FREE, LIVE & RECORDED: Saturday 10th May 2025 Register here to attend live and/or receive the recording.There will be a 15-minute Q&A at the end where you can ask your questions anonymously (off camera), and there's also a space to add them on the Zoom Registration form.
Katy Seppi and Jody Day talk Mother’s Day and More
Mother’s Day takes place in May for most of the world, earlier in the year for the UK & Ireland. But whenever it lands for you, it’s rarely inconsequential for those of us who are childless not by choice.
The day can be tricky for many intertwined reasons on top of our own thwarted motherhood, including mourning our own mothers and/or managing our challenging relationships with them; insensitive family members, colleagues and the wider culture; the exagerrated visiblity of our difference on Mother’s Day (particularly if also unpartnered); and the way that the day can surface other ungrieved life losses, including the absence of grandchildren.
For these reasons and many more, perhaps it’s not surprising that, in my 14 years of supporting involuntarily childless women, Mother’s Day often proves to be the most triggering day in the calendar after Christmas. However, I’ve also learned by trial and error that all losses can be witnessed, and even transformed, in community and with empathic support – both internally and externally.
And that’s why I’ve invited Katy Seppi, founder of the Childless Collective, to join me for this free GW Masterclass Webinar to share how we’ve each developed our own tools and techniques to manage the feelings that Mother’s Day can evoke, and what we’ve learned from supporting others to do the same through our work with the childless community globally.
Join us for an hour of candid, heartfelt and no doubt occasionally humorous chat as we touch the highs and lows of childlessness. Our hope is that you will leave this hour with some fresh ideas about how you can better navigate Mother’s Day in a way that both honours your experience, and makes it just that little bit easier to carry.
In addition, if you are looking for connection and support on Mother's Day, the Childless Collective hosts a live, round-the-clock support chat covering all the time zones where it's Mother's Day on May 11th (something it does on UK/IE Mother's Day and other 'trigger days' too). Access/join here.
JODY DAY (60s) is an English/Irish psychotherapist and the founder of Gateway Women. She’s the author of Living the Life Unexpected: How to Find Hope, Meaning and a Fulfilling Future Without Children (PanMac 2016/2020). A World Childless Week Ambassador since its inception in 2017, she was chosen as one of the BBC’s 100 Women in 2013 & as a UK Digital Woman of the Year in 2021. She was also a founding and former board member at the UK Charity Ageing Without Children, and is a former Fellow in Social Innovation at Cambridge Judge Business School. Having created and hosted the Gateway Women Online Community for a decade, in 2022 she passed its stewardship to Katy Seppi, who now hosts it as the ‘Childless Collective’ online community. This has freed her up to focus on her Gateway Elderwomen project, developing projects around ‘Elderhood without Motherhood’, and she’s currently engaged in developing her pilot project for ‘Alterkin’ (Alternative Kinship Networks) to create a mutual-aid, hyper-local, community of care for those ageing without children. After a lifetime in London, she now lives in rural Ireland and is working on two new books. She is managed by a small scruffy terrier called Puffin McCool.
Gateway Women Masterclasses, hosted by Jody Day, are conversations with the leading writers, therapists, activists, healers, community-creators ders and change-makers in the childless community globally. To watch previous GW Masterclasses click here. To sign up to hear about future free GW Masterclasses, click here.
