operates, about how the whole ‘As a Mother’ thing works against childless/free women, about the difference between childless & childfree, about the complexity of childlessness after abortion, about what NOT […]

The next time someone suggests to you, ‘Why not have a baby on your own?’, like it’s an easy option, ask them to read ‘The Mother of All Dilemmas’ by Kathleen Guthrie Woods

July 23, 2021 Jody Day 0

When you’re a single and childless-by-circumstance woman approaching the event horizon of your fertility, still hopeful that somehow partnership and children might happen for you, one of the most common pieces of ‘helpful advice’ (and I use those quotes advisedly!) you might hear is, ‘Why don’t you just have one on your own?!’ It can also be phrased in the past tense, once you’re a little older, accompanied by that pitying head-tilt… These enquires are usually delivered as if this were (a) something that hadn’t ever occurred to you and (b) slam-dunk easy. When Guthrie Woods found herself in exactly […]

Gateway Women Masterclass: ‘Celebrating the Spinster’ with Donna Ward, Civilla Morgan & Shani Silver (Video + Written Transcript)

May 20, 2021 Jody Day 0

To celebrate the US publication of Donna Ward’s brilliant memoir, ‘She I Dare Not Name: A Spinster’s Meditations on Life’ we hope you enjoy this GW Masterclass on ‘Celebrating the Spinster’. To join us at future GW Masterclasses sign up at www.bit.ly/gw-masterclass As I wrote in my 2020 interview with Donna Ward about her book: She I Dare Not Name: A Spinster’s Meditations on Life energised me in a way that few books still have the capacity to do, so eloquently and accurately does it portray not only ‘the life unexpected’ (to paraphrase my own book’s title!) but also, the life […]

Gateway Women Masterclass: Childlessness and Sexual Intimacy: the taboo within the taboo

April 24, 2021 Jody Day 0

RECORDED LIVE ON SATURDAY 22 MAY 2021. TO REGISTER FOR FUTURE FREE GW MASTERCLASSES CLICK HERE Over the decade that I’ve been the vault of childless women’s most private stories, there’s one topic that comes up again and again, once they feel safe enough to talk about it: sexual intimacy. And yet, whenever I’ve tried to create some kind of group conversation around it, it’s fallen flat. It seems many of us are hungry for someone else to talk about this – as long it’s not us and our sex life! Whether we’re in a relationship or not, our sense […]

Free Gateway Women Masterclass Webinar: ‘Owning Your Single and Childless Identity’ (Recording now available)

February 2, 2021 Jody Day 0

Hosted by Jody Day, founder of Gateway Women and author of Living the Life Unexpected: How to Find Hope, Meaning and a Fulfilling Life Without Children (Bluebird/PanMac) with special guests Rachael Lloyd of eharmony UK and Melanie Notkin, founder of SavvyAuntie.com Click here to sign up to our list to hear about future free Gateway Women Masterclass Webinars. Sometimes being a single and childless woman can feel like a double-whammy in a society that privileges the rights of couples and mothers over the millions of wonderful women who are neither. And never has that felt more obvious than in this […]

Jody interviewed by Shani Silver of ‘The Single Serving’ Podcast – January 2021

January 9, 2021 Jody Day 0

I was so delighted to be the first guest for the 2021 season on Shani Silver’s “Single Serving” Podcast. You can listen here on her website where you’ll also find shownotes and links to other podcast plaftorms. A transcript of our wide-ranging and delightful conversation is below. And a big thank you to “S”, (you know who you are!) one of the members of Gateway Women ‘Single Life’ subgroup as well as Shani’s own membership community, for suggesting me as a guest on the show. To listen go to https://www.shanisilver.com/home/jody-day or search “Single Serving” at Apple, Spotify or iHeartRadio. Thank you […]

Meet the author of ‘Confessions of a Forty-Something F**k Up’ – a new novel by Alexandra Potter

