This essay was published in 2016, so some of the links may no longer work. But the 5 points hold true!
Gateway Women was 5 years old yesterday.
It was on 5th April 2011 that I published my first blog here, reaching out blindly to the world in the hope that someone (even just one person) would have some kind of clue as to what I was going through as a divorced, single, infertile, childless women in her mid-forties, wondering what the hell had happened to my life! I was almost 46 and had been trying to get my head around my childlessness since I was 44 (yes, I held onto toxic hope that long) without much success. I’d been blogging on other topics for a couple of years and had found that addressing my words to an invisible audience ‘out there’ had helped me to clarify my thinking in a way that journalling never had, so I decided to start a new blog called Gateway Women specifically to write about childlessness. I actually had very few expectations that anyone would read it, as so far trying to engage people on the topic had been met with disdain, disinterest, disbelief and a collection of bonkers ‘miracle baby stories’ that would defy even the authors of the hideously unhelpful book ‘The Secret’ to top.
As I’ve learned SO MUCH in the last 5 years myself and from you, I thought I’d have a go at distilling it down to the five most important things. Here goes:
1. You are not alone
Although 5 years ago I was, as far as I knew at the time, the only involuntarily childless woman amongst all my friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, complete strangers, etc, through my blog I discovered that although we were mostly silent on the internet, there were a great many of us.
To put childlessness into a global context, the 2013 United Nations Fertility Report states that since the UN’s 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, the number of low-fertility countries (with 2.0 children per woman or fewer) has increased from 51 to 70. Within those countries, childlessness amongst women aged 40–44 has increased across Europe and Eastern Asia, with five countries now having 1 in 5 women remaining childless, a statistic unknown in 1994.
Living the Life Unexpected by Jody Day (2016), Chapter 2
In the UK and Ireland, 1 in 5 women have turned 45 without children, and it ranges across the developed world for example from 1 in 3 (Japan, Germany), to 1 in 4 (Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Singapore) and 1 in 5 (Spain, The Netherlands, Canada, until recently USA). The countries with the lowest rate of childlessness (at around 12 percent) are France and Sweden, due to hefty financial and structural state support for fertility treatments and childcare. As childlessness data includes both childless-not-by-choice and childfree-by-choice women it’s hard to get an exact picture of our numbers, and this important distinction has yet to be recognised in census data. However, a recent meta-analysis of international data by Professor Renske Keizer estimates that childfree-by-choice women make up only 10% of the number of women without children, although other estimates vary. (For more detailed analysis of these figures, see chapter 2 of my book).
When I found out it that 1 in 5 women in the UK were childless, my first thought was, well where the hell are they all then?! I had never come across any (although I knew a couple of happily childfree friends) neither in person, nor in the media. In novels and films, childless women were portrayed as neurotic or evil; call to mind Glenn Close’s ‘bunny boiler’ character in Fatal Attraction, Cruella de Vil in 101 Dalmatians or even the still culturally present ‘Miss Havisham’, portraying single childless women as unhinged, selfish and not safe to be around children (included her adopted daughter) since Dickens dreamt her up in 1861’s Great Expectations.
Five years on, and Gateway Women has a ‘reach’ of almost 2 million women around the world and my personal and professional life is full to busting with wonderful, wise, funny, creative, soulful, courageous, compassionate, kind childless women. We have a vibrant private online community and meetup groups around the world in the UK & Ireland, Europe, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. I’ve just calculated that I’ve worked with almost a thousand women personally in my workshops and private sessions alone!
