The Menstruality Podcast - Finding Hope and Meaning When You're Childless-not-by-choice (Jody Day)

Episode Date: September 15, 2022

The menstruality journey begins at menarche with our first bleed, and ends as we go through the great initiation of menopause. For some, pregnancy, birth, and motherhood are a key part of their menstruating years, but for some people, parenting doesn’t happen, despite a deep desire to have children.It's World Childless Week this week, and we've invited the brilliant Jody Day to share about the challenges of involuntary childlessness,  her work to honour and dignify childless women, and explore how to  how to find meaning and hope when looking towards a future without children. Jody Day is the founder of Gateway Women, the support & advocacy network for childless women. She’s a psychotherapist, a global thought leader on female involuntary childlessness, and the author of what many professionals consider to be the ‘go-to’ book on the topic, ‘Living the Life Unexpected: How to Find Hope, Meaning and a Fulfilling Future Without Children’.In the conversation we explore:Jody’s personal journey through grief, denial, hopelessness to real acceptance of her life as a childless woman. The creation of Gateway Women and Jody’s mission to make the world understand childless women, and help women who are childless-not-by-choice to understand themselves. Jody's emerging Gateway Elderwomen project, exploring the uncharted path to becoming a conscious childless elder woman.---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [e-mail]---Social media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolJody Day: @gatewaywomen - https://www.instagram.com/gatewaywomen

Welcome to the Menstruality Podcast, where we share inspiring conversations about the power of menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause. This podcast is brought to you by Red School, where we're training the menstruality leaders of the future. I'm your host, Sophie Jane Hardy, and I'll be joined often by Red School's founders, Alexandra and Sharni, as well as an inspiring group of pioneers, activists, changemakers and creatives to explore how you can unashamedly claim the power of the menstrual cycle to activate your unique form of leadership for yourself, your community and the world. Hi, welcome back to the Menstruality Podcast. It's so good to have you here. Today's episode is a deep one. It's a rich one. I hope it's really supportive for people who are childless, not by choice. Or if you have someone in your life who's experiencing

this and they need support. So this is the menstruality podcast and the menstruality journey begins with our first bleed, ends as we go through menopause. For some people in our menstruating years, pregnancy, birth and motherhood are a key part of that part of life. For many, for one in five people at the moment, parenting doesn't happen. Around 10% of those people choose not to be parents but for the other 90% it's either due to infertility or circumstance and people who are childless not by choice can experience such a profound othering in our world and we don't speak about it enough but our guest today is devoting her life to changing that. Jodie Day is the founder of Gateway Women, the support and advocacy network for childless women.

She's a psychotherapist, she's a global thought leader on female involuntary childlessness and she's the author of what many professionals consider to be the go-to book on the topic Living the Life Unexpected, how to find hope, meaning and a fulfilling future without children. Jodie it's such a delight to have you with us today on the menstruality podcast thank you so much for for joining us we often start with a cycle check-in and I know that you're post menopause now so you don't have a menstrual cycle I'd love to hear about how you experience cycles in your life in this phase of your life. Thank you. And thank you for inviting me onto the podcast. It's a great honor to be here and to be in the company of such amazing women and also the other interviewees. So thank you for including me. Yes, I'm 58 now and I had my last period at 48.

So technically post-menopausal now for coming on 10 years. And my cycle was always an interesting one because I wasn't able to conceive, yet I was still dealing with having a cycle. I think that since my periods ended, I've had a, I'll be honest, I've had a rough menopause and it doesn't, it's not finished with me yet, is interestingly thinking about cycles, I noticed I've got much more interested in the cycles of the moon. I think that my sort of deep feminine wisdom is has really it's been emerging for you know about 15 years but I think postmenopausally and also now living in the countryside I've lived in the countryside now for coming on for five years in rural Ireland I'm really interested in the moon and I I always

used to be fascinated like when I traveled in India with a group of friends you know the way we all started you know to our cycles started to synchronize and things like that. So this sense of being connected to the moon feels very powerful. But also as a childless woman, I felt that my participation in the cycle of birth and death had been denied me. I felt that nature itself had rejected me. It was a very, very deep mourning. And I remember once I was walking in the mountains in the south of France in a place I used to go to regularly, really in deep mourning for my childlessness and for this sense of not being welcomed by nature anymore. And I realized that I was part of the cycles, but it was a much bigger cycle. I needed to expand my perspective. And I realized that I am still part of the cycle of life and

death and transformation and rebirth, but it is to do with, you know, my body will die and it will return to the earth and it will be food and fertilizer for new growth. And so I'm still part of it, just part of it in a different way. And that also helped me when I was writing my will and my funeral sort of arrangements is that, you know, which facing that has been a really important part of also of, you know, menopause is um you know I want to be buried in a bluebell wood and I don't want and I don't want a headstone and I want an eco coffin and I want to be food for bluebells and the fairies that live in them I have to say because I spent my childhood reading stories to the fairies that live inside bluebell flowers. So when I go, I'm going back to them.

