RECORDED LIVE IN MAY 2025 / FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW
If you are reading this on Sunday 15th March 2026, do access/join the Childless Collective today, where it’s running an all-day rolling text-only chat, hosted by volunteer members. It’s a great way to both get support, take a break from the whole thing and get to know other childless women! (And you don’t have to be experiencing Mother’s Day where you are – the chat will be about all kinds of things!) Click here to access/join the community
Mother’s Day takes place in March as ‘Mothering Sunday’ for the UK and Ireland, and on the 2nd Sunday in May as ‘Mother’s Day’ in many parts of the world. But whenever it lands on your calendar, 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 exaggerated visibility 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.
And that’s why I in May 2025 I invited Katy Seppi, founder of the Childless Collective, for this chat 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.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jody Day: Hello, and welcome to this Gateway Women Masterclass Webinar. My name is Jody Day. I’m the founder of Gateway Women and the author of Living the Life Unexpected, and this webinar is about navigating Mother’s Day as a childless woman. I have a really special guest that I’m sharing this hour with: the fabulous Katy Seppi.
If you don’t know Katy already, let me tell you a little bit about her. Katy is in her 40s and is the US founder of the Childless Collective, which offers connection, support and resources for people who are childless not by choice. After a four-year infertility journey that ended with a hysterectomy in 2017, Katy set out to find others who understood the layered experience of childlessness. What began as a personal blog and Instagram account evolved into an initiative that now includes an online membership community, annual summits, and a growing network of support for those navigating life without the children they once hoped for.
Katy holds a Master’s in Social Work from the University of Georgia with a focus on community empowerment and programme development. She brings over a decade of experience in community organising, advocacy and event planning to her work, combining professional skill with lived experience. Through the Childless Collective, she creates spaces where people can honour their grief, explore new possibilities and find belonging. Her work has been featured in CNN, HuffPost, Fortune, Psychology Today and The Telegraph.
This isn’t the first time Katy has been with us, but this feels really special. About three years ago, I handed the stewardship of the then decade-old Gateway Women online community into Katy’s precious hands, under which it became the Childless Collective online community. She has done an incredible job, and it has been a pleasure — I’m genuinely proud to have watched that happen and to have been mentoring her behind the scenes through the teething problems, the growth and the changes. Running and creating a consensus space is really challenging in our current culture, with its tendency towards polarisation in all areas. Katy has handled that aspect with a sensitivity and skill that I deeply admire. So hats off, and a big thank you to Katy.
Before we get going, I have a candle here that I wanted to light for all the children who live only in our hearts and who are with us this hour and every hour. They’re always there, and that’s why we’re gathering — to honour our hearts on Mother’s Day, and to honour those little lights in our hearts too. You won’t see it, but it’s burning away for all of us.
We had 150 questions sent in, which is amazing. We’re not going to read out all 150, but I grouped them into themes and created questions from those themes. We have five main themes to work through, and we’ll leave 15 minutes at the end for Q&A. If you’d like to submit a question, please use the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen rather than the chat — the chat will be rolling by too quickly for us to catch questions there.
But before we kick into that — how are you doing with Mother’s Day tomorrow, Katy? How is it for you this year?
Katy Seppi: I feel like I have waves with how I experience my grief around childlessness. The first few years after my hysterectomy, I really struggled with Mother’s Day. The last few years, not as much — a lot of the grief isn’t quite as raw. I’m actually feeling pretty good this year, and I think part of what makes a difference is having a lot of support built in, and having built tools and strategies over time. I’m hoping that as we get through this hour, we can share some of those and give people ideas for how they can navigate tomorrow and make it a little bit easier — and then keep building on those over the years. Because, as we know, it’s not like you solve it once and you’re done. I see it as a toolkit that you keep adding to: ideas and strategies for how you want to navigate it.
Jody Day: Thank you. Tools and strategies are definitely really helpful. I’m in Ireland, and in the UK and Ireland, we already had our Mother’s Day — Mothering Sunday, back in March. But, thanks to the gift of social media, we see an awful lot of the marketing for International Mother’s Day, because it’s Mother’s Day in many parts of the world now, including our sisters in the southern hemisphere.
