Video Interviews – Gateway Women

Gateway Women’s 10th Anniversary ‘Ask Jody Anything’ Session

April 3, 2021 Jody Day 2

Recorded live on 17th April, 2021. To sign up for future Masterclasses go to bit.ly/gw-masterclass April 2021 is Gateway Women’s 10th Anniversary month, which is pretty mind-blowing. Ten years since I sat alone with just my keyboard for company – partnerless, friendless, petless, jobless and soon to be pretty well much homeless, as my ability to cope with life admin came increasingly unstuck whilst in deep grief over my childlessness. Ten years since I pressed ‘publish’ on that very first blog and thought to myself, ‘Well, maybe one woman out there will understand.’ Ten years since I gave my first […]

Jody’s lecture on disenfranchised grief for York University’s ‘Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience” Project

March 14, 2021 Jody Day 3

The disenfranchised grief of involuntary childlessness: A living loss that society dismisses: a talk by Jody Day, psychotherapist, author and founder of ‘Gateway Women’ Delivered 4th March 2021 for York University’s ‘Grief: A Human Emotional Experience’ – a 4-year AHRC-funded project for the Department of Philosophy, University of York, UK. The overarching aim of ‘Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience’ is to develop a detailed, wide-ranging, and integrated account of what it is to experience grief, focusing on aspects of grief that are of considerable theoretical and practical importance but remain poorly understood. For more about the project go […]

2 free webinars + 1 Podcast + 1 Instagram Live + Free Tickets to Childless Collective Summit + Support for UK Mother’s Day + Tutum Quarterly, a new journal for the childless community

March 12, 2021 Jody Day 2

Goodness gracious me it’s been a bit busy around here! There’s an old saying that says ‘be careful what you wish for’ and one of my dreams has been that the work of Gateway Women and the subject of involuntary childlessness is something that would begin to get more mainstream, serious recognition… and these last few weeks I’ve been working my socks off on a couple of really important projects that totally fit this. The first one was to create a video training series for COSRT (The UK College of Sex and Relationship Therapists) on ‘The Impact of Involuntary Childlessness on Sexual […]

Jody Day interviewed by Ben A. Eisner of ‘The Knitted Heart’ Podcast: February 2021

February 25, 2021 Jody Day 1

Above is a short clip from the interview. You can listen to the full interview on the Knitted Heart website here and read the full transcript below. And please, please do leave a review on Apple Podcasts – it’s hugely helpful for podcast creators who put so much love, work and expenses into creating podcasts! I absolutely loved being interviewed by Ben A. Eisner for his ‘Knitted Heart‘ podcast in February 2021. Ben describes Knitted Heart as being about “the inter-connectivity of everyone and everything, and our collective responsibility to heal, restore, and unify the world we share. Knitted Heart […]

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

August 5, 2020 Jody Day 45

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 […]

‘Meet the Author’ discussion with Jackie Shannon Hollis, author of ‘This Particular Happiness: A Childless Love Story’

November 11, 2019 Jody Day 4

A recording of a one-hour Gateway Women book club webinar, hosted by Jody Day, author and founder of Gateway Women, interviewing Jackie Shannon Hollis, author of This Particular Happiness: A Childless Love Story, published in September 2019 and for which I wrote the Foreword. Jackie’s wonderful book (hey, who’s going to argue with Cheryl Strayed?!) is available as a paperback, an e-book and is also available as an audio-book via Audible. Do order it now. And of course, you’ll need to read Jackie’s novel/memoir, for which I wrote the Foreword. It’s available as a paperback, e-book and audiobook Jody Day’s FOREWORD to […]

World Childless Week 2019 starts tomorrow – here are 40 free on/offline things you can join in with!

September 15, 2019 Jody Day 0

As you may already know, I’m a World Childless Week ‘Champion’ which means I support the campaign and do I all can behind the scenes to make it a success. And it’s that time of year again (no, not that time of the year!) – the 3rd World Childless Week is next week and there are so many wonderful free events happening on/offline around the world for you to take part in. If some of the links to things on the Gateway Women website are slow to be open, please be patient, they will open – we’re upgrading our server […]

Would you swim the Channel to understand if motherhood makes you happy?

January 19, 2019 Jody Day 3

Jessica Hepburn is an extraordinary woman. I mean, properly extraordinary. Not only is she the veteran of eleven rounds of unsuccessful IVF but she’s also one of a very small group of people who’ve successfully swum the English Channel – that deceptively narrow stretch of water, just 21 miles across – that separates England from France. And she’s doesn’t even like exercise! These two things are intimately and surprisingly connected, as Jessica explains in this short, moving and funny interview she gave to me in 2018 just before the publication of her book, 21 Miles: Swimming in Search of the […]

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 […]

Where are the childless voices in the celebrations over IVF’s 40th anniversary?

July 15, 2018 Jody Day 9

If you weren’t already aware, in ten day’s time, on 25th July 2018, Louise Brown, the first person to be born from IVF turns forty – so it’s IVF’s 40th birthday too. There’s going to be a big party at the Science Museum in London and the UK HFEA (Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority), and other fertility organisations are in self congratulatory mood. This tweet says it all (thank you to my colleague Dr. Robin Hadley for this) and a sobering reminder of how often IVF fails – almost 80% of the time. In response to this tweet, the HFEA had […]

Embracing the Grief of Childlessness – a video recording of my More to Life webinar in July 2018

July 9, 2018 Jody Day 5

Click the image above or this link to watch or share: https://youtu.be/6M4EE7UIBfQ Learning that the despair that I was feeling around my childlessness was GRIEF was the beginning of my healing. That was seven years ago, and I’ve been in a good place with my childlessness for five years now – in fact, I’m pretty sure I feel as at peace with my childlessness now as if I had chosen it – although I still have my ‘griefy moments’ – usually when a new aspect of my loss that I hadn’t been aware of before comes into view and my heart […]

“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 […]

“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 […]

We are all born worthy; childlessness cannot take that away.

April 19, 2018 Jody Day 5

One of the things that almost all of the thousands of childless women I’ve spoken to, corresponded with or worked with over the last seven years have in common has been a sense of unworthiness: unworthy as women, as ‘real’ adults, as sexual beings, as valid members of society, even (as I mention in my video below), as members of the human race. For those who are childless due to infertility or other physical reasons there can be a deep sense of betrayal by our own bodies. For those of us childless due to circumstance, particularly if it involved not […]

An album about coming to terms with childlessness – Seamonster, by Chiara Berardelli

March 19, 2018 Jody Day 2

Seamonster is a new album by the Scottish singer/songwriter Chiara Berardelli. In it, she chronicles her own journey through grieving her childlessness, the support and solace she found in the Gateway Women online community, and her Plan B life that gradually took (and is taking) shape in place of the family she always expected to have. As she says on the notes for the album here: The songs on this album have been inspired by the loss of a dream, my dream of one day becoming a mother. It’s an invisible loss, hard to put into words, even harder to […]

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