Oh, I can feel the mythic imagination of the Irish entering you here. Yes, I am genetically half Irish. And I've been living in Ireland permanently now for four years. And there is in deep rural Ireland, and there is a real sense actually of something very precious here, which is that those myths and legends and stories are not so far away. You know, Ireland never the land, when I came here, the land spoke to me. I didn't speak to the land. The land basically reached up through my feet and went, there you are. I felt known by the land in a way I have never felt anywhere else in the world. So there is something, actually, even if I come here

20 years ago, when I was, you know, still bleeding, I don't think I would have felt it then because I have menopause has gifted me with access to deeper parts of myself. I really look forward to exploring that with you a little later on in the conversation, because there's, you teach very powerfully about what it is to be childless, not by choice, through menopause and postmenopause. So we'll get there. But I wanted to ask, for those who haven't read your book, where you very generously share your story, and what inspired the creation of this incredible organization and body of work Gateway Women. Could you share a bit of your story? Yeah, absolutely. The interesting

thing is, whenever I'm asked to tell my story, a different story comes out every time. It's never, it's never fixed, you know, the events are fixed, but what I sort of choose to share or the lens through which I see it, and that's also one of the fascinating things about getting older is that biography is always moving. And the meaning that we assign to different events changes over time. So I was born in London. I was actually born rather dramatically in the Catholic home for fallen women. So my in West London, which later became the DVLA centre, which somehow feels appropriate. So my mum was a kind of rebellious Catholic teenager in West London, and I was an unplanned teenage pregnancy. And she was very much shamed by her family and her community for that. And also, after I was born, she changed her mind about

me being adopted. And so she was kind of thrown out of the nursing, you know, the nursing home by the nuns with nowhere to go, and newborn baby. So there's definitely a rebellious streak that runs in my blood. My mum did go home to her parents when I was six weeks old, and they did take her back in. And very much, I was the first grandchild and I was much beloved by a sort of large, rumbustious, dysfunctional Catholic working class family who loved me dearly. My mum, unfortunately, was pretty much forced to get married when I was about three to a really very unpleasant man to provide a respectable home for me, as it was called then. Because it's very interesting, this was 1964 when I was born, it was the most shameful female stereotype, which was to be an

unwed mother, and to be born out of wedlock, it was still really, really shocking, which really interesting shows how much things have changed in 40, 50 years, because in a way now the most shamed female stereotype is to be a single childless woman over 40. You know, why didn't you have one on your own? Is, you know, is the idea is like, how did you how did you screw this up that you don't have a baby? So that's, you know, that's the Daily Mail shouts about that now rather than about unwed mothers. It's now childless women who are going to destroy the fabric of society as opposed to unwed mothers, but best not get me started on that one. And so I really grew up in a very unhappy, often violent, abusive home. My mum was very unhappy. She had been a very unmothered child herself and so didn't really have the skills to be a mum because she hadn't been mothered. So things were not great at home.

And growing up, all I knew was that I needed to get out. I needed to survive and get out. And the idea of having children was just absolutely not on my mind. If anything, it was, I never want to bring a child into a world like this. You know, so I was quite a radical teenager and quite a politicized one. And I arrived in London knowing no one age 19 to launch myself on the world, which I did. I was originally in the fashion business, which was my dream at that time. And then I was with a really lovely man who was actually really stable, really kind. I didn't understand him at all because I wasn't ready for a man that nice. And accidentally got pregnant at 20, 21, was terrified, absolutely terrified of repeating my maternal story, which was having children young and to quote my mum and many school teachers of

the time, ruining your life, that having children ruined your life as a woman. So I, my boyfriend was, you know, was fine with us having the baby or not. I chose to have an abortion. My mum completely supported me. She was even with me there, you know, when I had the abortion. My mum completely supported me. She was even with me there, you know, when I had the abortion. So there was no sense of children as that, you know, this could be the biggest blessing of your life. It was not there at all. But I was very unconscious. And I was, I mean, I was very young, I had no emotional or psychological language to try and explain how much trauma I was carrying. And I was terrified of being a bad mom, you know. And now I'm a big grown up psychotherapist.