For me, Mother’s Day is no longer a difficult day in terms of not having children, but I always have to be mindful of it, because it can still come up and bite me in strange ways. In the last couple of years, I lost my mother and my mother-in-law, and there’s that sense — which came up a lot in the questions — that feeling of being both childless and motherless is existentially quite fragile. If you’ve also had a very challenging relationship with your mum, as I did, that’s an extra layer. And if you had a wonderful relationship with your mum, that’s hard too when she’s no longer around. And as I move through my 60s now, there are grandchildren as well. So there’s always something around this day that might tap on us — which is why it’s good to be prepared.
Theme One: Managing Our Social Difference on a Very Public Day
Jody Day: I wrote that childlessness is a private sorrow lived in public, and Mother’s Day is the most public of days around motherhood — when our difference as women without children stands out most starkly, whether at church, in the supermarket or out walking the dog. “Happy Mother’s Day” seems to be everywhere, and the whole day has been capitalised by commerce and pumped out on every channel through social media and advertising. Considering how mighty the forces of the pro-natalist status quo are on this day, what works to manage our social difference from the norm? How do you relate to, manage or build strategies around that? I think it’s much tougher in America — in the UK and Ireland we don’t have this culture of saying “Happy Mother’s Day” to every random woman you encounter.
Katy Seppi: Yes! Maybe we can all just travel there for Mother’s Day and escape it. I think this is a hard one, because it’s not just that people are celebrating mothers for the day — it’s that there is a public assumption that everyone is a mom. I have a story about this that has really stayed with me, and I’m sure people listening could relate with similar experiences.
A few months after my hysterectomy, I went out for lunch on Mother’s Day. I picked a place on purpose that I thought wouldn’t be the kind of place you’d take your mom — no mothers-with-children brunch situations. It was fine all the way through, but at the very end, when the waitress brought my check, she said, “Oh, are you a mom?” I said no. She said, “Do you have pets?” I said no. She said, “Oh, I was going to say Happy Mother’s Day, but never mind” — and then she just walked away. It was so raw for me; my hysterectomy had only been five months earlier. I’m getting teary now thinking about how hard that hit me.
Then last year on Mother’s Day, I posted a quick Instagram reel saying, just as a public service announcement, you don’t have to say Happy Mother’s Day to every woman you see. It’s perfectly fine to celebrate the people in your lives who you know are moms, but one in five people are childless or child-free, so you’re very likely saying it to someone who isn’t a mom. Some of the comments really surprised me — people saying “I’m going to say it to everyone, why are you being so sensitive?” I was taken aback by how indignant people were at being asked to be just a little more thoughtful. To me, that’s the crux of it: it’s not just that we’re celebrating moms, it’s the assumption that you are one, and you’re going to have that coming at you all day.
In terms of strategy, some things I’ve tried over the years — and every year may look a little different — start with preparing beforehand, emotionally, and making a bit of a logistics plan for how much you want to encounter. When your grief is really raw, it may be better to be out in nature, or at home, or with friends who understand what you’re going through. If you can’t opt out of certain things, just knowing in advance that it’s going to be there can help. And finally, anchoring to the core of who you are and appreciating your worth even though you’re not a mom. So much of the messaging around Mother’s Day wraps our worth up in motherhood, so we can remind ourselves: I am more than that, this does not define my worth. That can be hard to believe on Mother’s Day, but it’s worth practising.
Jody Day: Anchoring to our worth is really important, and in the early stages of childless grief it can be very hard to do — even the idea that we might have worth if we’re not mums can feel absurd. That’s when community is so important. When we’re around other childless women, sometimes we can see their worth even when we can’t see our own, and in that reflection we begin to recover our sense of value. We were all born childless and worthy. Our childlessness doesn’t take away our worthiness — that’s a social construct we have to push back against, and it’s called pro-natalism.
I have noticed a movement of organisations sending out emails saying “do you want to opt out of Mother’s Day messaging?” and whilst I think that’s well-intentioned, it still feels like another message about Mother’s Day. The opt-out itself is a reminder. It feels like virtue signalling to me — why not just have that option in the sign-up process in the first place? Plan your marketing better. Mother’s Day was never meant to be a marketing opportunity. It began as a religious observance, and then as a secular day — started, incidentally, by a childless woman. Anna Jarvis, who founded Mother’s Day in the US, was childless.
