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Honouring your experience of Mother’s Day

March 1, 2016 Jody Day 5

In the UK, we celebrate Mother’s Day as “Mothering Sunday”, three Sundays before Easter and so this coming Sunday. It was originally a day when all domestic servants were given a coordinated day off so that they could visit their families and together attend a service at their “Mother” church. It was a family day. However, gradually that original meaning has been lost and has been overtaken by the “Mother’s Day” first introduced in the US by Anna Jarvis in 1914 and falling on the second Sunday in May. Interestingly, Anna Jarvis was childless and the scope of her Mother’s Day also […]

Talking About Childlessness: a video interview with Karen Malone Wright, Founder of TheNotMom.com

September 19, 2015 Jody Day 11

One of the thing that has helped me so much in my recovery from unchosen childlessness has been hearing other women’s stories. Over the last few years I’ve got to know some amazing childless women and it’s been a privilege and a delight that I wanted to share with you. I know that it would have made a huge difference to me when I was still struggling if I’d been able to eavesdrop on conversations between women who’d recovered from their childlessness and were moving on with their lives in ways that felt meaningful to them. Firstly, because I didn’t know women like that, and secondly […]

Honouring Your Childlessness on Mother’s Day

March 13, 2015 Jody Day 33

In the UK, we celebrate Mother’s Day as “Mothering Sunday”, three Sundays before Easter and so this coming Sunday. It was originally a day when all domestic servants were given a coordinated day off so that they could visit their families and together attend a service at their “Mother” church. It was a family day. However, gradually that original meaning has been lost and has been overtaken by the “Mother’s Day” first introduced in the US by Anna Jarvis in 1914 and falling on the second Sunday in May. Interestingly, Anna Jarvis was childless and the scope of her Mother’s Day also […]

The Childless Menopause

September 8, 2014 Jody Day 127

I turned 50 earlier this year which was a cause for celebration amongst my family and friends. However, when I officially became ‘post-menopausal’ the year before, nobody wanted to know. In our youth (read: fertility) obsessed culture, becoming post-menopausal means the end of bearing a biological child and, it seems, the official beginning of your pointlessness and invisibility as an older woman. But, it seems, just as in other stages of my ‘failure’ to become a mother, I don’t fully buy into this cultural narrative of my worthlessness. And maybe even the ‘invisibility’ might work to my advantage too, as […]

Things I wish I’d known at 40

July 16, 2014 Jody Day 60

This week, I celebrate my 50th birthday. It feels like a heck of a thing, to find myself turning 50 at peace with the past, happy in the present and excited about the future. It didn’t come easily and, looking back over the screenplay of my 40s it does seem to include just about everything from farce to tragedy… So that got me thinking about boldly going into a new decade where no Jody has gone before – if I could talk to my 40-year-old self, what would I want her to know about the decade ahead? Here are some […]

Honouring your Childlessness on Mother’s Day

March 18, 2014 Jody Day 28

In the UK, we celebrate Mother’s Day as “Mothering Sunday”, three Sundays before Easter and this year falling on Sunday 30th March. It was originally a day when all domestic servants were given a coordinated day off so that they could visit their families and together attend a service at their “Mother” church. It was a family day. However, gradually that original meaning has been lost and has been overtaken by the “Mother’s Day” first introduced in the US by Anna Jarvis in 1914 and falling on the second Sunday in May. Interestingly, Anna Jarvis was childless and the scope of her […]

You’re Not the Odd One Out

January 31, 2014 Jody Day 14

Although when you look around you in the street, amongst your friends and family or in the media you may sometimes feel like the only woman who isn’t a mother, the surprising fact is that 1:5 UK and US women born in the 1960s reached 45 without having had children. And, as the first of those born in the 1970s turn 45 in 2015, we’ll begin to see if the statistic rises to 1:4 as it already is in Italy, Switzerland and Finland. My hunch is it will, but the data’s a few years off yet. The last time the rate […]

