FREE, LIVE & RECORDED: Click here to register
Join Jody Day, founder of Gateway Women & Gateway Elderwomen and her #NomoCrones for a bumper edition of Fireside Wisdom with Childless Elderwomen as we ‘Celebrate our Light!’
With Christmas, Yule, Hanukkah, Diwali, Kwanzaa, and other December festivals of light occupying social and cultural space at this time of year, it can often lead to those of us without children, and many without partners too, feeling left out.
This year, maybe it’s time to celebrate OUR light?
- The light of our essential worthiness as women, as human beings.
- The light of our courage to continue participating in a world that so often doesn’t participate in ours.
- The light of our nurturing, generative, relational energy and how vital that is for our families (both born and found), our communities, workplaces and the wider world.
- The light of our intelligence, decency and wisdom, which contribute so much to the civil society that other people’s kids depend upon.
- The light of our love and humanity.
Click here to register to attend live and/or receive the recording by email 24 hours later.
This is a free, live & recorded public event. Whatever your age, gender expression or reproductive identity, you are very welcome. As this is a Zoom webinar, neither your face nor voice form part of the event or the recording.
Saturday 13th December 2025, 8pm-9pm GMT (UK/Ireland time)
Click here to find the start time in your timezone.
There will be a live Q&A with the panellists for the last 15 minutes, and you can send in your questions beforehand on the Zoom registration form.
Although all of us, including me (Jody), offer their time, wisdom, and love free of charge, there are still digital costs involved in putting on this event. eg: Zoom webinar licence, video editing & graphic design software licences, video storage fees, etc. These amount to about USD$200 /GBP £150 for each session, which I pay. If you are able to leave a small contribution at BuyMeACoffee, it would be gratefully received. This is the 21st time I’ve run these free webinars, and so you can imagine how those costs mount up! Hugs, Jody x
Your NomoCrone host (nomo = not-mother + crone wasn't always an insult!)
JODY DAY(UK/Ireland) is the English/Irish founder of Gateway Women (2011) and hosts the ‘Childless Elderwomen’ subgroup of 200+ members, aged 50-80, in the Childless Collective Online Community. An author, speaker, systems thinker and integrative psychotherapist, she’s known for her best-selling Living the Life Unexpected: How to Find Hope, Meaning and a Fulfilling Future Without Children (Self-Published 2013; PanMac 2016/2020) and her TEDx talk ‘The Lost Tribe of Childless Women. Now in her early sixties, she is increasingly focused on the practical and existential challenges of elderhood without motherhood, including co-creating a hyperlocal Alterkin Circle (Alternative Kinship Circle) in her rural Irish location. Her Gateway Elderwomen newsletter on these topics is a Substack ‘Bestseller’, and she won a coveted Advantages of Age award for her writing in 2025. Jody’s been a World Childless Week Ambassador since its inception in 2017, was 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. After a lifetime in London, she’s now settled on the wild coast of West Cork, Ireland, where she’s managed/controlled by Puffin, a small white terrier puppy. https://gateway-women.com
Our bumper holiday season panel of NomoCrones from Australia, UK & Ireland and the USA will include:
SUSAN DOWRIE (AUS) is in her early sixties and a long-time member of the Gateway Women/Childless Collective Online Community, as well as having hosted the member Gathering for Brisbane members for several years. A student and practitioner of NVC (Non-Violent Communication), Susan describes herself unapologetically as a Spinster and is single and childless due to not meeting the right man. After many years in Brisbane, she is currently exploring life as a solo vanner in Australia. https://gateway-women.com/community/
SARAH ROBERTS (AUS) is in her mid-fifties and is the founder of The Empty Cradle, which offers support to childless-not-by-choice women to grieve losses, navigate complex thoughts and feelings, feel more confident in social spaces and workplaces and move forward with confidence in their futures. She co-leads the Gateway Women Reignite Weekend program in Australia and New Zealand. Sarah and her husband live in an outer suburban acreage of Brisbane and are part of a local community of intention, including supporting each other into ageing and death. This has emerged from long-term native ecosystem regeneration work and Sarah’s background and interest in social activism and permaculture, along with her counselling and community work skillsets. https://theemptycradle.com/
DONNA WARD (AUS) is 70, a writer, editor, publisher and former psychotherapist from Western Australia who now lives in Melbourne. She is the author of a 2020 memoir, She I Dare Not Name: A Spinster’s Meditations on Life, (Allen & Unwin), a global authority and thought leader on singlehood, and CEO of a new Australian organisation, Singlehood Australia www.