Meeting other childless women first online in the comments and conversations on our blogs, and then in person, and being able to have the kinds of conversations that no-one else would let me have without interrupting me with bingos such as: You’re lucky – children aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, or, What are you worried about? You’ve still got time!, or any variety hereof that we all know so well, was a lifesaver. And I don’t use the word ‘lifesaver’ lightly – the pain I was in over my childlessness was the most intense I had ever experienced in my life, and I’d already dealt with a great deal of life trauma, from infancy onwards…
2. You absolutely can and need to grieve for the children you’ll never have
I started training to become an Integrative psychotherapist in 2010 (I’m still going, such things take a very long time!) It was during my second year, on a course about grief, that I understood, for the very first time that what I was experiencing was grief. Neither doctors, therapists nor anything that I’d found on the internet had suggested that being childless involved grieving for my longed-for children. It was a huge relief to me immediately for two reasons: (a) I knew that this meant that I wasn’t going crazy, which had been a serious worry as I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t ‘pull myself together’, and (b) although I had no idea how it would happen, grief was finite, it would eventually came to an end and somehow I would recover from this. I didn’t have a clue how yet, but for the first time I had an idea what I was dealing with…
When I started writing about grief on my blog, my realisation also helped other women name and own their pain, confusion, anger, envy, jealousy, withdrawal, depression and despair as grief. And so I started reading and studying as much as I could about grief, and how to tackle it. I didn’t yet realise that grief doesn’t really respond to being ‘tackled’ but it was a good place to start! In time I came to understand that grief is an emotional, physiological and psychological process that some days doesn’t make much sense to a left-brained, list-making way of dealing with life. In fact, befriending my grief with self-compassion (and befriending my wounded heart) opened up a whole new way of being in the world for me, one of tenderness and vulnerability that I didn’t really know I possessed. And in doing so, others wanted to know how I’d done it, and so the first Gateway Women groups and workshops were born, just to see if it were possible for me to share my experience in a way that would be useful for others. My first groups were in the Autumn of 2011 and I then translated that into the Reignite Weekend workshop which began in July 2012 and has been running quarterly ever since. Sharing my experience of ongoing healing with others, and then supporting them as they used it as a guide to their own healing has been, and continues to be, one of the most beautiful and profound experiences of my life.
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My tips and resources for grieving your childlessness
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Gateway Women events and workshops
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Kristen Neff’s brilliant book ‘Self Compassion’
3. Shame is the thing that keeps us from healing
One of the things that I didn’t realise when I started this blog was that childlessness is a social taboo. In our culture, it’s currently shameful to be childless, and shame functions as a social ‘silencer’ making it shameful to talk about and shameful to experience, and in effect can leave us with the feeling that the ‘reason’ we are childless is that not that things didn’t work out for us, but that there’s something fundamentally ‘wrong’ about us. It also makes it difficult for people who might otherwise want to support us to talk to us about our childlessness, as they fear ’embarrassing’ us by discussing it.
Perhaps because I’d already been part of Al-Anon (the 12-step programme for friends and families of alcoholics) and had seen the power of opening up about things that we’re conditioned ‘not’ to talk about, I’d already seen the power of shame-busting, and thus felt able to be open about my childlessness? I genuinely didn’t think it was my fault, or that there was something wrong with me as a human being because of how it’d worked out for me. I had a vicious Inner Bitch at the time who used to give me hell about every other aspect of my life, but somehow in this one area, although I was desperately heartbroken, I still felt that a lot of it had been down to bad luck, bad timing and bad choices in relationships, as well as unexplained infertility. If I’d have felt shame around it, it’s unlikely I wouldn’t have persisted in trying to talk about it with people who really didn’t want to hear it, eventually choosing to take it online instead! And by not being ashamed of my childlessness, it’s given other women permission not to feel ashamed of theirs. It’s a virtuous circle of liberation with each woman who stops being ashamed liberating those she then comes into contact with…
Shame is different from guilt, because guilt tells us that we’ve done something wrong but shame tells us we are something wrong. Working with childless women over the last five years, and trying to encourage women to meet in person, I’ve come to understand that toxic shame is the #1 thing holding most women back from recovery, as without the open-hearted vulnerability and connection that comes from sharing our story and seeing that someone doesn’t freak out when we do, it’s hard to move forward, and the shame-based stories get bigger and nastier in our heads. The trouble with toxic shame is that it sounds like some kind of ‘truth’ when we tell it to ourselves – it’s not until we hear or read another woman’s story and can see elements of our own in it, and realise that we feel compassion rather than disgust or condemnation for her that we begin to realise how unnecessarily hard we’re being on ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with shame, there’s nothing wrong with any of our emotions; it’s what we make them mean that causes the trouble…
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Watch Brene Brown’s brilliant TED talk on The Power of Vulnerablity
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And another cracker too – Brene Brown on ‘Listening to Shame’
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Read Karla McLaren on ‘The Gifts of Shame’
4. Finding your community, your ‘Tribe’ is crucial: online and in-person
My first experience of community was getting to know other women in the blogosphere online. Although I only knew one other person writing about childlessness due to any other reason that failed infertility treatments (Katherine Baldwin’s From Forty With Love, which started at the same time as my blog), the compassion and friendship I found amongst ‘the infertiles’ was a huge balm to my isolated and wounded heart. I would like to say a particular thank you to Pamela Tsigdinos of Silent Sorority, who sent a copy of her book across the Atlantic to me, the generosity of which made a huge impact on me during a time when it seemed that the world had turned mean on me. And also to Lisa Manterfield, a transplanted Brit in California who welcomed me and interviewed me for her Life Without Baby blog. For the first time, I felt I was able to express myself and be completely understood without any weird comebacks, put-downs or ‘advice’.