You know, I know that probably I wouldn't have been a great mom at that point. But also because I was scared of being a bad mum because I already had the beginning of that awareness that I didn't want to repeat my family's pattern I probably might have been able to do something different anyway so there's a kind of you know I don't regret that decision but it would have been nice if there had been some elders around me with some different perspectives to share. And so that relationship broke down. And a couple of years later, I met the man who became my first husband. And I said to him, I don't think I want to have kids. And he was like, okay, big discussion. That was it. That was all we discussed. Then we got married. And when I was 26, which felt incredibly grown up,

and now looking back, I'm like 26. And a few years later, being part of his big, rumbustious, loving, dysfunctional, English, upper class, bohemian family, very, you know, he was one of six, his parents adored each other. It was a very, very different idea of family life. And I thought, okay, maybe family doesn't just mean what I've had, what my mind knows as family. And so I changed my mind and I said, I think I do want to have children. And he was like, okay. Once again, these conversations that can derail relationships, especially if they're not had. And so I started trying to conceive and I wasn't able to conceive. Three years after I started trying, I had an operation called a laparoscopy, which is where they put a camera through your navel and they have a look around.

And when I came out, you know, the very avuncular gynecologist said, finest property I've seen all week. You lovely young people just go off and have lots more sex. That was it. That was all the advice we got. So we were both checked out. There was absolutely nothing wrong. And, but I never managed to conceive again. No damage from the abortion. Everything was checked out. Everything was fine, but something wasn't fine. So then I went through. So by this time, I'm 33. I just disappear into what I call in my book, baby mania. I just became obsessed with getting pregnant. Tried every pill, every potion, went to see every alternative practitioner, started eating this, started not eating that, taking these vitamins, not taking those, standing on my head,

you name it. And including my poor then husband was also put through all these things. And he worked a lot with paints. He's an artist. I made, I made him, you know, stop using these toxic brands. And, you know, we did everything to no avail. Meanwhile, other things are brewing in our life. Unbeknownst to me, unconsciously, I had sort of married my mother again. So I'd married a sort of charming, a charming person, but actually fragile and vulnerable underneath and with lots of trauma and mental health issues, which started to show up in addictions. We had a business together by that time, an interior design business, which was going really well. And, but behind the scenes, things were going horribly wrong with drinking and drugs and me holding everything together,

which is what I'd done all my life to that point. So holding together the business, holding together how our marriage looked from the outside, dealing with the terror of loving an addict and then disappearing for days at a time. Until I had nervous breakdown at 37, just... But thanks to Brene Brown, her her amazing expression I had a nervous breakdown slash spiritual awakening so I it was like being very painfully reborn in my life and I had an opportunity

to see my life really see it and literally it was like looking around the room of my life and going, who the heck made all these decisions? It was like a reset. And that was very powerful and very terrifying. And my marriage didn't survive it. And I think what catalyzed it was probably what we would now call burnout and also I lost my temper so I had a physical collapse and I lost my temper all at the same time it was a very very physical thing and as I lost my temper I found it carried on I couldn't stop it and it was literally like I mean it within some spiritual traditions, Eastern traditions, they would describe what happened to me as called spontaneous Kundalini awakening. So this white hot energy, which started in my buttocks, basically my buttocks got hot

and I was losing my temper and I could feel this energy rising up through my body. And it rose up through my body, right up through the central column of my body. And it came out the top of my head. So I felt that the top of my head had come off like a boiled egg. It just wasn't there. And I felt that this white energy, like a column of it going a billion miles an hour was just going straight up to infinity. It was. And at that point, I was on my own because I'd left the office and gone home because I felt so not myself. And I felt that I was, and I remember this feeling,

