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Guest Blog: Reflections from a Childless Christian on the first Sunday of Advent

November 29, 2020 Jody Day 11

A guest blog by a Christian member of Gateway Women’s Childless Christian’s group – one of 35+ specialised subgroups in Gateway Women’s private online community. Happy New Year! Have I got my dates in a muddle – surely it isn’t 2021 just yet? Well no… it’s new year but in the Christian church calendar: Advent Sunday. Today starts the season of Advent – candles and calendars and yes, Christmas is under four weeks away. Advent is a time of preparation and countdown to celebrate the birth of the ultimate miracle baby, Jesus Christ, and all the trappings of comfort and […]

What does it take to get through childlessness? Guts, hearts, head, new friends, community, connection and a BIG sense of humour! Jody Day interviewed by Australia’s [un]Ripe Podcast (November 2020)

November 14, 2020 Jody Day 0

In this interview from November 2020, Jody Day (founder of Gateway Women) joins Penny and Jo in an episode for the Australian childless/childfree podcast (un)Ripe. You can listen to the full episode here (transcript below). As well as talking about the early days of Gateway Women and how it grew from a blog to the global organization it’s become, Jody also shares what goes on behind the doors of the amazing Gateway Women private online community, and the massive diversity of its 35+ subgroups covering everything from being a Childless Stepmother or Childless & Single to a group which is […]

World Childless Week 2020 Starts Tomorrow, Monday 14 September

September 13, 2020 Jody Day 3

It starts tomorrow – 2020’s World Childless Week! When I first started writing about childlessness on my blog back in 2011 I really found very little on the internet about involuntary childlessness apart from a few wonderful life-after-infertility blogs such as Silent Sorority, Life Without Baby and The Road Less Travelled. However, as fertility treatments hadn’t been part of my story, I didn’t immediately find them. And there certainly didn’t seem to be anything out there that spoke to the diversity of ways a woman could find herself childless. So, when I wrote that very first blog and women from around the world left comments such as “How […]

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

August 5, 2020 Jody Day 43

Full Transcript Below Donna Ward is an Australian writer, publisher and editor, living in Melbourne. Her 2020 book She I Dare Not Name: A Spinster’s Meditations on Life energised me in a way that few books still have the capacity to do, so eloquently and accurately does it portray not only ‘the life unexpected’ (to paraphrase my own book’s title!) but also, the life ‘invisible’ which is that of the unpartnered, childless woman in our society. In a world focused and built on the needs, attitudes, prejudices and ‘stories’ of those who couple and have children, to be a […]

“Single & Childless in a Pandemic” on The Full Stop Podcast

May 17, 2020 Jody Day 0

I was very happy to be interviewed as part of this special lockdown episode of the Full Stop Podcast on the experience of being single and childless during this pandemic. Although I’m now in a relationship, I was single for much of my forties as I went through the heartbreak and painful life-transformation of involuntary childlessness. And being both single and childless is something I write about in my book, as well as the experience of grieving childlessness whilst single, which has its own flavour compared to the challenges of grieving as a couple. Many members of the Gateway Women […]

Oppressed by advice… all over again!

April 4, 2020 Jody Day 13

When I think back to my days of wanting/trying to become a mother and then wanting/trying to recover from that and build a new kind of life that did not include motherhood, one of the things that eventually stopped me from discussing my situation with anyone – was advice. (For me, the fact that the last four-letter spell V.I.C.E seems very apt!) In my training to become a psychotherapist, one of the earliest things we learned (and it’s not an easy habit to break!) is to stop giving advice, either asked for or not, but instead to support our clients […]

When the title of your book becomes the same as the news… ‘Living the Life Unexpected’

March 19, 2020 Jody Day 13

Today the 2nd edition of my book, Living the Life Unexpected: How to Find Hope, Meaning and a Fulfilling Future Without Children is published and the incredible global blogtour of my book that’s been going on since March 1st comes to a close. And yet, celebrating that feels like a crass thing to do right now, in the opening stages of a global pandemic that will change all our lives forever… Even though we’re in the run-up to UK Mother’s Day this weekend, normally a very anxiety-provoking time for British childless women, my website and inbox are almost silent on the […]

#LTLU Living the Life Unexpected (2nd Edition): World Blogtour, 1-19th March 2020