Katy Seppi: That’s good to remember. And actually, one way I’ve handled the email marketing is that some years I’ll get a “50% off for Mother’s Day” email, and I’ll think — actually, I’m going to take advantage of this and treat myself. Turning it into a gift for yourself can be one small reclamation of the day.
Something else I wanted to add: unpacking a lot of those worth messages in therapy was really helpful for me. I was raised Mormon, which carries a lot of messaging around your literal purpose in life being to become a mother. I had left the Mormon church years earlier, but I found in therapy that those messages were still in there — they kept coming up. My therapist helped me identify where they had come from and begin to counter them. I hadn’t even realised how deeply I was still holding onto them.
Jody Day: For anyone thinking they’d love to do some therapy around this, I want to mention that on the Gateway Women website — gatewaywomen.com — there is a list of childless therapists from around the world. These are therapists I know personally or have interviewed, and doing this work with someone who is also childless not by choice can make a real difference.
Theme Two: Managing Mother’s Day Around Friends and Family
Jody Day: Moving from the public sphere to the private one — often our friends, family and siblings with children, and maybe grandchildren, can be the least sensitive to our pain and awkwardness on Mother’s Day, even if we’ve tried to explain how challenging it can be, and even when we keep our pain hidden from them. The effort it takes to celebrate others for having the very thing we are grieving takes its toll on our hearts, our minds and our lives. What techniques help us manage Mother’s Day around friends and family? What works for you, Katy — managing that huge imbalance between whose life is celebrated and whose goes unspoken?
Katy Seppi: I think this is really tricky, and it’s going to be a different answer for everyone. For me, I genuinely want to be able to celebrate my sisters and my mom and my friends who are moms. The way I’ve approached it is finding a balance between making room for my grief — sometimes with other people, and sometimes by setting aside time after an event to sit with what’s come up — while also showing up for the people I love.
There have been years where I’ve said, it’s just too tender, and I’m not going to participate in any of it, or maybe I’ll send a message but keep it low-bandwidth. But fundamentally, I do want the good mothers in my life to feel special. I see what they do, and I think they deserve to be celebrated. So I try to find ways to do both — honour them and honour my own grief.
That’s easier when there are people in your life who can see both things too. I have some people who are very sensitive to it and will send a thoughtful text or offer some acknowledgement, and others who aren’t comfortable with it and let it pass by. I can choose how I want to interact with different people and plan my day accordingly. It’s okay to set boundaries and decide what you’re comfortable doing this year — and that may change. Every year may be different. The key for me is having an emotional plan: what can I give, and where do I need to protect myself?
Jody Day: It varies from year to year with events, and I think family members can find that confusing — if you opt out one year, they may stop inviting you, and then the following year, when you feel stronger and would actually like to be included, you have to renegotiate. Your limits are not walls; they require ongoing conversation. Families aren’t always equipped for that level of emotional flexibility, but it is possible with some people. Work with what you’ve got.
I don’t have siblings, so I haven’t had that particular family dynamic around Mother’s Day. But I’m very close to my ex-husband’s family — four nieces by love, not blood, as I call them. I remember when I was in the early stages of my grief, I had to pull back from them for a while. I went to a school play and just sat in the audience in floods of tears. I couldn’t do it. About three years later, I felt strong enough to re-engage, and I invited myself to Christmas. When I got out of the car, all four of them basically pinned me to the bonnet — they were so delighted to have me back.
One moment from that visit has never left me. We were in church on Christmas Day for a nativity play, and the vicar’s baby was playing the infant Jesus and was acting up while a toddler tried to manage the situation. The whole congregation was giggling at the cuteness of it all. My sister-in-law, sitting next to me, simply put her arm through mine and squeezed it. That was all. In that moment, she saw the scene through my eyes — understood that the poignancy and the funniness might land very differently for me — and she let me know she saw it. We’d never discussed my grief directly. It doesn’t have to be a big gesture. Just: I see you.