I was saying, oh my goodness, I've actually lost my mind. It's gone. And I thought, but I could feel that in the center of this incredibly powerful vortex of energy, though, I visualized it as a walnut, there was a walnut. And I was inside this walnut. But the I that was inside this walnut was the I that I'd been when I was born the I I was now, it was an ageless. I mean, Jung would call it, it was the

self. I was in pure contact with the self and the self was like, but I'm fine. I'm fine in here. And they're all good. They're not going to be able to find this bit. They're all going to think I've gone insane. And that was my last thought that I remember. And then I, I blacked out and I, you know, I don't know how long I woke up later it could have been 15 minutes could have been an hour but I obviously lost consciousness and woke up on the floor of my house but it was a a before and after moment wow I want to carry on with your story but I just feel moved to ask you this because at Red School and on this podcast we're always talking about callings core to our work is how the process of

the menstrual cycle and the process of menopause can bring us home to ourselves and to what we're here to do or to bring or to offer. And clearly you have a huge calling. One of my friend's lives was totally transformed by Gateway Women. She's a different person on the other side. And it's just so fascinating to hear about that key moment in your calling. Calling. It was very lonely afterwards because the life that I had built around me didn't fit. That didn't suit.

And it was not long after that that I found myself divorced, single, childless in my early 40s. At first, still hopeful that I would, and I'll put this in air quotes for the podcast, meet someone and do IVF. I knew nothing. Interestingly, I had avoided doing any research around IVF. And actually one of the reasons the marriage broke down when it did was actually my, my then husband said, maybe we should do IVF. And I remember I was lying in the bath and I thought, I don't want to bring a child into this, you know, and that was about six weeks before the bath and I thought, I don't want to bring a child into this. You know, and that was about six weeks before the breakdown. I just suddenly saw what a mess our marriage and our life was. And having grown up in chaos, I was like, I don't want to bring a child into this.

So there was a moment before that moment that was probably, I see it like, you know, releasing the vacuum on the top of a jam jar there was something that just sort of loosened the lid and then six weeks later the lid blew off so I spent the first couple of years of my 40s still hopeful that I would I would you know I would still manage um you know I didn't know that at that age you know my chances of IVF working were probably about two percent you know uh all because like everyone else well I won't know that at that age, you know, my chances of IVF working were probably about 2%, you know, or because like everyone else. Well, I wouldn't say everyone, like most people, we get our information about IVF and success rates from the proliferation of miracle baby stories in the media. And we don't understand that the most likely outcome of IVF treatment is childlessness. You know, that is the kind of the shadow, the very big shadow that is never talked about. So I was, I wasn't until I was 44 that I accepted, and accepted is

the wrong word, realized that I, that childlessness was not an inconvenient stopping point on the way to motherhood, that it was my final destination. And I completely fell apart when I, when I found that out, but I didn't know it was grief. I was in despair and I'd had, I'd pulled myself up through, you know, I'd had a lot of, I'd had a lot of troubles in my life and I had found my way through all of them. And I trusted in my ability to find my way through this. And I couldn't, and I would speak to doctors, therapists, Dr. Google, nobody had any insight into what I was going through because nobody knew it was grief. And it wasn't until I was in my second year of my psychotherapy training and we were doing a weekend training course on bereavement,

working with bereaved clients. And we were exploring the Kubler-Ross five stages of grief model. I was thinking, this feels very familiar. And I went home that evening and I mapped out each stage. I mapped out against my experience of childlessness. And I was like, oh, my goodness, I'm grieving. That's what this is. It's not depression.

It's not this. I'm grieving. And I was so relieved for two reasons. Number one, I knew I wasn't going mad because anyone who has experienced a deep grief and loss, and if you haven't yet, you will, it's part of being alive, is that the internal cognitive reality of grief is very bizarre. It is not like your normal functioning mind. And I thought, is this just, is this just like the new me? Is this the middle-aged me? And I thought, no, no, this is a process I'm going through. And that was the other thing that I was relieved about. I thought, I don't understand how, but one day this is a process, which means one day I'm going to be on the other side of it.

So actually what it gave me for the first time in many years was hope. And not being able to have a child is the most heartbreaking thing. Maybe it's one of the most heartbreaking things. I mean, unfortunately, there are many heartbreaking things in this world. And you have to lose hope, because that's actually the first part of grief. You have to come out of denial, that somehow this is fixable, and you have to lose hope. And losing hope is basically coming out of denial. But living a life without any hope is very hard. It's very bleak. We kind of, we like to have a sweetie to look forward to. It's just part of being human. You know, we just need something that links us to

