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 to ask a childless woman (including questions about adoption, IVF, etc), about whether childless people who work with kids are able to understand them as well as parents, about why challenging pronatalism in the workplace is the thing that I think is the most important thing that needs to happen next, about why childless/free people don't have to defend/compete with mothers for the busy badge, and many more of the tricky things that crop up and blow up between mothers and women without children. Doryn is a curious, reflective interviewer and a great listener, really honest about her blind spots and I am so proud to share this conversation with you. This is bridge-building in action and if there is a parent-friend, colleague (or HR Director!) in your life that you feel would take the time to listen to this, I hope it really helps. Because until we can start having these conversations without being reactive or defensive, pronatalism will continue to divide us. And it's time to call time on pronatalism and for women without and without children to support each other. Find Doryn Wallach on Instagram @ItsNotACrisisPodcast and on Facebook and on all major podcast platforms.
FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW
Doryn Wallach
Welcome to ‘It’s Not a Crisis’ – I am your host Doryn Wallach, I’m an entrepreneur, a mother of two, a wife and a 40 something, trying to figure out what is happening in this decade. Why is no one talking about it? I created this podcast to help women in their late 30s and 40s to figure out what is going on in our mind, body, soul and life. We may laugh, we may cry, we may get frustrated, but most importantly, my goal is to make this next chapter of life positive. I’m also full of my own questions and I’m here to go on this journey with you. So let’s do it together.
Hello, my amazing women and listeners, I’m very excited for today’s episode as I am for all my episodes but this is going to be, in some ways a second part to last week’s podcast where I had Marsha Drut Davis on here who was just amazing. She spoke about her many years of fighting for women and the right to be childfree. And until I spoke to her I didn’t realize that childless and childfree are different things that I actually felt a little bit of shame being a woman that didn’t know that. So today, We’re going to cover childless, knowing that many of you are parents, I do have some listeners that have asked for this topic so I hope that we’ve brought some clarity to the subject and at the same time, this pertains to every woman, and I believe it’s truly our duty to educate ourselves on this topic so that we can support other women, rather than putting them down and making them feel shame about their situation or saying the wrong things. I have a lot to learn. I learned a lot from last week’s episode so make sure you check that out if you haven’t, and I am just very excited today to welcome my guest, Jody Day. Jody Day is the founder of Gateway Women, the global friendship and support network for childless women with a social reach of 2-million. Founded in, 2011. She’s the author of ‘Living the Life Unexpected, How to Find Hope, Meaning, and a Fulfilling Future without Children’, chosen as one of the BBCs 100 Women in 2013. She’s a global thought leader on female involuntary childlessness an integrative psychotherapist, a TEDx speaker, a social entrepreneur, a founding and former board member at Ageing Well without Children, and a former fellow in social innovation at Cambridge Judge Business School. In 2021 She was nominated by the UK organization, Digital Women as a digital woman to watch, and as a finalist in their digital role models category. Often referred to as the voice of the childless generation, and less often, but more memorably as the Beyonce of childlessness. She is also a World Childless Week champion and PLICA, Ambassador. She lives in Ireland where she is working on a novel, and her new conscious childless, elderwomen project, Jody, welcome.
Jody Day
Thank you, Doryn it’s really lovely to be here.
Doryn
That’s a pretty impressive bio. It looks like you’ve done so much for this which is so wonderful. I’m so happy to have you here. Tell me what sparked your passion for this subject.
Jody
Well, like so many things in life, it came from personal experience of being childless not by choice myself, trying to talk to people about it, trying to find resources to support me with it and finding absolutely nothing – no books, no support from therapists, nothing from Dr. Google, and certainly nothing from friends or family, or the wider culture. So it started as a blog 10 years ago in 2011, me typing into the void, thinking well maybe one woman will read this and get what it is I’m going through? And well, the void spoke back, and you know it’s has become in 10 years you know the the best known global support network for women who are childless not by choice, and all of those other things that you mentioned in the intro: I’ve been busy.
Doryn
Yes, really busy, but so so admirable, do you mind discussing, you know, what made you childless,
Jody
Not at all. I mean I wrote a blog on my site I’m back in 2012 called 50 ways not to be a mother in brackets with apologies to Paul Simon, it no longer says that because the Millennials and the Gen Z’s don’t know what I’m talking about. But it’s that idea that there are so many ways, not to be a mother, whereas there is this kind of dichotomy in society where we tend to think that if a woman doesn’t have children, she either didn’t want them, what we call childfree or she couldn’t have them, ie: infertile, but that’s actually only covers 20% of those women who reach midlife without children, 80% of women are childless by circumstance, and my story is kind of a bit of a mixture of them all.
When I was a kid I didn’t think I wanted to have children. I grew up in a very unhappy and disrupted home. And for me the idea of family was not something that was really something I wanted or looked forward to. My own mother didn’t seem to be having a great time of it so I had other ideas for my life. Then I got pregnant accidentally when I was 20 in a serious relationship and although my partner was, was fine for us to have the child, I was terrified, absolutely terrified of motherhood, because the message I got from my family and also from the wider culture at school and places like that was that, having children ruins your life as a woman, you know, there was none of this kind of adulation of motherhood that there is right now. So, I had an abortion, it was the right thing for me I was, I was quite emotionally immature at 20 I was still very traumatised from my childhood, I would have been a really rubbish mother. I probably just would have passed on all of the trauma, you know, to my own kids.