The second community I met, and which I’m now proud to call my Tribe was other childless not by choice women like myself. Of all different ages, ethnicities, backgrounds and stories we had this defining life experience in common: we’d wanted (or still did want) to be mothers and it hadn’t worked out. I discovered that there were many more ways to be childless than I had ever imagined and that yet, no matter how different another woman’s story was to mine, we had so much more in common than not. It created an amazing bond. I discovered that having other women to talk to was THE missing ingredient in ‘doing my grief work’ and, over time, I came to formulate that grief is a ‘social emotion’ and simply cannot be processed alone, in our heads. We absolutely have to have someone else who totally gets it to talk to (and online works too). And as it seemed that no-one except other childless women seemed to ‘get it’, this made a massive difference. And oh, the chance to laugh again (dark humour is another of the gifts of grief) and to have women to feel close to again! One of the many losses of childlessness can be a partial (or total) loss of our female peer group – it was for me and for many others I know. Finding my tribe, my community, gave me back my sense of connection to the human race that I feared my singleness and childlessness had robbed me of forever.
The third community I’d love to share with you is the private Gateway Women online community which I created in December 2012. Like many of the things I’ve created for GW, I thought I’d just give it a go and see how it went (not everything I’ve tried has taken off!) Google had just introduced Google Plus (its social media platform) and I liked the idea of creating a private community that wasn’t on Facebook, as Facebook seemed to be a form of self-harm for most childless women. Different to other online communities, I decided to instigate an application form and an ID-check for everyone joining, so that we could all feel as secure as possible that it was a safe place to open up. Although the admin for this proved so onerous that at one point I nearly had to close the community down, eventually I chose to weather the storms of outrage at introducing a very modest membership fee (even though we also offer free memberships to anyone who needs one) and the community now has a paid community manager (the wonderful Helen Burke), leaving me to actively participate and interact with members on a daily basis, and it continues to thrive and grow. We now also have sister communities for those through their grief work (a testament to the healing that the main community can provide) called ‘Nomo Tribe’, a reading group community for those working through my book, ‘Grief Bacon’ for those healing their relationship with emotional eating and also a support community for those members considering or going through the adoption process. We have about 1000 members from all over the world and it’s the wisest, most compassionate, intelligent and creative group of women I’ve ever found online. It pretty well much ruins you for any other social media, but that’s not a huge loss I’ve found!
5. Recovery from childlessness is possible
Perhaps the single most important thing that it would have been helpful for me to know when I began to face the rest of my life without children is that it is possible to recover from childlessness. From the way that others treated me as some kind of damaged social leper, to the complete lack of literature on the subject and a total lack of role models talking about how they had done so themselves, I had no way of knowing this. Even if I hadn’t been able to fully believe it myself at the time, it would have been a HUGE help to have known this was even a possibility. To have had something to work towards. Some kind of guideline. So here it is:
I now consider myself to be in my seventh year of recovery from childlessness, dating it from the day that I accepted (cognitively that is!) that I would definitely not be having children of my own (nor adopting) in this lifetime. It’s coming up for four years now since I came through my grief and into a calm and peaceful total acceptance that childlessness is something that happened to me rather than it being my whole identity. I thought that this would be as good as it could get, but one of the most surprising ‘gifts’ of grief has been that not only did it heal my heartbreak over childlessness, but it seemed that it also healed many other losses, including my divorce, childhood losses, my health and the passing of youth with my menopause. It seems to have burnt away everything not needed for the onward voyage of my life, and I feel clear-headed, courageous and excited about the future again. Considering that during the worst days of my grief, I felt that my life was just something to be survived, one day at a time, until the blissful release of death, this is one hell of a turnaround!