this imaginary place in the future, this lighthouse on the horizon that maybe we can swim towards. It just helps us get through those dark nights of the soul. And that really, really helped me. And so I gradually started writing about grief. I started, you know, I started my blog Gateway Women probably about two weeks before that extraordinary moment when I discovered it was grief. So then I started writing about grief. Six weeks later, I gave my first talk. A journalist came to that and who wrote about an article about me for The Guardian and my work, which went viral, which is still being read today, which is actually about the impact of childlessness on your friendships which is huge infertility and childlessness

really they take your take your friendship group apart and they do a bit of a number on your family relationships too so that's me and here we are gateway women is 11 years old this year i published my book in which living the life unexpected uh um nine years ago as a self-published book and then in 2016 it was picked up by bluebird pam mcmillan it's now in its second edition with with them and um yeah started an online community started workshops given two ted talks got another one coming up and have made it my mission i think to make the world understand childless women but also help childless women more understand themselves and have compassion for themselves for what they're going through because the world treats childless women and this is women who are childless, not by choice, rather than women who've chosen not to have children. They don't get a free pass either, by the way, but treats us like

failed women, you know, incomplete projects, failed women, not proper grownups. And when you're also grieving your children, your grandchildren, being, you know, being the mother of your, you know, your partner's children, not having, you know, being the mother of your, you know, your partner's children, not having, you know, children when your siblings do, not being part of the community of mothers, not being considered a real woman by society, then not seeing your children grow up, not having grandchildren, dying without children. This is a lifelong loss. It's a living loss. It's not about just not having a baby this is your whole feminine identity that you thought you would have ripped away from you it is such a profound psychological

wound and people trivialize it and think oh she didn't have a baby really aren't you over that yet yeah well we've shared so much there and there's several threads that I'd like to pull on. The first one being just the concept of being childless, not by choice, which I think is really not understood in the world. As you pointed to this, there's this, well, why don't you just adopt or a million things, throw away things that people say. And at the start of your book, you've named 50 ways to not be a mother, which is very helpful because you give voice to the nuance and the complexities of the situations that people find themselves in. Yeah. And that list could be a hundred. I mean, I had to stop somewhere. I mean, it started that 50 ways not to be a mother started in 2012 as a blog. And then gradually, people were this is by the way, for those who are not in their late 50s, blogs used to be a very big thing. Before Instagram and all of those things. And so people would leave a lot of comments on them. And you would get a conversation going in

the comments. And so more and more people were sharing their stories and I was learning more and more ways not to be a mother so in each edition of my book that section not you know 50 ways not to be a mother has expanded to include more and more because there are so many but I think the main thing is is that the idea is that childlessness is oh well she well, she didn't want them, or she couldn't have them. You know, these two, this binary idea, when actual fact, I would say there is a spectrum definitely between childless and childfree, between choice and not choice. But I think there's also a spectrum between motherhood, childless and child free. I think it's part of, in academic work, it's becoming your reproductive identity, whether you have children or not, whatever your gender, or how

you like to express that gender, you have a reproductive identity. And it is core to how you show up in the world and how you think about yourself. And many, certainly infertility is usually around 10% of those women who don't have children by midlife. Child free by choice is 10%, but definitely going up, definitely going up for the younger generation. But the biggest reason that women reach midlife without having had children when they wanted to is circumstance. And probably the biggest reason amongst circumstance, and this is really on the rise as well, is not having a willing or suitable partner during your potentially fertile years. And that is to be doubly shamed as a woman in our society, in our heteronormative society, because it's the idea, you haven't been

chosen by a man to be the mother of his children. There really must be something wrong with you. It is sickening. I would say that single childless women bear the brunt of what is the acceptable face of misogyny in our society. You've only got to look at the crazy cat lady. That's a joke. It's not a joke. When people used to say, you know, you at the crazy cat lady. Like, that's a joke. It's not a joke. When people used to say, you know, you're a crazy cat lady, I'd say, well, if I was a mum and I had a cat, I'd be a family pet.

So the fact that I'm not a mum and I have a cat and I'm a crazy cat lady, it's not really about the cat, is it? It's about my childlessness. If you or someone you know is looking for support through this journey of being childless, not by choice, we want to share some of Jodie's resources with you. So firstly, there's her website, which is gateway-women.com. Gateway-women.com. That's where you can find her community.