Best friends forever? With childlessness, not always…

December 18, 2013 Jody Day 13

Perhaps one of the most unexpected, and hardest, parts of being a childless woman was coming to terms with the fact that I not only lost the family I longed for, but that I also lost my peer group. It took me a very long time to realise what was happening, as I was so in denial about my infertility (I never actually even identified as ‘infertile’, I was just ‘trying to conceive’) that I was quite happy for everyone else to have children – after all, I knew for sure that I’d be joining them soon… It wasn’t until […]

50 Ways Not To Be A Mother…

September 6, 2013 Jody Day 61

Although many people who don’t know our story may imagine that we either actively chose not to have children or couldn’t have them due to infertility, there are many ways to end up childless without actively choosing it: Being single and unable to find a suitable relationship from your mid-thirties onwards. Being ignorant about your fertility and not realising that after 35 it’s half what it was at 25, and that by the time we’re 40 we have only a very small number of viable eggs left. The age that many women think they need to worry about is 40, […]

You’re not crazy, you’re grieving

March 27, 2013 Jody Day 36

Do any of the following sound like you? You find yourself hiding out in the bathroom at the office because of your colleagues’ endless babytalk… You walk home alone across town, in the freezing rain, just to get away from your ‘last’ childless friend’s announcement of her ‘miracle’ pregnancy… You avoid family events and spend most of your cash on holidays and retreats abroad during the Christmas season… You snap and bitch at your partner so much that you wouldn’t be surprised if they left you… You’ve given up dating all together… You couldn’t give a shit what you look […]

Will I Ever Get Over Not Having Children?

January 17, 2013 Jody Day 276

There are two sides to the question “Do you ever get over not having children?” And it really depends on who’s doing the asking. One is incredibly insulting, as in, “Aren’t you over that yet?!” Whilst the other is “Will I ever feel good about my life again?” The fact is that if you were to have had children, and by some tragic event, they had died, nobody would ever expect you to be ‘over it’. Indeed, if you ever were, you’d be considered heartless – that terrible fairytale nasty: a bad mother. Every Christmas or Mother’s Day, people would be sensitive towards how […]

Menopausal Mojo: why being post-fertile is yet another taboo to bust!

August 11, 2012 Jody Day 20

This article was written in 2012 Perhaps one of the things that’s surprised me most about coming to terms with my childlessness is how it’s impacted every area of my life: my identity, my dreams and my hopes. And one of the most unexpected shifts has been in my ideas about intimate relationships. I was with my ex-husband for 16 years, and both before and after that had serious, long-term relationships. Really, from the ages of 15-45 I had sex and heteosexual relationships on the brain. And now, aged 48, and four years into accepting that my quest for motherhood […]

No children? Not welcome.

July 10, 2011 Jody Day 5

In today’s Observer (10 July 2011) buried at the back behind the lengthy reports of what, in time I presume will come to be called Murdoch-gate or some such thing, is an article by Tracy McVeigh called ‘Single, female, 45-plus: life, love and friendship for women of ‘a certain age.’ Now, I’m never entirely sure what this ‘certain age’ is… I’ve always, from a mixture of vanity, denial and naivety presumed it to be ‘a bit older than me’. But, turning 47 in the next few weeks I guess that… Tag! I’m it. On the whole, I’ve never been too […]

Hell hath no fury like an empty womb

May 7, 2011 Jody Day 17

Sometimes, just knowing that someone else understands what it’s like to be driven mad by the whole ‘baby’ issue is all it takes for the pressure to ease, just a little. For someone to reach their hand down to you as you sit in a funk in your dank, dark tunnel and let you know that they understand. It’s good to know you’re not alone, but still… You’re so mad you could spit. When the number on your fertility speedometer reads 35, or maybe the needle’s pushing 40, 41, 42… the scream in your head can be so damn loud […]

To the Childless Woman at Christmas – I See You

December 25, 2023 Jody Day 18

I originally published this post in Christmas 2020, when many of us across the globe were under pandemic-related restrictions. However, although that may have changed, much of the experience of being childless at Christmas hasn’t… Many of us are hanging out in the round-the-world round-the-clock live chat in our private online community – come and join us there for empathic company and some random and often frivolous chat to distract you! However you are spending your holidays this year, I send you a warm hug. Hugs, Jody x I see you sitting at home muting the rolling TV ads of […]