My book, Living the Life Unexpected, self-published with the crowd-funded support of the Gateway Women tribe in 2013, was republished in fully revised and massively expanded edition (including extracts from case studies of your stories too) by Bluebird/PanMamillan in 2016. My book contains everything I’ve learned so far about how to recover from childlessness. You can also find a lot of free material here on the blog and in the resources section. As I continue to heal and recover, I continue to share what works for me, and for others, and it’s my life’s mission to help as many childless women as possible, and to change society’s antiquated and hurtful ideas about childlessness so that the next generation don’t have to endure what we have.
And as for the next five years of Gateway Women? Well, there are plans for my book to be published in other languages (Czech is the first apparently!) and I hope that once my psychotherapy masters is totally complete I aim to hit the road, coming to meet you all around the world and sharing the liberating and healing experience of the Reignite Weekend. Oh, and writing more books and continuing to speak out in the media about the many challenges and stigmas that pronatalism heaps on childless (and childfree) women. And continuing to work with my colleagues at AWOC.org (Ageing Without Children) to improve that aspect of our experience. So, pretty exciting and busy really. The cat and I couldn’t be happier or more fulfilled, and no one is more surprised about that than me…
I couldn’t have done it without you, dear Reader. Thank you, from the bottom of my scarred and grateful heart. With love and thanks, Jody x
I dealt with all this stuff 15-20 years ago, aged 40-45. I entertained all my emotions, wept, raged, stormed, talked about it, shouted about it, went through 2 years of therapy. Came through, became the artist I should always have been. Hooray!
Guess what? It’s back. It’s worse than ever. I’m 60 and all my friends who drove me nuts when they had children are now new monsters, grandparents! Sanctimonious, complacent , boastful, ghastly. Grief never stops.
Hi Kate. I’m new with GW so only just seen your post.. i’m 65 and can relate totally to your second paragraph. You describe it perfectly ‘Sancimonious, complacent, boastful, ghastly’, exactly. And they have done precisely nothing to merit their status. Anyone can be a grandmother simply by reproducing and having offspring who reproduce. I’ve jsut discovered the word ‘pronatalism’ and it’s been a total revelation to me. I’m so sorry are grieving again. Sending a big hug. Julie xxx
Hi I just saw this after joining gateway women. I really needed this as I am 35 and facing the possibility of infertility. While me and my partner have not actively tried we have not taken preacautions in the last year and no pregnancy. The thought of infertility is unearable and I am terrified to be tested as I am scared that artificial means may be the only option (this is something I refuse to pursue if women want to all respect but I cant as I feel like a failure doing it). It hurts so much and no one understands. The other day I nearly called Lifeline as I struggled so much. I am dreading xmas as partner and I have many social functions where I am the only childfree woman or will be around women who semi tried when we did and now have big baby bellies I wanna punch their bellies as horrible as it sounds becUse I feel so incompetent around them. I also feel I failed my partner esp at his football grandfinal where all his teammates had kids to pose with in the photo when he didn’t. I think the team photo also made me realise that as childfree wag I could never join the photo. Comes back to the exclusion thing. I know Im silly thinking that as I know my partner loves me regardless and has a dont worry it will happen approach and it is times like this I need support from.women who know my feeling of 30’and childfree
I’m so sorry that you are struggling, Jess. Allow yourself to grieve, be angry, jealous, sad, whatever emotions you need to work through. This process takes time. My husband and I tried to conceive for ten years and are now in year four of accepting our childless life. I am 40 and still have some bad days. But I definitely have more good! I actually started a blog recently about our journey and it has been amazing to connect with other women like Jody who have gone through these same struggles. You have found support! We can take heart in that!
Hi Jess – thanks for your comment and I’m so glad you’ve found us. Our society paints such a scary picture of what life without kids might turn out to be that facing the possibility that this might be your future can feel overwhelming. The time up to and including Christmas is the hardest time of year because, let’s face it, it’s the celebration of the ultimate ‘miracle baby story’! Being a childless or childfree woman in our society is to be part of a large, but mostly hidden group of women in society. We are not less than mothers,our life paths are simply different. Spending time with other childless women may help you to realise that, even if you do find yourself part of ‘this club’ rather than the ‘mother club’, it’s going to be OK. Not right now, I get it. You’re grieving, in shock and fearful. I really recommend joining our private online community where we can support you where you’re at and help you get to a better place. Hugs, Jody x
Thank you, Jody! As I read your post, I kept nodding in agreement. I particularly like that you say you are in “recovery” from childlessness. I struggled with infertility for 10 years. I think I’ll now remember and vocalize that I’m in my third year of recovering from childlessness. I recently started blogging about my journey and it has been incredible to find my “tribe.” I look forward to seeing where this new journey takes me!