You can also find a link to her book, Living the Life Unexpected. And also a link to her brilliant TED Talk, The Lost Tribe of Childless Women. And you can find all of that at gateway-women.com some of the other reasons that you name in the 50 ways are for example that realizing because of your sexuality your journey was going to involve IVF and you tried IVF and it didn't work you know there's for people who are members of the LGBTQ plus community there are extra layers of complication here in terms of how the world stigmatizes and marginalizes and also presumes that because they because they aren't heterosexual that that they're not real women in inverted commas, therefore they're not

going to want children. So there's this idea that somehow, and they get left out of the childlessness narrative almost totally. I mean, the Gateway Women Online Community, one of its subgroups, and it's now called Lighthouse Women rather than Gateway Women, is we have the world's only group for LGBTQ childless women. We also have a group for women of colour. There are, childlessness is an intersectional issue, as is fertility. But unfortunately, if you look at, if you look around you at literature, you would think that only white middle class um women uh suffer from either infertility or childlessness yeah so true yeah something that you speak about so powerfully and i feel the fire in me rising up my spine every time i hear you speak about it is the impact of the career or work expectations and how they don't fit necessarily

with the potentially fertile years could you speak to this because it's it blew my mind when I first heard it and it continues to thank you um well yes because because the world that, I mean, let's just say when in the last 50 years, women have had access to the pill, to legal and safe abortion in most, but not all countries, all developed countries, access to higher education and access to the professions. So it has, women's lives have been absolutely radically transformed in the last 50 years in terms of their opportunities. However, the, the universities that we've gone to and the professional working places we've become part of many of us were set up by men. It is a male, a male patterned working world, an educational world that women have joined.

And that pattern has been set up around male fertility. I work your ass off in your 20s, solidify, you know, with studies and getting onto the career ladder, solidify your career in your 30s and then maybe have a family in your late 30s or 40s. That works for men. And we've joined that pattern. And it doesn't work for female fertility. It also increasingly is not working for male fertility, because what, you know, and this is a truth bomb here for people, male fertility declines as well. It declines, it starts declining at 35, dramatically, just as many women's does. And it gets much worse in the 40s, as many women's does. One of the reasons, unfortunately, those couples who perhaps are successful conceiving in their, in their late 30s and early 40s experience so many miscarriages is due to the quality of the sperm a sperm bank will not take sperm from a man over the age of 35

because of the amount of chromosomal abnormalities in it so it is you know there is we see kind of people like charlie chaplin and rod stewart and it's like and and the people but they are the outliers there will be many many you know men and couples who wanted to have children, who experience heartbreaking amounts of miscarriage and end up childless when that hadn't been the plan because they didn't have the right information, which is that male fertility declines too. If a man in that age is with a woman much younger than him, then the robust strength of her younger eggs will perhaps counteract his older sperm. But if he's with a partner around about the same age as him, they might struggle. They might be able to get pregnant, but it might be really hard for them to have a live birth.

And this information is not out there. We need to be educating young people in schools, boys and girls, not just about how not to get pregnant, but actually more information about the reproductive cycle, all of it, including periods of menstruality. And boys need to know about periods of menstruality too. But yeah, it's, it's's there's so much this not just ignorance there's actually disinformation out there yes yes one of the things that I've really rarely seen talk about maybe I've never heard it at all is the impact of infertility on a career path and I experienced this personally because I had to make various decisions about my career based on the fact that I didn't know if I was going to be able to have a child or not and I didn't know what fertility procedures I was going to need to do and I needed

to reduce stress levels to enable optimal fertility like it goes on and I never hear anyone speak about this it's a real thing for so so so many people that as they're negotiating infertility or childlessness that impacts life decisions and derails careers I call it psychological nesting it's like you are as a woman it would appear that and maybe this is the case for men but I don't have that experience to to speak to I always held in mind that the life I was living and the life I was creating was the life my children were going to be born into which kind of spoke to why you know when I suddenly realized it wasn't going to be with my then husband, you know, I was out of that marriage very quickly, in a way. But it would be like, well, I can't take that job because it doesn't have maternity leave. Or I can't, I mean, I left a

job that was by a really busy road, because of the pollution, you know, and I can't commit to this course of study, or I can't do this, because three years time I'll be there and that might not fit in with, you know, when I'm having children. And this sort of internal negotiation is going on all the time. the most optimal landing you can within what's under your control for this potential child that already exists in your mind and your heart and your soul. You're kind of preparing to receive them into your life and you can't not view every aspect of your life through it. And you may not even be aware that you're doing so. And you,