Katy Seppi: That communication piece is so important, and alongside it is acknowledging that you may communicate really clearly and still not get the response you were hoping for. You have to take that into account as you move forward. And sometimes I couldn’t even identify what I needed — I couldn’t tell you what would feel good or how I’d like people to treat me on Mother’s Day, so how could I expect others to know? Communication requires vulnerability, and that can be hard, and you may not get the response you want. But you might. And if you do, you’ve gained someone who can offer those moments of being seen.
One thing I come back to often: there was a niece born after I knew I would be childless. I got to hold her when she was only a day old. I’d had nieces and nephews before, but this was the first one after, and it hit completely differently — I just burst into tears. I thought, do I want to keep doing this? Should I just go home? But I thought: no. I’m not going to get to hold my own one-day-old baby. So I’m going to hold her, and feel the joy of this tiny person, and feel the grief of it at the same time. Being able to let both of those things exist at once was good for me.
There are things that are too painful and I say no — I can’t do this, it hurts too much. But I do try to approach a lot of these situations by asking not just what grief it might bring up, but what joy it might also hold, and what I’d be missing if I didn’t go. Sometimes the answer is still: I can’t do it, I’ll skip it. But sometimes it’s: yes, I know it’s going to bring up grief, I’ll plan to process that later, but the experience is worth it. It’s hard to allow all those things to coexist messily — but sometimes that’s what it is.
Theme Three: Grieving Childlessness and Social Exclusion
Jody Day: Childlessness is a form of disenfranchised grief — it’s not socially acceptable to experience it, talk about it, or ask for support for it. Many of us have discovered that if we do, we might receive the bingo response: “You can’t grieve something you’ve never had.” And on Mother’s Day, it can feel as if everyone in the world got to become a mother except us. So many of us feel left out, excluded, lonely, or misunderstood. What can we do to help ourselves through this? And is it always going to feel this bad?
One of the cruellest qualities of acute grief is that it traps us in an eternal and infernal present tense — with this overwhelming now, and a past that feels like a catalogue of every wrong decision we ever made, and a future we can barely look at. If we can look at it, it stretches out blankly for another twenty, thirty, forty years. It’s too much.
When you’re in that stage, the idea of “making space for grief” can feel abstract. What does it actually look like for you, Katy — leaving space for grief, and processing it when it arises?
Katy Seppi: I think one of the most healing things for me, and what has helped me process grief most, has been connecting with community and other people who understand this experience. Until I found that, there was a disenfranchised quality to my grief — even the people who loved me and wanted to support me didn’t quite get it. I needed someone who truly understood how much it hurt. Slowly, as I made those connections — reading Jody’s work, other memoirs by people who are childless not by choice, listening to podcasts, connecting on Instagram, and now of course carrying on the legacy within the Childless Collective — all of that has helped so much in just making me feel like I don’t have to process this alone.
On a more personal, practical level, when I’m navigating something that’s been hard — say, attending a difficult event — I’ve built up a toolkit of things I know will help. For me it’s very physical. I am a sobber. I love a good cry. Once it’s out, I just feel so much better. In the early days, when the grief was at its heaviest, I used to drive to an empty parking lot and just let myself cry in the car — somewhere private, where no one could see me and I could be as loud as I needed to be. Or I’d put on sad music, really loud, and sing along at the top of my lungs or just scream. That release is really important to me. It feels like something is being flushed out of my body, given somewhere to go.
Sometimes it shows up as anger, and for me that’s also physical — I need to get it out of my body. I love what Jody mentioned about rage cleaning. Journalling doesn’t do it for me, but I’m a verbal processor, so if I can find someone else who is childless, post in the community, talk to my therapist, find someone to actually speak out loud with — that’s much more effective for me than sitting alone with a notebook.
Jody Day: Rage cleaning! I haven’t done it in a while, but I used to immaculately clean the entire bathroom — all the grouting — when I was deep in grief. Cathartic, if slightly sad to think about now.
I love creating rituals — making tangible the intangible. That might be buying yourself flowers on Mother’s Day, or giving yourself a gift. It might also be a more formal grief ritual: writing a goodbye letter to your children, taking it somewhere special to you, reading it aloud, and then burning it, ripping it up, or giving it to water. Grief is about letting go, and what’s interesting when I’ve done that ritual with groups of women is that there’s often a desire to hold onto the letter, to keep a copy. But the point is to deliver it to the river of grief — to let it move through you. Rituals are really powerful. It might also be planting something in your garden as a living memorial, something that blooms in ways that feel connected to your children or your grief. The physical world, partnered with ritual, can do remarkable things.