Thank you.
Thank you, Jody, for helping make us VISIBLE, helping us to connect to our tribe, and for your message of hope! Heck, just reading this post is empowering.
My local library had a brand new copy of your book waiting for me this afternoon on my darkest day. I have read 4 1/2 chapters in as many hours and feel hope for the future for the first time in many years. You possibly have saved my life. I’ll be buying a copy to share with those closest to me so that they can understand what I’m going through.
Thank you so very much <3
Tamara – I’m so very, very glad that my book has found you and that it is helping you feel some hope again. It was my dream when I created the new edition that it would be available in libraries and bookshops so that more women could find it. You have made my day! Hugs and thanks for letting me know. Do consider joining our online community – it’s a powerful, private and understanding place to process the deep reflections that the book brings up. Jody x
https://gateway2012.wpengine.com/community
Happy 5th Birthday Gateway Women and thanks for everything Jody! Your strength and courage to start this group up when you were in such a low place was so brave.
Having only found Gateway 18 months ago I can honestly say I am making huge leaps and bounds in learning to re-evaluate my life without children and realising that life is worth it. Working through the book and attending various courses has been an emotional journey and one where I have learnt a lot about myself and others. Everyone’s stories are so different and yet we all have such sadness and so many feelings in common.
Looking back to this time last year I have noticed my self hatred & lack of compassion has improved dramatically. Meeting other wonderful GW ladies at local meet-ups, all suffering in silence, has made me realise I am not alone and its been great to learn how to socialise again. Releasing the feeling of shame and allowing myself to grieve for something I saw as an invisible loss, and therefore not worthy of grief , has been life changing. I do hope that other ladies struggling with their nasty thoughts, sadness and isolation find you and the tribe. Its been a challenging journey but one hopefully worth fighting for.
Big hugs to you and so pleased the new updated version of the book is now easily available to all – it is so worth buying to find some inner peace!.
Good Luck with all your future plans. Well deserved.
Dear Braggie – thank you so much for taking the time to comment and to share how being part of GW has helped you. It has been an honour and a privilege getting to know you and watching you let go of the old and welcome the new in the last year. Lots of love, Jody x
here here, Jody, as always so inspiring to read where you are and your plans for the future! The energy and warmth you’re slowly infusing into the souls that need it most, are so very meaningful and very powerful.
Your book came to me at a time that, at the age of 45 after struggling 5 years with uncertainty and grief of the closure in my attempts to create a family, I wound up spontaneously pregnant, completely unplanned, and within nine weeks miscarried. Just enough time to fall head over heels in love with the idea of family again, then off the cliff I went. Your book and the Gateway community reached out to me with warmth and light through a dark, cold, and lonely place. I cannot express what it meant to me to receive warmth and kindness by email from all corners of the globe wishing me well as I waited for my emergency D&C.
Now, here I am, two years later, having walked solidly through this grieving process, embracing a full, challenging, and meaningful life and LOVING it. Your book, and the women who I’ve connected with as a result, played a critical role in this process, I’m absolutely certain.
Thank you again Jody. Xxo
And please come to Vancouver some day, I’ll introduce you to the beautiful West Coast of Canada! 😉
I’m struggling today, and desperately seeking something that can help me make sense of the turmoil I’m feeling. I’m 44 in a couple of weeks, and am childless by circumstance – married to a man with alcohol issues for 15 years, who told me that he wanted children, then changed his mind. For much of our relationship I wouldn’t have wanted to bring kids into the chaos that was often his world. We split when I was 39 but patched things up, and he promised that we could try for kids. He didn’t mean it. After limping on for a few years we divorced. He gave up the booze, found a new partner, and in January this year he told me that he is expecting a baby, due sometime this month. In the meantime I’d met a marvellous man who said that he wanted to try for a family. After recently encouraging me to have fertility tests (all results totally normal) he told me earlier this week that he didn’t think that he wanted kids after all – he just felt that he should make amends for my ex-. Now I’m in despair, and realise that the ‘toxic hope’ which had perhaps lingered for too long, has now been forcibly removed. I don’t want to be in this involuntarily childless club. I still can’t believe that this is going to be my life. I don’t want it to be my life. I’m sad and angry. I don’t know what to do. I don’t really know how to be. Reading that I should write a poem or paint a picture, or find a hobby enrages me. I don’t feel shame – not in the slightest, I don’t feel societal pressure, or disapprobation from family, friends, colleagues. I guess though, I feel lonely with these feelings.