and trying to explain that to someone might sound quite potty, you know, well, what do you mean? You know that you're doing so and you and trying to explain that to someone might sound quite potty you know well what do you mean you know you're not even trying for a baby you know or something like that and it's like but we're planning to yeah it really does feel like a symptom of patriarchy because this isn't from what I can see happening as much in the male psyche at all it's a different trajectory it would be fascinating to understand more about that i mean my colleague uh dr robin hadley um who's at manchester metropolitan university he's the kind of uk uh academic specialist in male childlessness and he's just written an amazing book called How is a Man Meant to Be a Man, which is all about the impact of childlessness on the male psyche. And he did an extraordinary

piece of research, which debunks, you know, a lot of the patriarchal ideas that, you know, that it's women who think about children, about, I think this was in his master's rather than his doctorate, around broodiness in men. And his research shows that men are just as, if not more, broody than women. It's just they're not allowed to talk about it. Because it's culturally disenfranchised to be a broody man. Yes. I'd like to speak about some of the other challenges of being a childless woman,

not by choice in our world. And I think the way that you explore pro-natalism is really important here. So could you define what that is and share some of the impacts but actually before you do that I just want to say that there's so much charge in my system still left over from my infertility process even though I've had a child that I can I'm sort of managing a lot of emotion as we're talking and I'm watching it scramble my brain which I expected but it's very it's one of the weirdest things for me is how even having a child hasn't changed the experience of it of five years of infertility and I think I think that's really important because you know a lot of a lot of women who do go on to conceive have something called fertility amnesia which is is they, and it can even be that women that they

were in infertility groups with, or they did treatments with, or things like that, that haven't had a child, it's like they become as insensitive to them as once upon a time they used to talk about how insensitive people were being towards them. They can become, you know, completely just as if they knew nothing about infertility. There's a form of amnesia. We call it infertility amnesia. But for those women who don't forget, or those women who for some reason, never really quite drank the pronatalist Kool-Aid, to be allies to non-mothers, to non-parents is hugely important because once you understand and you can see pronatalism, you know, once you take that red pill, like in the film, The Matrix and Laura Carroll's book uses that metaphor. It's, you can't unsee it and it is everywhere. And it it's not something which stops impacting your life. Once you had a child, because pronatalism is the ideology, it is a valuation system that says people with children are more valuable than people without children, particularly women. But it also says that mothering, childbirth and mothering is easy,

natural, glorious, no problem at all, the most fulfilling thing you'll ever do in your entire life, you'll never want for anything else. Which of course, for those women who are longing for it, makes it just the promised land. But for those women who experience it, and it's like, holy crap, this is so not what I was expecting. Because pronatalism is very pro-birth. It's not that interested in supporting mothers. I mean, a pronatalist society really wanted free childcare, care, basic. Maternity leave, basic. But it makes childless women out to be failures and an older childless women, an old childless women as complete waste of space. Postmenopausal childless women, postmenopausal single childless women, you've got no protection under the patriarchy. You are no one's mother, no one's partner, no one's potential hot mama either.

You know, you are absolutely, as far as the patriarchal project is concerned, you're nothing. Now, one of the things that does do, if once you get through the grief, and I'm thinking I was listening to your recent interview with Sharon Blackie, once you get the rage, or as Heather Carina, who an American author,

wrote an amazing book about the perimenopause. Maybe if you haven't had on the podcast, you have to. The IDGAF energy of postmenopause. I don't give a fuck. Is you start to get angry and go, OK, the society thinks I'm invisible.

That could be handy because I'm planning to actually be really quite disruptive. And it's going to be ages before they catch on what I'm up to. But it's pronatalism. It's there in the fairy tales. It's there also in every modern film and story you will watch. Hansel and Gretel, the witch, Rapunzel, the lady that lives next door to the sweet childless couple that end up getting this child. And then they're all women without children. If there's an evil or a suspect woman, she's childless. That is what the patriarchy thinks of childless women. And let's talk about the bingos, the bingos.