So I moved through my 20s I met the man that later became my husband, I said to him, I don’t think I want to have children, he was like, okay, and we were married for a few years and I began to realise that revise my idea of what family might mean that it didn’t mean having my childhood, again, that we could actually have a child together and it would be our child a product of our love. And so I said, Actually, I think I do want to have a family, and he was like okay, these really huge conversations that can derail relationships were straightforward for us but unfortunately that was the only straightforward bit. I couldn’t get pregnant. A couple of years later, we started having investigations. I had an operation called a laparoscopy, which is where they stick a camera down through your, your navel and have a look around. And the very avuncular Harley Street surgeon, as I came out of the anaesthetic said, ‘absolutely first class uterus, find this property I’ve seen all week, you lovely young people just go off and have lots of sex’, but that was it. That was a total amount of fertility advice I got so there was no structural reason why I couldn’t conceive, and no damage from the abortion, no endometriosis or any of the other things that you know might have been diagnosed. And so we carried on trying, and it didn’t work, and I entered a period of what I would call ‘babymania’, that’s what I described in my book which was everything was about trying to get pregnant, moved through my 30s desperate to conceive, trying every alternative treatment there was just, I might as well have just rushed around London sort of stuffing bundles of notes through people’s doors you know it was just, you know shamanism acupuncture, whatever, someone said would help me get pregnant I tried, you know, standing on my head, all kinds of things after sex you name it. My husband was you know stuffed full of vitamin pills and all kinds of things but nothing worked. Our hormone profiles, all of our fertility checks, everything was fine. It was unexplained infertility, and I never got to the bottom of it.
And as I moved through our 30s, the combined pressure of my infertility, although I never called myself infertile, I was someone who was going to get pregnant, I wasn’t infertile, and my then husband’s increasing kind of workaholism, and other addictions, sort of just came to a head to a perfect storm at 37 I had a massive nervous breakdown. The marriage came to an end and I sort of was spat out the other end, you know, was the end of a partnership we’d been together 16 years. And really I was 40, internet dating, desperate to meet someone and try IVF, not in a good shape mentally or emotionally to be dating, but I did have two relationships post-divorce, neither of which were right to try for – one man didn’t want to have any more children, the other one did, but luckily we never got as far as IVF because it would have been a really really tough relationship to continue. So at 44 and a half with that relationship ended as well I realised it was game over for me and motherhood, which was very late to come out of denial about it, but it was a hell of a shock to realize that my childlessness was not some temporary, and inconvenient stop on the way to motherhood, but it was the destination, and that I was going to be childless, for the rest of my life.
Doryn
Did you ever consider other options or is that just not for you?
Jody
Well as a single self-employed person without savings and without my own home, newly single at 44 and a half – there weren’t a great many options.
Doryn Wallach
Yeah, that’s a lot.
Jody
You know, when if you’d like to adopt you need to, number one, and this is for very good reasons, they do prioritize couples over single people who are looking to adopt. So even if I had been approved, I may not have ever been matched, and also they look for people who have secure financial, logistical and emotional support networks around them. And now that I am a qualified psychotherapist and I understand so much more about child development and that you know the probable needs of those, of those young lives, I realized how supported adoptive parents need to be – how supported, they need to be. So I wouldn’t, I, I never was that interested personally in adoption I was desperate to have a biological child of my own. I’ve never met my own biological father. So the idea. I think I really wanted a biological child, and other fertility options like donor eggs and IVF and doing all those things on my own. I was too old and too broke.
Doryn Wallach
Did they ever tell you what might be the issue about getting pregnant?
Jody
No, That’s why they call it unexplained infertilty.
Doryn
I mean that that seems so baffling to me that, about 70% of cases are unexplained, and as a woman that must make you, I mean, I can’t imagine how that must make you feel when you don’t have a lot of, I’m not gonna say every woman but we do like to control things sometimes! Because we’re capable of that I would imagine that was really difficult to not have an answer.
Jody
It was really difficult and sometimes when I even now, even though I’m in a really good place with my childlessness, you know if a new piece of information comes to light about new reasons why they’re kind of discovering why it’s likely that people don’t conceive. If it’s something that I think, ‘Oh, could it have been that? Could it have been my thyroid? Could it have been this?’ You know, there’s still a part of me. Even though I no longer want a baby, there is still a little question mark in my mind about what was it, I think, I think I often thought it must be my, my then-husband, and it was a really rude awakening. About two years after we’d split, he got someone accidentally pregnant, either the pregnancy didn’t take or she chose not to go ahead with it I’m not entirely sure what, but when he told me that, that’s when I kind of completely came out of denial I think about. No, it really was me. It really was me, because he’d, you know, he’d had a girlfriend pregnant in his past, and she hadn’t had the baby, and I’ve been pregnant and I thought well I was pregnant once so surely I must be able to get pregnant again. And there was no damage, you know, no physical damage that they could find from the abortion procedure so it was just a mystery and many, many women, You know, one in one in three women in the UK, one in four women in the US has an abortion. Many, many of them go on to be mothers, but also many of them go on to be childless, and there’s a lot of extra shame around that as if somehow, where you had the chance to be a mom, and you turned it down so you don’t get to grieve, you don’t get to have sympathy and a lot of women who are childless after abortion. Also don’t give themselves any sympathy and compassion. It’s a really tough one.
