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 […]

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 […]

My 9th Childless Christmas & 3 Gifts for You

December 16, 2018 Jody Day 0

This is my ninth childless Christmas. Well, nine years since that first awful year when I came out of denial that my childlessness was a permanent ‘thing’, not just some inconvenient stopover on my path to motherhood. I can’t really remember that first Christmas because, although I’d ‘accepted’ in my head that I wasn’t going to be a mother, ever, in my heart and body there raged such a fire of confusion that I thought it was going to burn me alive. I didn’t yet know that what I was experiencing was grief; I didn’t find that out until almost […]

Fairy Tales, Gremlins & Childlessness: a guest post by Lauren de Vere

August 25, 2018 Jody Day 16

This is a guest post by Lauren de Vere, one of our lovely UK licensed Gateway Women Reignite Weekend facilitators. Lauren is 54 and lives in Greater London with her cat, Mr. Marvo. You can find out more details about Lauren’s Reignite Weekends here, including a ‘Solo Reignite’ weekend she’ll be co-facilitating for unpartnered childless women in February 2019. Leave a comment for Lauren at the bottom of her article or contact her directly at: lauren@gateway-women.com Recently I’ve been rewinding, replaying and reviewing my childlessness in terms of the history of events leading to it and the role I’ve played […]

“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 […]

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 […]

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