What catches me off guard is how much my grief still first announces itself in my body — a heaviness in my chest and shoulders, a kind of slump, a lot of sighing. My psyche seems to know before my conscious mind does. I’ve learned to trust that signal: something irrevocable has passed, and the grief is doing its work of gently unpicking it from my heart.
Katy Seppi: Rituals can be such a powerful way to bring something out into the world and make it physical and tangible.
Something that really surprised me in the early stages of healing was what happened when I first started to feel the grief loosening — when I’d have a day without crying, or a moment of genuine laughter, or I’d notice some small perk of my childfree life, like a quiet, mellow Saturday morning. My first reaction was to push those moments away. It felt like a betrayal. Like: if I’m not grieving, does that mean I didn’t really want to be a mom that badly? Will people think I’m fine now, and stop acknowledging something they barely acknowledged in the first place? I found myself wanting to hold onto the grief — it almost felt like letting it go would be a betrayal of the dream, a betrayal of the children I didn’t have.
Jody Day: I went through exactly the same thing. Getting over this felt like it would diminish the experience, like letting go of those children in my heart. I also had to grieve the end of my grief — grieve the identity of being Jody, the grieving woman, the woman whose life had been shaped by not having children. When that began to shift, I didn’t know who I was without it.
I remember the first spring after things had genuinely started to change — Apple Blossom coming out on the street where I lived in London — and I thought, oh, look at that blossom, it’s beautiful. An ordinary noticing. What struck me was that the previous few springs, when the blossom had come out, I’d had a very different reaction. Even the trees were fertile, and it got on my nerves. And suddenly I could just see the beauty of it. That shift — small, quiet — told me something had genuinely moved.
Theme Four: When Mother’s Day is also About Your Own Mother
Jody Day: This day is, of course, about honouring our mothers — and for those of us who are mourning our mothers, have a complex relationship with them, never knew them, or are estranged from them, that can be really challenging. Combining that grief with the disenfranchised grief of childlessness is not something you’ll ever find on a Hallmark card. What can you suggest for managing the weight of all this?
My mum had a lot of complex mental and physical health problems, and I am truly the unmothered daughter of an unmothered daughter — she had a very poor experience of being mothered, and then so did I. It was one of the reasons I was terrified to become a mother as a young woman: I feared I would mother as I had been mothered. There was very little empathy or curiosity in my family about what it was like to be childless, and my mum always had to be the centre of attention. I remember that the Mother’s Day cards I sent her were usually beautiful ones that didn’t actually say “Mother’s Day” on them, because I couldn’t face the cards that said “Best Mum Ever” — they were simply not true of my experience.
Interestingly, in my mum’s last couple of years of dementia, when the filters started to come off, something shifted. Those of you who’ve experienced dementia in someone close will know that the shadow side of the personality can emerge — which is often shocking for people whose loved one was previously gentle and loving. For me, it was the reverse: I had the difficult, critical mother, and what emerged in her was a tenderness and loving quality she’d never shown before. Very hard to deal with at first, but ultimately quite healing.
I really feel for all of us navigating this layer. Many of us are estranged from our mothers, or managing very challenging relationships, or mourning beloved mothers who were wonderful. Holding childlessness and motherlessness together — however that relationship was — is an invisible tension that is nonetheless very large and very real. And these things can be deeply intertwined: some women who are childless by circumstance have found that difficulties in forming solid relationships partly trace back to difficulties with their own mothers. Acknowledging your grief around your mum, finding a space for it on this day, matters. For me, that still looks like ritual. I talk to my mum on Mother’s Day — I still feel I’m in relationship with her, even now that she’s gone. Would you add anything to that, Katy?
Katy Seppi: Just briefly, given time — what I’m hearing in what you’re saying is that it’s about the messiness. Letting it be conflicting. You’re going to feel a lot of things, some of them warm and some of them painful, and they can all exist together in a bit of a mush. If you can take time to process and sort through some of those feelings, and resist putting expectations on yourself about how this is supposed to look — give yourself the permission to do it differently to what feels expected, and really explore what’s going to work for you.