Doryn
Yeah, I can’t even imagine I mean, you know, I think, on one hand, you know that you can get pregnant or you knew at some point you could get pregnant. And that’s, you know, listen, it’s it’s a choice, it was obviously a smart choice for you at that time of your life and I think many other women have had to make that choice and realize down the line that, you know, their lives would have been completely different and they wouldn’t have been the best mom they could have been if they hadn’t made that choice so, but I, I hear you that, you know women must feel some sort of, I don’t know, shame or wonder if that had something to do with it.
Jody
I mean in the UK, abortion is not such a hot topic,as it is in the US; it’s not religious, it’s not political, it’s medical and personal. So it’s not such a big deal to talk about or experience, you know, afterwards. I mean it’s still a very big deal to experience at the time, but even amongst British women where it doesn’t have that hotter context like it does in the United States, there’s still a lot of shame about being childless after abortion.
Doryn
You know I haven’t talked about this on my podcast but I was a pre-abortion counselor in college at Planned Parenthood, actually one of the best jobs I ever had. It was very difficult to going to work every day with protesters, every single day outside of the building shaming me for even working there. But, but one of the things that I discovered I was young, you know I was twenty, twenty-one. One of the things that I discovered was that so many of the women that I did the pre-abortion counseling with very few of them were there using abortion as birth control, many of them were there, they accidentally got pregnant they were on birth control and an antibiotic and it knocked out their birth control, or I had a few women that were actually raped by their husbands that are very religious women who didn’t want more children and their husbands would rape them to have more children – just crazy, crazy stuff, and it was very eye-opening for me. It really was, I think that you know it’s an experience I wish everybody could experience because there is a lot of judgment in the US about this, and,
Jody
And a lot of misinformation,
Doryn
A lot of misinformation absolutely
Jody
…about why women and couples, sometimes choose abortion, out of necessity. Yeah, I don’t know anyone who’s had an abortion for a casual reason, not a single one.
Doryn
Right, right. Can you explain I know so, so hopefully my listeners listened to my last episode, but as we talk about childless, just to reiterate this explain the difference between childless and childfree?
Jody
Oh, with pleasure. I wish every interviewer would ask that I usually try and get it in quite early. Childless means that you are, you don’t have children, and that wasn’t the choice that wasn’t the plan. You had wanted to be a mother, childfree means that you have chosen not to have children, you’ve decided that parenthood isn’t for you, for both men and women. Now one of the interesting things is that that does look like two buckets. It can be a little bit of a continuum. And you can slightly move between that continuum over the course of your lifetime, you know, I sort of was more childfree when I was younger, I was then I was quite ambivalent, then I became definitely childless. And I would say that as I move further and further through my recovery from my physical childlessness, I’m actually starting to develop a more childfree state of mind because I’m not grieving, and I no longer regret my childlessness or the choices that led up to it. But, Marsha, the and that you know your amazing guests from last week, I’ve had the privilege of meeting and sharing a platform with – there are people who are childfree, very, very early on in life, just absolutely sure that being a parent isn’t for them. And it’s a choice I really respect, and often childless and childfree women are sort of pitted against each other. And I wish that didn’t happen so much but it’s a really important distinction because we may look the same on the outside, but our interior worlds are very very different and that’s often because childless people are grieving, you know, they didn’t get the life they wanted childfree women are often celebrating because they did get the life they wanted.
Doryn
That’s so well put. But I think the thing that they both have in common is that women tend to be shamed whether it was their fault or not or their choice or not. And I just felt so passionate about, you know, in general, I feel passionate about women supporting women and not putting each other down. And I just, I feel like in either situation we need to learn what to say and not to say, how to celebrate or mourn with somebody who’s going through this I think it’s really important. So, that that’s kind of my goal today What are the numbers of women without children? Have you seen any trends over time and these numbers? I have noticed a little bit and maybe, maybe I’m wrong. I feel like this newer generation of women, girls, even Gen Z, Gen Millennial, seem to be fighting more for their right to make the decision to marry or not marry or have children or not have children and it seems to be hopefully a little bit more accepted in either way. I don’t know if you’ve seen that as well but I’d love to hear more about the numbers and the trends.
Jody
Absolutely. Well I’m born in 1964, so depending on which chart you consult I’m either the last year of the Baby Boomers or the first year, have said Gen X or Gen Z I can never remember Gen X, I think, and over the time that I’ve been sort of childless and supporting other childless women, anecdotally, I’ve seen a really big change, but also the numbers are very high. So for me for my, for my cohort, my 10 year period of the 60s in the UK, it was one in four, and it was about that for the US as well. The numbers have dropped slightly in the UK, it’s one in five in the UK at the moment, one in six in the US. Now, those numbers are numbers of women reaching midlife without children. So those are the kind of the bare stats, they don’t really say who chose it, and who didn’t, who is childfree, and who was childless.
However, a meta-analysis of both the UK and European data would suggest that the number of women who are reaching midlife without children who choose it, it’s a lot smaller than people think, it’s about six to 10%. So let’s say 90% of those women, it wasn’t a choice. 10% of them it will be infertility or another medical condition and 80% Eight zero percent is childless by circumstance.