Hi Jenny – that all sounds very tough to cope with, and I’m not surprised you’re in ‘turmoil’ about it. I had to deal with alcoholism in my (ex) marriage too, so I have some idea of the hell you might have been through. And as for the new partner changing his mind…!! I strongly suggest you join our private online community where you can vent in privacy about all this, and be assured that no one will recommend a ‘hobby’ as a possible solution to your grief and despair. You sound angry as hell, and I don’t blame you! Come and join us in a place where you can process all this shit and get to the other side of it. With hugs and understanding of how incredibly hard this can be. Jody x
http://www.gateway-women.com/community
Oh Jenny ! I feel the anger in your post and have felt the same myself – still do occasionally although I’m now 61 and my failed IVF attempts and subsequent early hysterectomy were over 20 years ago. I can’t advise, but can empathise with what you’re going through. The only thing that helped me make sense was going to a counsellor (which I had to almost throw a screaming tantrum to get to see one) – It’s a long, long road. XX
Thank you Jody for everything you do. Making friends through the Gateway Women site has been so incredibly helpful on what can feel like a v lonely journey. You are an inspiration to so many!
Hi Catherine – you are very welcome lovely. I’m so glad you found us and that the online community is helping you feel connected and supported again. Hugs, Jodyx
Hi Jody
Thank you for all you have and are doing with Gateway Women. I think I grieved from my mid to late 30s as I kind of knew it was never going to happen for me….I just couldn’t see how I was going to meet the right guy in time and lots of other issues. So by the time I discovered you, I had accepted (more days than not) that I’d crossed a threshold at 45 and after investigating adoption and being told by a social worker that there was little chance I would be considered for a young child, I went through a new and different kind of grief. It was after a morning of endless sobbing that I was sitting in the physio’s waiting room, that I picked up a magazine and with eyes sore from tears, I read an article which mentioned Gateway Women. It was a sign!!! Since then I have read your book (1st edition), realised where I’m at on the journey, told lots of women I meet about it, gone to GW meetups and most wonderfully I have made some new lovely friends and hosted some GW dinners at my home. So thank you so so much and well done!
Hi Dinah – how lovely to hear from you and I’m so happy for you that you’ve embraced all that I’ve been putting ‘out there’ and it’s made such a difference to you! I love that you’ve got some new lovely friends too. It makes all the difference again, doesn’t it?! And knowing that you found me through an article really cheers me up as I do spend a lot of time being interviewed, writing things etc and many of them don’t come out, or don’t have a link, or are strangely edited to make GW (and me) look unappeallingly ‘odd’, so I’m so glad that one of the gooduns found you at just the right moment! Hugs, Jody x
Beautifully said. Jessica x
Hi Jody
It’s hard to believe that Gateway Women is 5 years old! It feels like it’s been going for much longer because it’s truly a pillar in my world, as it is for the community of childless women I’m lucky to meet up with each month in my local area.
When you started GW, I had just turned 42 and being recently single, was struggling with the devastating realisation that I might not have the chance to have children. Although you couldn’t have known it, it was perfect timing!! I was experiencing exactly those feelings of grief, loneliness and shame which you were writing about and immediately felt that I wasn’t alone. I have learnt and continue to learn so much from you and those I have met through GW. I can’t begin to imagine how difficult and painful it would have been for NOMOs before GW, and I’m so delighted that it will be there for many more women in future.
It’s been an amazing last 5 years, and here’s to the next 5, and beyond! Thank you Jody.