January 2, 2021 Jody Day 0

Alexandra Potter is a British author, whose first novel ‘What’s New, Pussycat?’ was published in 2000, a week before her 30th birthday and immediately made the top ten. She has since written twelve novels of romantic comedy including ‘Be Careful What You Wish For’, ‘Me and Mr Darcy’ (which won Best New Fiction Award at the Jane Austen Regency World Awards) and ‘Love From Paris’ which was shortlisted for the RNA Comedy Award. Her latest book is Confessions of a Forty-something F##k Up and features a totally relatable single, childless, middle-aged woman as the main character, ‘Nell Stevens’, whose life […]

Never married, over sixty and childless: Donna Ward on living and writing an invisible story.

August 5, 2020 Jody Day 43

Full Transcript Below Donna Ward is an Australian writer, publisher and editor, living in Melbourne. Her 2020 book She I Dare Not Name: A Spinster’s Meditations on Life energised me in a way that few books still have the capacity to do, so eloquently and accurately does it portray not only ‘the life unexpected’ (to paraphrase my own book’s title!) but also, the life ‘invisible’ which is that of the unpartnered, childless woman in our society. In a world focused and built on the needs, attitudes, prejudices and ‘stories’ of those who couple and have children, to be a […]

“Single & Childless in a Pandemic” on The Full Stop Podcast

May 17, 2020 Jody Day 0

I was very happy to be interviewed as part of this special lockdown episode of the Full Stop Podcast on the experience of being single and childless during this pandemic. Although I’m now in a relationship, I was single for much of my forties as I went through the heartbreak and painful life-transformation of involuntary childlessness. And being both single and childless is something I write about in my book, as well as the experience of grieving childlessness whilst single, which has its own flavour compared to the challenges of grieving as a couple. Many members of the Gateway Women […]

Oppressed by advice… all over again!

April 4, 2020 Jody Day 13

When I think back to my days of wanting/trying to become a mother and then wanting/trying to recover from that and build a new kind of life that did not include motherhood, one of the things that eventually stopped me from discussing my situation with anyone – was advice. (For me, the fact that the last four-letter spell V.I.C.E seems very apt!) In my training to become a psychotherapist, one of the earliest things we learned (and it’s not an easy habit to break!) is to stop giving advice, either asked for or not, but instead to support our clients […]

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’ – […]

Book review: “Do You Have Kids? Life When the Answer is No” by Kate Kaufmann

July 17, 2019 Jody Day 2

Kate Kaufmann’s book, “Do You Have Kids? Life When the Answer is No’ is the latest addition to a pleasingly growing pile of books about women without children that I am now asked to review. A decade ago, when I first realised that my childlessness was the terrifying endpoint of my fifteen year journey towards motherhood, there was practically nothing out there, apart from a couple of books which were out of print then (and now), such as Rachel Black and Louise Scull’s 2012 Beyond Childlessness and Linda Hunt Anton’s 1992 Never to be a Mother, neither of which I […]

“Mum’s not the Word” a moving and candid photobook of women without children by Denise Felkin

May 30, 2019 Jody Day 5

Mum’s Not The Word: Childless, Childfree by Denise Felkin is a new book published by Earthworld in the UK on 4 June 2019 which shares stories of choice, freedom, regret and pain in a series of 50 photographic images, each one of a different woman lying naked on a duvet in the foetal position. All of the women have one thing in common – they do not have children. Statistics show that an increasing number of women remain childless: currently around 20% in the UK. The book sets out to challenge the antiquated and negative stereotypes that picture women without children […]

Letting go of the old year…

December 31, 2018 Jody Day 2

Amongst the myriad exhortations to embrace the new year with gusto, I wanted to make space for those less glamourous feelings – of loss, sadness, grief, wistfulness and confusion which are so much a part of every life, and so often close to the surface for those of us living the life unexpected. I thought you might find this recording of my Reflect & Renew webinar which I hosted last week (29th December 2018) to talk about feelings that come up at this ‘in-between’ liminal moment in the year, and how to cope with them. There are also questions from viewers […]

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