And the biggest circumstance, and the one that is growing so much amongst the women I support, are women who didn’t find a willing or suitable partner during their fertile years; so they’re with a partner who already has children and doesn’t want more, or a partner who doesn’t want children or, and this is quite often the case, a male partner who isn’t ready yet to have children, and keeps kicking it down the line, and it gets to a certain point when the female partner says it’s now or never. And the relationship ends. Meanwhile, a woman has aged right through her 30s, and her options at thirty-nine or forty to meet someone else, and still managed to have a baby, are very very small at that point. So there are real big disparities between male and female fertility in your 30s. And I think, I didn’t really understand them, and I think a lot of men don’t really understand perhaps that they, they might have more responsibility to get clearer about what they want a little bit sooner.
And certainly for the Millennial generation coming up, more and more of them are childless by circumstance, but also their circumstances are structural, as well. They are to do with the difficulty now for a young person in establishing themselves in the world in terms of finishing their training, paying off their debts, getting onto the housing ladder, getting secure employment, getting those things in place that make it feel like it’s safe to have a child. And then we had the 2008 global meltdown, which massively changed the landscape, and which our societies have not recovered from. And now we have the 2020, 2021 pandemic. I think the sense of security that many people naturally want to feel before they have a family has been completely taken out from a whole generation’s calculations, and we are starting to see the impact of that in the stats. In 2019 The US showed its lowest ever birth rate, I think recently they just posted something similar as well and the number of women who’ve had children, by the age of 30 is much, much, much less than 20 years ago.
Now obviously, women are giving birth later -there are a lot more women are giving birth in their early 40s now, but I think we will see as the generation ages into their mid-40s, I think we’re going to see a lot more involuntary childlessness, but I think we as you were pointing to, I think we’re going to see a lot more voluntary childlessness – choosing to be childfree – because I think, is becoming destigmatized. And I think, you know when you’re making choices around things like climate change, economics, security, lifestyle, cost, many other things, a lot of young people are going, actually, I don’t think I can bring it I don’t think I can afford to have a child.
Doryn
Yeah, you know, this is so interesting, it just sparked something in me. I got pregnant in 2007 and married in 2003. I keep saying, 2000 and, I don’t know it’s 2003.
Jody
You’ve been talking to a lot of British people!
Doryn
I know, I know – what’s going on here! 2003 I got married, and 911 was what 2001, I believe? I remember sitting on the couch and my now husband’s apartment, and on the phone with my mom and my dad separately, crying and saying, I’m not bringing a child into this world, like I’m not gonna even get married like I don’t want to. I don’t want to risk like marrying someone and losing him or bringing a child into this world and I was very, very upset and passionate about it at that moment it really took me a while to feel like it was okay. So, you know, I can see how that must be impactful in today’s day and age, I feel like things have only gotten scarier in the past few years,
Jody
It is a natural response to, you know when the environment around us, you know feel shaky socially shaky, in times of war or famine, or pandemics or any of these things, it is very normal for the birth rate to shrink as people’s choices and opportunities change. I don’t think we’ve ever seen quite so many things simultaneously making it difficult for young people to make the transition into parenthood though. It’s almost like the way our societies are structured is changing dramatically. And I agree, some people will always be having children even if, you know, even if circumstances aren’t ideal, but it might require thinking about different ways of doing it and I’m certainly the young people that I know in my life – my nephews and nieces and children’s friends who are in their 20s, you know, they are a lovely generation, and they are very different. And I think they will probably find different ways to solve these problems. I’m not sure what they are yet. And by golly, we need different ways to solve these problems because the old ways, it’s broke!
Doryn
That’s for sure. I you know I talked about this a little bit with Marsha, but the word pronatalism is actually a word that I didn’t, I have never really heard, until recently, can you explain what that is?
Jody
Yes, and beware this is like taking the red pill, once you know about pronatalism, you can’t stop seeing it! Pronatalism is the ideology, which is a subset of patriarchy, which says that being a parent means you are more important than someone who is not a parent that your opinions have greater value, that your life has greater status. It can be seen very very clearly in the phrase ‘as a mother’, which immediately puts value in front of whatever it is the woman says next – whether she’s talking about something relating to parenthood and child-rearing or not! Nobody says as a childless woman – it is not a statement of value. As a mother, whatever it is, you’ve got more value, and you’ve only got to see how even Z-list celebrities now can make the cover of a magazine for being pregnant. I’m sorry, it’s not a great skill.
Doryn
Yeah, I’m always one to admit when I feel that I’ve, you know, thought one way or done something, I, you know, it’s certainly run through my head at points, not thinking that I’m superior because I have children, more in the context of people who, who attempt to say that they understand children without having children if that makes any sense, whether it be had been a therapist working with my child or you know somebody else in my head I’m thinking, how do you, I mean it’s great that you have education but by the way, I have a psychological background as well in school, but if I need to change that thinking you know I think I do think sometimes when you know, there are, you know, I worked with kids a lot before I had children. And I certainly did not understand, while, by the way, I still don’t understand children, understand them better now that I’ve had them! However, I was so young, you know, so that wasn’t even in my thought process and one of the things actually that I spoke of with Marsha was ways of parenting in your life that aren’t necessarily parenting a child – you know there’s, you know birthing something that’s a hobby or a plant or an animal or an idea or, you know, Something along those lines, I thought that was so beautiful because, naively, I never think about that but you know that didn’t go through my head but there are many ways to understand what it’s like to be a mother without being a mother.