JULIE GREENAN (UK) is in her early seventies and lives in Newcastle, N.E. England. She’s divorced and single and, for many reasons, including ambivalence, circumstances and physical issues, including two pregnancy losses and many encounters with the medical profession, she did not become a mother, but prefers to avoid categorising herself as either childless or childfree. In 2023, she was a panellist at StoryhouseCHIDLESS as part of Jody’s ‘Finding Community in Elderhood’ panel, and has appeared on the Full Stop podcast episode ‘Single and Childless in a Pandemic‘ speaking of her experience of living alone through lockdown in the south of Spain. Julie is passionate about open-water swimming, loves singing and, when she gets down to it, writing. She’s an active member of the Childless Collective (formerly Gateway Women) online community, and occasionally publishes her writing on her Substack, ‘From Seventy‘.
BYDDI LEE (UK: Northern Ireland) is an Irish writer in her late 50s. Her most recent book is Barren – a fictional account of infertility set amid the backdrop of climate change, and ultimately offers hope across the millennia. Her other books include Rejuvenation, a speculative fiction trilogy about reverse-ageing that confronts society’s infatuation with youth and questions where our values lie, and her first book, March to November, a quirky but dark relationship drama set in Belfast. She has also published flash fiction and short stories. Byddi also writes for stage and screen and is a member of BBC Writersroom Voices 23. Her most recent play is a climate change satire called Toxic Relationships. www.ByddiLee.com
SUE NEWSOME (UK) is in her early sixties and a psychosexual therapist, coach and educator. In 2013 she was named ‘Sex Therapist of the Year’ by Outsiders, the UK charity that provides sex and relationship support to physically and socially disabled people. Partnered and childless by circumstance herself, Sue has been a long-time member of Gateway Women. www.suenewsome.com
CAROL SCOTT (UK) is in her early 70’s and has been a therapist for 25 years. She has worked extensively with those who are childless not by choice and went through her own journey of miscarriages and baby loss. Carol is currently writing a book and creating a 6-week program about recovering from the end of a long-term relationship, with the working title of ‘Beyond Break Up’, which includes a chapter on being single and childless not by choice. Carol’s therapy practice is listed on the Gateway Women’s Childless Therapist directory here. https://www.carolsuzanscott.com
ANN DAVIDMAN (USA) is in her late 60s and is a marriage and family therapist, parenthood clarity mentor, and an author who has been helping people resolve their parenthood indecision since 1991. Childfree after infertility, she offers motherhood and fatherhood clarity courses based on the book she co-authored with Denise L. Carlini, Motherhood – Is It For Me? Your Step-by-Step Guide to Clarity (2016), which Jody gave a glowing review for upon publication. Ann lives with her female partner in a dedicated 55+ community in the San Francisco Bay Area. www.ParenthoodClarity.com
SUE FAGALDE LICK (US) is in her early seventies and the author of the memoir & blog ‘Childless by Marriage’, the collection ‘Love or Children: When You Can’t Have Both‘, a wonderful trilogy of novels (beginning with ‘Up Beaver Creek‘) featuring her inspiring and relatable childless heroine, ‘P.D.’, as well as journalism & poetry. She is childless due to her second husband not wanting (more) children, and in 2024, published her memoir ‘No Way Out of This: Loving a Partner with Alzheimer’s‘, about their marriage, his decline, her life whilst being his sole carer, and death. A musician and singer, she lives alone in rural Oregon and writes a Substack about her experience of ‘solo ageing’ called ‘Can I Do It Alone?‘ www.suelick.com
ELIZABETH GRAMBSCH (USA) is in her early 60s and is a Neurodevelopmental Educator and Coach. She uses her strong background in applied neuroscience, auditory processing and performing arts to help her clients improve and enhance their communication skills and creative self-expression. She is a contributing author in the textbook Bodymind and Voice: Foundations for Voice Education and a faculty member of the VoiceCare Network. She has worked to heal the roots of her own Ancestral trauma (German/Ojibwe) and many others, by weaving cranial nerve and reflex integration with sound healing and vocal coaching. She is a trained Gateway Women facilitator with a passion for expressing her childless life. elizabethgrambsch.com
MARIA HILL (US) is in her late seventies. She is a World Childless Week Ambassador and a long-time member of the Gateway Women/Childless Collective online community. She is the founder of Sensitive Evolution and the author of The Emerging Sensitive: A Guide For Finding Your Place In The World. She is a writer, coach, healer, and transformative thinker illuminating the connection between culture, identity and the self. She can be found on her Substack, where she discusses the current cultural shift from hierarchical to egalitarian systems. https://mariahill.substack.com/