Jody Day: And one of those expectations might be that you have to see your mother on Mother’s Day, or that you have to keep working on healing a difficult relationship. People can be very black-and-white about estrangement — there’s often a message that the daughter is the one who should be making more effort. One in five people in the UK is impacted by family estrangement; it is genuinely very common, and very hard to talk about. Find support with people who aren’t simply going to tell you to call your mum.
Theme Five: Ageing Without Children
Jody Day. A question sent in: A few of my friends are already grandmothers, and it feels as if the whole competitive dynamic has started up again — and I’m on the sidelines again. On top of this, whilst they’re boring me to death with photos, I’m genuinely worrying about who will be there for me when I’m old. If I try to talk to them about it, they dismiss it as neurotic. The motherhood envy was one thing, but now there’s also real anxiety about old age. Do you have any suggestions for managing this next stage of life?
I’m in it — in my 60s — and very much thinking about how to navigate it. I do have nieces I love dearly, but they live far away and I wouldn’t expect them to be involved in my care. So I’m very intentionally developing local, intergenerational relationships. I have a small project I’m working on called Alta Kin — Alternative Kinship Network — which is moving very, very slowly, because as the American thinker Adrienne Maree Brown says, it moves at the speed of trust. In-person relationship building of real intimacy is delicate work. I’m trying to weave people into a container that will support us all as we age without children.
I also write a Substack called Gateway Elderwomen and host webinars under the same name—sharing everything I’m learning from people smarter and older and more experienced than me as I go along. Come and get involved; you’ll find the links on the Gateway Women website. I can’t offer a neat, tidy answer — but do find us there.
We’re now into our Q&A. I’ll take this first one, Katy: How do I move beyond the pain of not being a mother when I work full-time as a teacher of young children?
Katy Seppi: This comes up quite often in the community — and in other professions centred on working with children. I think it varies. I’ve heard some people say they have ultimately left teaching and found other paths. For those who want to stay, I think it’s about building space outside of work to process what’s constantly being triggered throughout the day — because I know from my husband’s experience as a teacher that you sometimes don’t even have two minutes to yourself. The idea of needing to cry in the middle of a lesson but having a whole classroom of children in front of you sounds genuinely devastating. It doesn’t sound easy, and I don’t have an easy answer. But being very intentional about your strategies, and building in ways to process things after the day ends, seems key.
Jody Day: I’d also say that a lot of women go into teaching partly because it fits, theoretically, around the life of a mother — school holidays, term times. Which means teaching is, in fact, a very pro-natalist environment. The staff room in a female-dominated profession will often be full of mothers. And yet—childless teachers are extraordinary role models. We give young people a different image of how to be a woman. Not a better one, a different one. Children pick up on our difference; we intrigue them. That is something genuinely precious. And do join the Childless Collective — there are quite a few teachers in the community who work with young children and could be a great support to one another.
Next question: How do I approach my aunt and godmother, who are both childless and twenty or thirty years older than me, and who seem to mask and push these conversations away?
For people of an older generation, there was nothing—no books, no communities, no language for any of this. Their technique of holding it all down is hard-won, and it will take a lot for them to give it up. What I’ve found when I’m not sure whether someone wants to have this conversation is to offer a resource gently, and see if they bite—leaving a copy of my book somewhere they might find it, or sharing an article, almost as a piece of bait. See if there’s any response.
I also find that if I want someone to be vulnerable with me, I get vulnerable first. I say something honest and tender, and if they want to, they’ll identify with it—and sometimes that’s all it takes. If they push it away, they’re not ready. That doesn’t mean they won’t ever be ready. It’s lovely that you’re thinking of them.
I want to support my sister-in-law who had a miscarriage two years ago. I’d like to acknowledge her and myself on this day.
I’d say — you don’t necessarily know where she is in her journey. Until someone has reached the point of understanding their childlessness as permanent, we can sometimes represent the outcome they don’t want. They’re still hoping to become a mother and aren’t looking for a childless role model. So how would you approach that, Katy?