Jody
I mean there’s a few points in there I think just to circle back to the idea that someone who isn’t a parent, personally, doesn’t have an understanding of a child on an on a professional level, it’s something that if you’re a childless teacher, you hear all the time in the staff room, as well. My psychotherapy training, I trained as a child and adolescent psychotherapist with a specialty, I mean I can still work with adults, but I did all of my training working with children and young people, and I worked as a school counselor for a few years as part of my training. So I was working with children and parents. And I felt that judgment myself, actually from myself I thought I’m never going to understand children the way a parent can. And then working with parents who were struggling with children who had difficult issues, I began to understand that those parents were experts on their kids, and I absolutely got them as allies in the treatment that we were planning and executing to help their children. They were the experts in parenting their kids, but they didn’t have my psychological background, they didn’t have all my training, they also didn’t have the kind of the experience I had, of working with many different children, with many different responses to the same problems, with many different parents I had a much broader repertoire of understanding, but they were the experts on their kids. I think it’s really important to understand that we can build alliances, you know, it doesn’t have to be, you know more, or I know more, maybe we have different types of understanding about children that we can bring together to benefit the children or to help each other understand a different point of view? And I took this one day to my, my supervisor around you know the difference between therapists that are mums and therapists aren’t and she, she herself was a mother, and she said, I’ve often envied the therapists who don’t have children, because when they’re in a room with a child with a problem, they’re not comparing that child to their own, they’re actually seeing the child, wholly for who they are, you know.
So there’s going to be differences but it’s, it’s about assigning more value to one position or the other. That’s what pronatalism does. It says this is the dominant position, you shut up and listen to me, because I know best. And that’s not true. I mean, until recently, teachers were always childless women and they were really valued for it! And suddenly they can be seen as less than? Pronatalism has been very, very dominant over the last twenty or thirty years, because we’ve had pronatalism on steroids as a backlash against the Women’s Liberation Movement – this over-valorization of motherhood, as the most meaningful and fulfilling thing any woman can do, which is now backed up in the media, and also as a, as a sort of capitalist proposition. When in actual fact, when I was growing up in the 70s there was nothing groovy about motherhood. And if, if a star or a pop star got pregnant they had to go into hiding until after the baby had been born, because it was so ungroovy to be seen pregnant. I mean they lost a lot of cachet by being, they can’t they have to keep their kids hidden
Doryn
Sure I’m sure. But I love what you just explained and that should be very eye-opening for so many women. So I thank you for clarifying that.
Jody
I mean giving birth is biological parenting is psychological.
Doryn
Yes
Jody
And some you know some women and some people have a gift for it. And, you know, some women give birth and discover actually it’s really hard for them and they have a lot to learn. And for some, it comes very naturally. And we often can’t predict how it’s going to be I’ve really seen that with my friends, you know, some of them have just absolutely blossomed with motherhood and others have really struggled, and they couldn’t have predicted beforehand how it was going to be for them. So I think there are, there are so many factors in there. And I think if you are a naturally very maternal and gifted nurturer, I think it can be really, really hard to be childless if that’s not your choice. But also a lot of childfree by choice women, Marsha included are like that; there is this idea that someone chooses not to have children, a woman, because she’s cold because she’s unmaternal because she’s unnurturing, some of the warmest, most nurturing women I know are childfree; it’s a psychological thing, it doesn’t is not necessarily linked to giving birth.
Doryn
Yeah,, thank you for saying that. You see a lot of what not to say to a childless woman. But what about the other side, what are some good tips for opening or sustaining a conversation with a woman without a child?
Jody
It’s really interesting because it’s going to vary enormously on how kind of comfortable with her childlessness the woman is. So in a way like that spectrum we talked about, I mean if you’d asked me 10 years ago about my childlessness it would have been such a sore topic that I’m not sure there would have been any easy way to have a conversation with me about it. Whereas now, I’ve integrated that loss I’ve been through the grieving process, I’ve integrated that loss into my life. I think first of all, it’s going to vary from from woman to woman, and it’s going to vary from occasion to occasion. Probably the best thing I could say, is to ask open questions. And whatever your judgments are, whatever the first thought that comes to mind is kind of to basically just swallow that one, because that will be the pronatalist one, that will be the one that asks, inappropriately prurient questions like, ‘Have you considered adoption?’ or why couldn’t you get pregnant?
Doryn
You mean like I just asked you, it’s what everyone does, that was in the context of the interview I wouldn’t if I met you on the street I would never have said that.
Jody
Well, that’s nice, but a lot of people do
Doryn
I’m sure they do.
Jody
First of all, they ask you if you have kids, This is like a safe, social opener for most people who have children, what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to find connection. Do we have things in common? And because the world seems to be full of mothers and parents, it seems like a safe one to ask if you are a parent yourself, but the numbers of people without children are very high. Now, if you are grieving your childlessness that is like a social landmineyou know the ground just opened up in front of you. So I’d say the first thing is stop asking people if they have children. Just stop! If someone has kids, the chances are within two minutes they’ll tell you – you don’t need to ask.