March 1, 2020 Jody Day 44

I’m so proud to announce that the fully-revised and updated 2nd edition of my much-loved book, ‘Living the Life Unexpected’ is being published by Bluebird (PanMacmillan) in the UK on 19 March 2020. With fifty (I know, fifty!) prestigious endorsements inside the front and back jacket, a lovely new cover, a new subtitle, How to Find Hope, Meaning and a Fulfilling Future Without Children, and new content, (including a new introduction from me which outlines what’s new), I hope you’ll find it exciting whether you’re a returning reader or a brand new one. 25+ chances to win a personally dedicated […]

Salt Water & Honey by Lizzie Lowrie: a powerful new memoir of childlessness and faith

February 28, 2020 Jody Day 0

Lizzie Lowrie is a Christian clergyman’s wife in the UK and one of the writers behind the popular, frank and earthy Christian blog about miscarriage and involuntary childlessness, Salt Water & Honey. Although what remained of my own childhood Christianity was eviscerated by the grief of childlessness, my spirituality survived and has returned to what was there before Sunday School – a deep sense of connection to the natural world; but that was hard-won too as there was a time when even that felt denied to me, exiled as I sensed I was from the natural cycles of birth and […]

Distressed chicken looks at broken egg www.gateway-women.com

Forty, Single and Childless dammit!

February 12, 2020 Jody Day 9

From the archives: first published in October 2011, GW’s first year. I’m 55 now. Have you ever stopped to question why you want (or wanted) a baby so much? Do you find the question shocking? Taboo even? Well, I didn’t question it. And because I avoided this level of deep introspection, I failed to realise that I spent fifteen years of my life chasing a dream based partly on the premise that someone or something would make me feel fulfilled, content, satisfied, real, right, good… I thought a baby, a family, a home, what Zorba the Greek calls ‘the full catastrophe’ – […]

12 Books of Christmas: for your childless friend (or yourself!)

December 7, 2019 Jody Day 2

Reading for pleasure is one of those things that can take a B-I-G hit during grief and, even though I am no longer grieving, it’s taken me several years to really get my reading mojo back. That, combined with my reduced attention span (thank you screens) means it can take a lot more to get me to stay with a book these days! I found my way back into my love of reading through listening to audiobooks at night, when I couldn’t sleep (thank you menopause and hello working on this blog at 4am!) thus, where audiobooks are available, I’ve […]

Coping with Holiday Expectations

December 2, 2019 Jody Day 0

Click the image above or this link to watch this 1-hour webinar hosted by More to Life as part of their excellent free webinar series for childless people, this one on the topic of “Coping with Holiday Expectations”. As well as presenting my ‘Perfect Storm’ model to help you analyze and prepare for your holiday triggers in a new way, I am joined on the call by three members of ‘Team Gateway’, each of which are leading one of Gateway Women’s Plan B Mentorship Programmes in 2020: Lauren de Vere, Karin Enfield de Vries and Elizabeth Grambsch. Here is an […]

What if I never find my ‘Plan B’?

November 16, 2019 Jody Day 3

After more than a decade of travelling the path of recovering from childlessness (what I call ‘creating your Plan B’) and having been alongside many of you for much of that time, one of the questions I get asked most often (other than “What can I do about my mother slash boss slash sister slash friend” is this: “What if I never find my Plan B?” It’s a big fear and I completely understand it. I remember when my own life was in meltdown after infertility, divorce, narcissistic abuse, long-term singleness, involuntary childlessness, loneliness, career collapse, insomnia and peri-menopause. And […]

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

September 15, 2019 Jody Day 0

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

Book review: “Do You Have Kids? Life When the Answer is No” by Kate Kaufmann

July 17, 2019 Jody Day 2

Kate Kaufmann’s book, “Do You Have Kids? Life When the Answer is No’ is the latest addition to a pleasingly growing pile of books about women without children that I am now asked to review. A decade ago, when I first realised that my childlessness was the terrifying endpoint of my fifteen year journey towards motherhood, there was practically nothing out there, apart from a couple of books which were out of print then (and now), such as Rachel Black and Louise Scull’s 2012 Beyond Childlessness and Linda Hunt Anton’s 1992 Never to be a Mother, neither of which I […]

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