Very useful post. I try to get over being childless, but the concept of motherhood is constantly promoted everywhere and I still get exhausted with it. I’m now 61 and had to have an early hysterectomy due to endometriosis, following years of trying and 2 failed IVF attempts. – The first attempt failed at Easter (when the focus is on new life) and the second at Christmas (again celebrating birth)
Hi Penny – yes, motherhood is promoted everywhere because we are in the grip of a period of rampant pronatalism, which I think is a kind of social ‘backlash’ to the advances that women have made since the 1960s. It’s not any kind of reality or truth and the many women who create meaningful and fulfilling lives without children prove that! I’m sorry to hear of the cruel timing of your IVF attempts and I can imagine that having to be reminded of those dates each year in such a way can be hard… I find looking at role models of childless women really helpful – have you seen my gallery that I’ve been curating these last few years? I’ve got over 500 of them now? Love, Jody x
https://uk.pinterest.com/gatewaywomen/gateway-women-childless-childfree-women-role-model/
The ‘shame’ thing is one which has really touched nerve with me. I will never understand why mothers of my generation (I’m 44) place themselves on a pedestal, and suggest that by having and raising kids, whilst doing the other jobs which most people do, they are superior. I do feel a little out of place that I haven’t delivered kids, but when I read about kids being harmed by the very people who should care for the, I realise that me and my fellow non-mums have nothing to be ashamed of. Many of us were able to reproduce, but by choosing not to have kids because our circumstances were just not secure, we are ostracised, yet who is to say we didn’t behave with foresight and maturity?
Hi C – yes, I absolutely agree that the ridiculous over-praising of women who managed to have a child, whether it was a good idea, whether they were ready, whether the father was on board with the idea, whether they were psychologically, emotionally, logistically and financially prepared to parent… is utterly bonkers! Indeed, those who have chosen NOT to have a child, despite longing for one, when the situation to parent that child adequately is not in place have made a deeply maternal choice, and the very opposite of the ‘selfish’ tag so often applied to us! We totally have NOTHING to be ashamed of, and the very fact that society sees it otherwise suggests that pronatalism is at work here, and not logic, compassion or kindness. Love, Jody x
Thank you so much for sharing Jody! It is so inspiring.
Hi Rosa – you are so welcome! Thank you for letting me know, it’s so lovely to get comments and know that you’re out there reading! Love, Jody x
this holiday I could not face going on another couples dancing holiday as I have done for the last 4 so got into deep depression unable to exercise today I got out of it by speaking to another depressed but recovering friend and 3 or 4 12 step fellowship got out of my stuckness and got to a badminton session and tournament full of mental health professional eager to invite to groups where my physical recovery can continue I do not overeat now 21 years an am in a therapy group but remain childless and partnerless and jobless can manage one hour voluntary work listening to 2 six year olds reading and 1 hour rainbows with 20 energetic 6 years old. not on in holidays. holidays are the most challengeing but not eating sugar picking up the phone and seeing I have value becuae I help many people admit loneliness and depression and they are too ashamed this has helped me I have run out of library books no energy to go so read this today thank you jody
Hi Krysia – sounds like you’re doing everything you can to cope with a difficult time. I’m glad my post reached you today and helped a little bit. Love, Jody x
Thank you Jody. Very helpful. I’m nowhere near ‘there’ yet, and am definitely grieving. But it’s inspiring to see the light that is shining brightly at the end (and out the other side) of someone else’s tunnel – gives me hope while I’m still fumbling round in the dark of mine! Hopefully one day…
Hi Katie – although it’s tough that you’re grieving, it’s also ‘good’ in a strange way, as there’s no other way ‘through’ this loss. Grief is the emotional process that gets us to the other side. But we can’t do it alone – I hope that you’re a member of our online community or attend GW meetups? Either of those will help you along your way if they were accessible to you. I’m glad my post gave you hope that it is possible to come out the other side – it helps to know that, even if it feels a bit unlikely on the really ‘griefy’ days! Love, Jody x
Thank you so much Jody! Finding Gateway Women a few years ago helped me more than I can ever begin to describe. The community of women, the inspiring and thoughtful posts, knowing I wasn’t (am not!) alone , all of these saved me. Thank you:) In saving yourself you have saved others:)
Hi Heather – lovely to hear from you and I’m so glad that you found GW when you needed it most. It is a great privilege having been able to turn my healing into something that helps others find their own path out of the swamp too. My book will be in bookshops in Canada this October! Love, Jody x
This is really useful. I have found meeting up with other childless women through Gateway Women a real life saver and fun too. I have a social life again!
Thanks lovely – so happy to have you in our Tribe! Jody x
Great points, Jody! Thank you for all that you do.
Ditto Maria! x