Doryn
Yeah
Jody
So, if someone hasn’t mentioned that they’ve got children, there’s already a clue that this might be a tender area for you, so you might want to sort of talk about a few other things, you might want to mention that, you know, that you don’t have children or that you do have children, but just sort of weave it into the conversation rather this being the only thing you want to know about them. Childless women who are grieving have experienced so many microaggressions and so many judgments that we are very wary with new people. So I would say just be incredibly tender and if if this conversation does come up, just be really mindful and say, Is this something you’ll come, you’re comfortable talking about because I’m, I’m sorry if I, you know, I didn’t mean to kind of go into a sensitive area? You know, just just be really mindful and give them a get-out clause. And if you find you are in the conversation, just not asking the ‘whys’ – if someone says they don’t have children – of you’re feeling empathetic just say, ‘You know, how is that for you today?’, ‘Is this an okay place for you, shall we talk about something else?’ Just be really really gentle. Remember, the chances are they might be grieving, they might be experiencing a incredibly personal situation, in public, that people are often asking them, and judging them about. So, in a strange way, the best thing you can say to a childless woman is not to talk about it and see if she wants to talk about it – you know, create a safe space.
Doryn
Yeah, you know, and I would also add to this, and then I just want to mention something that happened to me just the other day, but I want to add to this that also there are women who only have one child that couldn’t have a second child, and I would imagine the same thing goes for them. I have a few friends who are in this situation and I always hate I find that they make this excuse to everybody to explain why they only have one child, like they feel and their circumstance was that they couldn’t have a second child, for whatever reason, but it’s a similar situation, you know only until they were my closest friends in the world did they open up to me I never once said, ‘Why don’t you have a second kid?’
Jody
But they probably get asked that a lot.
Doryn
Of course, of course, so I think I think approaching it with the same sensibility that you just mentioned is really important. I was at lunch the other day, and my son was being super picky about his lunch, and he like wanted nachos, but didn’t want the whole nachos and he wanted the chips and he wanted the cheese but he didn’t want this, blah blah blah, and the server was like, you know, she was so wonderful and she’s like, ‘Listen, I’m gonna bring you chips and cheese and chilli, and then you can do whatever you want with all three of them’, and she was, it was like such better thinking than I would have ever thought. I just didn’t even think like that. And I said to her, ‘You must, you must have kids’, and she’s like ‘No, I don’t’, and I so I dropped it at that point. And I don’t even know why I said that but I just I was caught trying to commend like you’re so, and talking to you now I realised like that was such a stupid comment, I think I was just envious of the way that she kind of got, you know, into his thought process and just understood him.
Jody
To give yourself a break, that’s also pronatalism… Pronatalim gives us all these unconscious beliefs: ‘She’s really good with kids, so she must be a mum.’
Doryn
Yeah, yeah.
Jody
Once you start to understand that pronatalism creates these set of expectations of how the world works, but it is a belief system. It’s not gravity is not entirely true. There are many people who have biologically given birth, who unfortunately for very, very many complex reasons, aren’t able to be good mums, yes, you know, and there are many women who would make great mums who haven’t been able to give birth, or their children have died or have been taken away or many of the other reasons why they may not have children in their lives. It’s a very sensitive area and it’s not as straightforward as, as we think.
And to your point about, you know, what should we say what shouldn’t we say, and I’m sort of partly saying well say nothing. I think if the conversation does open up, it’s just to be really mindful that you’re, you’re in a sort of super sensitive area and rather like conversations about race. It’s also not up to that person to explain childlessness to you. They are not the childless Google, you know, they don’t have to explain about fertility treatments working and being childless by circumstance and not meeting a partner, and all of those things, this is their personal story, I would say if you’re curious about the lives of childless women. Watch my TEDx talk, it’s 18 minutes, and I wrote it and delivered it to help people who are parents understand the experience of being childless. It’s called the Lost Tribe of Childless Women: 18 minutes of your life and I hope that will help.
Doryn
Oh great. I’m so happy that you did that. If you could choose one change that you’d like to see that would make being childless easier, what would that be?
Jody
Interestingly, I’d like to see childlessness become a protected characteristic in the workplace. And the reason for this is that a lot of the structural difficulties that childless people experience, a lot of them have very, very solid form in the workplace – between privileges and benefits going towards those with children and not with to those without children, and that’s by choice or not by choice – holiday time benefits, maternity cover. I mean if you’re a childless woman in the workplace and you’ve been there for 10 years through your 30s, you’ve probably done like four or five maternity leave covers – in Europe, those are up to a year – you’ve done so many other people’s jobs for them while they’ve been away, you know, having one or two or maybe even three children – you never get any thanks you never get any time off in return, you never get any pay increases so there’s no, there’s no recognition, no reciprocity, and no recompense.
So there’s lots of things that can build up unfairnesses in the workplace because pronatalism says that parenthood is more important than non-parenthood. Therefore the needs of people without children don’t have to be considered. But you know, having children is a choice. It is a lifestyle choice, and mothers and parents in the workplace need a lot of support, and I absolutely want them to have more support, but it shouldn’t be at the cost of those employees in the organisation that don’t have children – organisations push a lot of that stuff on to the childless and childfree employees. If we consider that we’re talking about the childless liberation movement; if we look back to the successes of the gay liberation movement, the LGBT liberation movement, by getting changes legally enshrined within the workplace that started people to understand what happens when diversity and equality, when the rubber meets the road, how does that actually shake down in law – those changes are absolutely vital in a beginning of a wider cultural conversation and understanding about how you experience inequality if you are not the dominant sexuality, and I think for childless, and childfree people in in the world, if we could start to see that recognised in law in the workplace we would start to see equality everywhere.