Katy Seppi: Bonding with someone over childlessness who then goes on to become a parent can be one of the more painful experiences to navigate. But my instinct here is the vulnerability piece — I’m pretty much an open book by nature, which I know isn’t everyone, but being open about my experience has led to so many unexpected conversations. People tell me things they say they’ve never told anyone, and I think it’s because sharing something painful of your own creates a kind of safety. It’s scary, and you don’t always get met with the same openness, but sometimes it leads somewhere really beautiful.
In this particular situation, a card or a thoughtful text — something simple that says “I’m thinking of you” — could be a really gentle way to acknowledge her on Mother’s Day. It says: I see you. And if you want to explore whether there’s common ground between you, you can test the water gently. But go in knowing you can’t control the response. Sometimes the response comes much later anyway — a year, two years down the line, someone says: that thing you said, it stayed with me. It’s never wasted.
Question: How do we help husbands and partners with their grief?
Jody Day: There’s a section on this in Living the Life Unexpected, because there’s a pattern I’ve seen repeatedly in heterosexual partnerships: as a woman starts to find support and begins to heal — through communities like this, through therapy, through whatever route she finds — it’s often then that her male partner begins to fall apart, to experience his grief for the first time. Within patriarchal conditioning, men are often trained to be strong for their partners, to suppress their own grief, to hold it together while she struggles. This can lead a woman to think he doesn’t care — she’s on the floor and he seems fine, he’s out mountain biking. But when he senses she has found some solid ground, he can finally let himself feel it. This can be a very challenging phase for a relationship.
Grief is a form of love; it’s deeply personal and subjective. And men are socialised in our culture not to show vulnerability or feeling. What seems to help many men is being with other men, in side-by-side activity rather than face-to-face conversation — sport, physical things — where feelings might surface without being the declared purpose of the gathering. I’d also strongly recommend the work of Dr Robin Hadley, at robinhadley.co.uk, who is the worldwide expert on male childlessness and grief. His writing is widely available online.
Our final question: I was too ill to confront my childlessness for many years, so I’m still at the very beginning of my grief journey, over a decade on. How do I grieve and find peace as an older newcomer?
Hello, older newcomer — you are not alone. Within the Childless Collective community, we have a group called Childless Elderwomen, which I host with the support of some wonderful members, for childless women 50+. Depending on life circumstances, the grief journey may start later in life, and there is no shame in that. I’ll confess there are moments when I look at people doing their childless grieving in their forties and getting to a good place by their mid-forties and feel a small pang of envy — because I lost my own forties to grief. So come and find us. Read Living the Life Unexpected if you haven’t already, and find your way to the Childless Collective. That is the answer. And Katy, final words?
Katy Seppi: Just that I’m holding all of you in my heart today. I know how painful this day can be, and how much can come up — the emotional waves are everywhere, just waiting to hit you. You are not alone. There are a lot of people going through this, and even if you feel alone right now, you absolutely are not. Come into community. Give yourself space and time. Be very gentle with yourself. Build in that self-care and self-compassion, because we may not have others doing that for us. It would be lovely if this were widely recognised and we were all flooded with support, but that probably won’t happen — so we may need to find ways to do that for ourselves and for each other in community.
We have some things coming up tomorrow in the Childless Collective if you’d like to join us. I’m hosting a support group in the afternoon, and in the evening for those in the UK and European time zones. We also have a tradition — started by Jody within the original online community — of a live text chat that stays open for seven hours during the day. Volunteers are in there all day, and you can drop in for a moment or stay as long as you need. We’re thinking of you. You’re not alone. I hope you are hugely kind and gentle towards yourselves tomorrow.
Jody Day: Thank you, Katy. That’s absolutely beautiful, and I love that you have carried on the traditions of the Gateway Women online community and started so many wonderful new ones alongside them. Thank you so much.
Thank you to everyone who has been with us today. It has been an honour to hold this space for you. The candle is still burning, and I’ll leave it burning until I go to bed tonight. From my childless heart to your childless heart — thank you for being here.
If you are connection and support on Mothering Sunday (March) or Mother's Day (May), 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 puppy called Puffin and a very patient, ancient ginger cat: Pushkin.
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.