KATE KAUFMANN (US) is in her early 70s and the author of Do You Have Kids? Life When the Answer Is No. Kate’s blog for Psychology Today, ‘Unapparent’, explores the lives and issues faced by the childless and childfree. Divorced, she is childless due to failed infertility treatments. www.katekaufmann.com
PAMELA MAHONEY TSIGDINOS (USA) is in her early 60s and was voted a World Childless Week Champion in 2023/4 for her groundbreaking and tireless work for the childless-not-by-choice community globally. She is the author of Silent Sorority (2009), the first infertility-and-after memoir not written by a mother, and 2015’s Finally Heard, which moves beyond the personal to examine the complex inter-relationship of the psychological, social and cultural implications of ‘Generation IVF.’ An award-winning journalist, researcher and truth-teller about the realities and the aftermath of ART (assisted reproductive technology) her newest paper, ‘An IVF Survivor unravels ‘fertility’ industry narratives’, was published in a special issue of the Journal of Marketing Management in 2022. https://pamelamahoneytsigdinos.medium.com
DR. DIANE OSGOOD (US) is in her early 60s and for thirty years has worked to make the world a better and kinder place. She has a Ph.D. in Environmental Economics and has helped companies to create products that are better for people, for the planet, and for businesses. She’s understandably proud of her work on human rights, including slavery in supply chains, and helping companies develop climate change strategies. She’s advised people such as former President Bill Clinton, heads of state from Caribbean countries and Costa Rica, the Vatican and private philanthropists, and for five years worked for Richard Branson as a director of sustainability. Diane is childless-by-circumstance and lives between Chicago and rural France and, as a personal friend of Jody’s, has seen the Gateway Women project evolve from day one; her sage advice, ‘You need a book’, was one of the reasons Jody wrote hers! Diane’s book, Your Shopping Superpower: Follow Your Values and Better Your World One Purchase at a Time, was published in 2025, and she’s the co-author and editor of 2022’s The Carbon Almanack: It’s Not Too Late, as well as appearing in countless articles and journals over the years. Diane’s Substack is Your Shopping Superpower, and her main website is https://www.dianeosgood.com
STEPHANIE RAFFELOCK (US) is in her early 70s and is a novelist, poet and essayist. She holds a degree in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University, a small Buddhist-inspired school in Boulder, Colorado. In addition to teaching her how to write, Naropa taught her about community service and over the years, Stephanie’s service has taken the form of teaching creative writing to marginalized communities, including halfway houses for teenagers and incarcerated women. She’s the author of A Delightful Little Book on Aging, Creatrix Rising and the editor of the anthology Art in the Time of Unbearable Crisis, for which she wrote the introduction. Stephanie writes an excellent Substack called Creative Eldering. Website: www.byline-stephanie.com
VICKI ROBIN (US) is in 80 and is a prolific social innovator, writer and speaker. She is coauthor with Joe Dominguez of the international best-seller and classic, Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence (Viking Penguin, 1992, 1998, 2008, 2018), and author of Blessing the Hands that Feed Us; Lessons from a 10-mile diet (Viking/Penguin 2014). She is co-founder of Conversation Cafes and of the 10-Day Local Food Challenge, and hosts the podcast/YouTube interview series, What Could Possibly Go Right?, inviting cultural scouts to shine a light on what’s emerging as the pandemic, climate, the economy and polarization unravel the old normal. A non-mother, currently, she’s exploring ‘the unmapped territory from older to elder’ on her Substack Coming of Aging. Vicki serves on the Board of the Post Carbon Institute and lives by herself on Whidbey Island in Washington State, USA. https://vickirobin.com/
JACKIE SHANNON HOLLIS (US) is in her 60s and is the author of This Particular Happiness: A Childless Love Story about her journey to making peace within her marriage to a man who chose not to have children. For many years, she worked as a counselor in addiction treatment and later worked in human resources. She now lives in Portland, on the west side of Oregon. She and her husband, Bill, lead workshops on communication, conflict management, and building successful relationships and she also facilitates creative writing workshops for people experiencing homelessness and other hardships. As a survivor of sexual assault, Jackie also writes and speaks about the unfolding impact of sexual assault on survivors and those who love them. www.jackieshannonhollis.com
Find out more about Jody’s Gateway Elderwomen project and watch previously recorded 'Fireside Wisdom' sessions here. Read Jody’s FREE essays on her Bestselling Substack ‘Gateway Elderwomen’ here. Join Jody’s ‘Childless Elderwomen’ subgroup (hosted by the Childless Collective) here. Join the Gateway Women newsletter so you don’t miss notice of the the next Fireside Wisdom call here.