There is a great quote that comes from the anti-racism movement, I’ve never been able to find the source of it. And this is, “When you are accustomed to privilege, equality, feels like oppression’. One of the real difficulties in getting change as a childless person, is that you need to get the parents in your environment to buy into it, and there’s a lot of hostility because when you try to have, let’s say you’re a childless employee, and you’re trying to speak to your HR director in your organisation about creating a fair environment for all employees regardless of parental status, there’s a good chance that that person has children and unconsciously they may see that what you’re trying to do is take away some of their benefits. And they may block you… they may not do it consciously…
Within the Gateway Women online community, we have a private group called the Workplace Changemakers group, where childless women in organisations, all over the world, are supporting each other doing this work of basically speaking truth to power. And I really really hope that the younger generation coming up, the Millennials and the GenZ’s that follow them, who are much more hot about personal rights and personal responsibility, will pick up the work that we’re starting and go, hang on a minute, this actually isn’t fair, that they get these rights and privileges and time off because they have kids, and I don’t. And it doesn’t mean that we want to make parenting and being a parent in the workplace, more difficult. I wanted to be a working mum, I support working mums, many of my friends are working mums, it’s not about that. It’s about privilege, and equality and diversity. It is a huge part of the human story, And I think it’s the next big diversity issue organisations need to look at and I think the organization’s that wake up to it will be more successful as a result.
Doryn
Can you give me an example of where you’ve, you know, something that’s happened and I assume you’re not talking about maternity leave? Maybe you are, is, is that what you’re speaking of when somebody speaks of things being unfair or is it more, you know, because I’ve seen this or parents say you know I need, I need to work part time, a couple days a week because I have a kid and you know they have this this and this going on or for whatever reasons.
Jody
But if you imagine that underpinning it pronatalism says that the life of a parent is more important. So you may have two employees, both of whom wish to have more flexible working arrangements, and the one who is a parent may have that granted, and the one who isn’t a parent may not.
Doryn
Right.
Jody
The company will say, ‘Well, what do you have to do outside work what do you need to be flexible about?’ No.
Doryn
Do you know how many mothers I know that say, and friends of mine, not to throw my friends under the bus, but I think it’s just something that commonly comes up among mothers, which is, oh my God, how did I think I was busy before I had kids like I can’t even, I had no appreciation for how not busy, I was before I have kids. And it’s something that I often defend, because everybody’s busy is different depending on your life and what you’re doing with it, you know, it doesn’t necessarily mean that mothers are the most busy in the world.
Jody
They may well be, especially when you know when your children are a certain age, let’s not take away from how much, so many modern mums are doing as well as working, you know, they are often ridiculously overstretched and I wouldn’t want to take away from that. But it’s not necessarily about busyness, it’s about you chose parenthood. Just because you’ve chosen parenthood that doesn’t mean your life and your time is more valuable than the person who hasn’t chosen parenthood, or for whom childlessness chose them. Just because they’re not as busy in the ways that you are that doesn’t mean that that time is less valuable for them to do with what they wish. You see there’s the value judgement creeping in again. And also I’d like to say that many childless women are also single and a single life is a very busy life in terms of having to do all of those things without someone to share all of those tasks and make enough income to cover a much more expensive lifestyle because when you don’t have to share it between two people, you know, it makes a very big difference. There are a lot of things going on in those lives; they may not be as obvious as, as parenting, but they may be busy in other ways. And it’s like, why do we have to justify what we’re doing with our time for us to be allowed to live our lives the way that works for us?
Doryn
Right.
Jody
And why should caregiving, be the only thing that a woman has to fit into her life? You know, she might be wanting to sort of, you know, learn to be a trapeze artist, write the next great novel, do over her garden, or just, you know, take a little bit more rest and not do so much commuting. Why do we valorize caregiving, as the most important female thing to be spending time doing.
Doryn
I am so happy that we’re talking about this, like I said before I can fully admit when I’m not educated on something and I always want to learn, but I think there are gonna be so many women who, whether they’re childless or mothers who are going to learn so much from all the wonderful things that you’re saying that makes so much sense and by the way, like definitely is not being talked about enough. It really isn’t to the, to the parenting communities so I you know I’m so happy that you’re here to talk about this and to bring some light to the subject for all of us, mothers and childless, childfree, whatever that may be, I think,
Jody
I think Doryn, we really need to build these bridges. I’m so grateful to you for reaching out to have this conversation, because in a way pronatalism has driven a wedge between parents and non-parents, but actually, childless women and childfree women have always been part of that, that, ‘village’ that surrounds families and children. We pay the taxes that build the schools and the hospitals and the scout huts, and we don’t use that money, you know, we are contributors, massive contributors to volunteer groups and political campaigns and tax to support the civic fabric of society that families need. We are not this ‘other’, we are part of the community that surrounds, parents and children, but somehow there’s this idea that we live in separate worlds and we don’t understand each other, and we don’t need each other. And the more conversations we can have where we see that actually we can understand each other and support each other better. I really think that that’s an important part of the work. In a way this is some of the unfinished work of feminism, we need to really build these bridges between parents and non parents, because there are so many misunderstandings.
Doryn
You know, I love when I meet a new friend that doesn’t have children, or if they’re younger, and they haven’t had children yet. I don’t want to go out to dinner and talk about my kids. I don’t I want to do everything but that. Unfortunately, given, you know my life circumstance and just kind of the groups that have formed around me I don’t have that many women in my life without children, but I much prefer, I do have a couple of good friends that don’t have kids and I love being with them because you know, it’s finally a conversation about anything but children, you know. A lot of moms will go out together and, you know, spend the first hour of dinner, talking about their kids and I actually make it a – when I go out with my friends who have kids, I’ll say, we’re allowed to do a quick check in and talk about our kids for like 10 minutes and then I don’t want to hear about your kids – I don’t talk about my kids, I don’t want to talk about other kids so. There are women who feel the exact same way that I do, I think women, I think moms feel that they should be talking about their kids all the time and frankly, as much as we love our children, it doesn’t define us as women, you know we are moms but we’re so much more than that as well and so just wanted to throw that in there with you. Yeah, I would love you to go to dinner with me every night I’ve truly I just, it’s, it’s, it’s nice to have somebody to talk to that, you know, is brings other things to the table, if that makes any sense.
Jody
No, not at all, you know, women with children always feel like that though. I know that I have been in situations where, you know I’ve sat at a table and everyone else, every other woman there has been a mother, and an hour has gone by, and the subject is nonstop about their children and their children’s lives. And I think gosh, the thing is is if this were any other thing, if it was a group of people who’d all been on a holiday together, or who all worked together, you know, after about 15 minutes they’d go, oh god we’re being such bores you know, Jody wasn’t there, she doesn’t know what we’re talking about, you know, and they change the subject, but somehow there’s this, this permission to become the most colossal motherhood, and just, you know, pretend that the child was woman actually isn’t that – it’s quite extraordinary and it’s very dull and very hurtful, that you’re sitting there. And you know, maybe you try to change the subject, maybe you bring it, bring in a new topic, and within sort of 30 seconds they found a way to turn that back into children.
However, something I learned, which really helped me understand what might be going on here, was that over the sort of the 20 years that I was hopeful of having children, trying to have children, and just starting to recover from it. You know my friends all had kids, everyone apart from two childfree friends – everyone who wanted to be a mum became a mum, and that became the focus of their life. And I realised once when I was at the last big gathering I was at with this particular circle of friends, and I kept trying to have conversations and I was experiencing this thing of it’s always going back to talking about children, that I saw this look in a woman’s eye, and I realised she was scared of me and that was the first clue I’d had and I thought, hang on, in the 20 years that that they’ve been focused on bringing up their kids or having kids, you know I’ve done two and a half degrees, I’ve travelled up the Amazon, I’ve written a book and I thought, what they see when they see me, is a woman who is incredibly accomplished. And I think they felt that they didn’t have anything to say to me, that that motherhood had become their life and I think I was a little bit intimidating to them. So as you say, not wanting to talk about anything else. So there’s a certain… I think if we can say the unsayable, if we can sort of try to bridge those gaps a bit more.
And I also learned that the women who have stuck the course with me, my friends who are mums who I’m still really close friends with, and my new friends that I’ve met who had children over the last decade, the ones that I can really hang out with, are the ones who haven’t collapsed their identity into motherhood. They would never have used their children’s photos on Facebook, they never described themselves as ‘so and so’s mother’. They are them and they are mothers, as you were describing, but I have a lot of empathy for those women who do collapse their identity into motherhood, because I have a feeling I would have been one of them. I think they would have bought for Britain about my children and been absolutely totally tone deaf to childless women. So I’m just want to say that, you know, because I was so desperate for the identity of motherhood. And it was almost like for me it was about more than having children, it was like it was my last ditch attempt to join the normals; I was desperate for it. And I think I would have just gone for it, you know! So I just have to be curious and compassionate to those who are open to talking about something other than parenthood, but also really understanding why that might not be the case for all mothers,
Doryn
I mean it is a very consuming position to be in!
Jody
Yeah, I’ve been watching from the sidelines all these years!
Doryn
Yeah, you know I talked about on my show all the time about how, how we can find ourselves after having kids again, how do we how do we start understanding in our 40s that that we’re, we’re a person and our kids are growing up and they’re going to leave and who are we, when they’re gone? And it is very easy to lose yourself in that it’s so you know I empathise on both sides, very much.
Jody
It might be a great time to reconnect with your old friends who haven’t had children because, yes, if you are experiencing empty nest. your childhood friend has been experiencing it for 20 or 30 years. She knows what it is, she knows what you need to do to come through it, she has been through the dark night of the soul and she has found meaning and purpose and identity in her life in a different way than motherhood. She’s got real wisdom to share with you.
Doryn
I’m going to end this right there, because that was the perfect last line to say, I just I thank you, Jody for coming on. I’m going to check out your TEDx. I hope that all of my listeners, I do have a very heavy amount of women that are moms but I am going to encourage that everybody listens to this and my audience is so fantastic. They’re just this wonderful group of women that are very open minded, that can admit their flaws are want to educate themselves and want to change who they are so that they can live a more positive next chapter so you’re starting to infuse that in all of us. So thank you, thank you for coming. Thank you for your time.
Jody
Thank you Doryn and I just want to say that everyone knows someone who is childless. You know, you may not realise it, and they can be our sisters, our daughters, our friends – becoming more aware of what it’s like to be childless will really helpful to someone in your life who will really thank you for that, so thank you for this opportunity.
Doryn
Oh, you’re very welcome. Thank you so much for listening. Remember to give yourself permission and know that you are not alone. Don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss any episodes reviews are always appreciated, and you can reach me by email at ittsnotaacrisiss@gmail.com, Instagram @itsnotacrisispodcast and please join our Facebook group as well. Until next time, just remember, it’s not a crisis.
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