Yeah. Because of all of this stigma that you've named, what happens when someone who is childless meets the world and what people can unconsciously, hopefully, but just often splurge out the kinds of questions and things that people say, and why you call them bingos. Okay, well, my TED, I include a lot of this in my first TED talk, The Lost Tribe of Childless Women, I got the term bingo from the child free community, because they have their own set of sort of knee jerk responses, that have questions and comments about why they've chosen

not to have children. And we call it bingos, because in a really bad day, you can get a full house. Now, these, these comments, they are mostly unconscious, because they are social conditioning that comes from pronatalism. And they can come from the nicest people. These can come from, these can come from therapists. They can come from, you know, your mum, your sister, your friends, your boss. They can come from a complete stranger at the bus stop and they are consistent and their languaging is all, it's kind of almost quite similar, you know, maybe therapists and stuff, they might be slightly more nuanced, but it's still the same message. I mean, mean just i'll just rattle a few off the top of my head um oh do you have kids um uh no follow-up question why not i mean i'm sorry who's who's number one why is my uterus and what

i'm doing with it and i have done with it of interest that's already very interesting you don't say to someone you know if they say they say, yes, you've got children, go, why did you choose to have children? No. So why not? And then you might be forced, you might feel forced to explain an extremely, extremely traumatic reproductive story. You don't know what someone is going through. And then they'll say, oh, well, they might say, well, you're so lucky. You get to sleep in and travel. Really? Not last time I looked, you know, as a menopausal woman who's self-employed, I don't get a lot of holidays or sleep. And then, oh, you dodged a bullet. That's often one men here. Children aren't all they're cracked up to be. Have one of mine.

Don't you think you're a bit selfish? That Have one of mine. Don't you think you're a bit selfish? That's more around choice. Don't you think you'll regret it when you're old? What will your parents think? Who's going to look after you when you're old? But just this sense of, you know, and the most common one that comes up always. I mean, for me, it's more now, why didn't you adopt?

Because, you know, they look at me and think, okay, she's a bit older. Why don't you just adopt? Just. Not just why don't you adopt or have you explored adoption or considered it? A lot of number one, bingo, number one, every childless woman has either has thought about adoption. Many of them have looked into it. Many of them have tried to adopt and have been turned down, you know, for really, really strange reasons often. Some of them have been through adoption. The adoptions have broken down. And it's not news.

Every single person has thought about adoption. And also, children who are looking for homes, they are not just a little bit of a cookie to throw at a childless person. These are complex human beings who've had a really difficult start in life. They're not there just to plug a hole in the conversation or plug a hole in a childless person's life. In a way, wanting to adopt, many people who want to adopt have always wanted to adopt it is part of their calling and something i would say back to someone who says why don't you just adopt is why don't you yes you know because and they'll say oh well you know because i've got my children i said well maybe childless people feel exactly the same. What they really, really wanted to experience was being the parents of their

own biological children, just like you did. But if you say, I don't want to adopt, they'll go, it's like, oh, well, she didn't really want kids. Someone actually said that to me once. Well, you obviously didn't really want children then. Yeah. You know? And if you you are as I was in my 40s single childless self-employed not owning a property not having any savings no way I you know I don't meet any of the criteria I mean I I'm my my psychotherapy training specialized in child and adolescent psychotherapy, as well as, you know, I work with adults as well. But I came to understand so much more about the likely needs of those children, you know, who are looking for homes with adopted families and the stresses and strains that will be placed on the adoptive parents. And once again, pronatalism, not really much help once you've adopted children, adopted parents who've just adopted get absolutely strung out to dry, compared to the amount of support they actually need to parent these often traumatized

kids. It's, I understand now why adoption is so hard, because it's a lot of the children need so much additional support than unless the couple and they prefer a couple and I understand now why adoption is so hard, because it's a lot of the children need so much additional support that unless the couple and they prefer a couple. And I understand why, because what they're asking of of adoptive parents quite often is a lot is they need you to be really set up and really well resourced emotionally, financially, within your family systems, within your workplace systems within your workplace within your living situation it's I mean it's um it's a calling it's not for everyone and it's not there to fix childlessness could you share some advice about how someone who is childless can respond when these kinds of questions are asked because it can be easy to think that we just have to have to give a response and as women we are really conditioned to answer for ourselves you know and for those you know for those women who have experienced pregnancy there is an extraordinary sense of public ownership over a woman's uterus,

in that, you know, people will touch your bump and ask you very personal questions once you're pregnant. And it's the same thing around a sort of a childless uterus, there will be real questions about what you're doing with it. But I think first of all, when you get asked those questions, you will need a variety of answers. I used to have, I used to think of it as like I had like a selection, like watches, do you know what I mean? About 10 or 20 different answers depending on how I was feeling and the situation and where I wanted to go with it. So I had like a range of answers because the thing about bingos, you can guarantee you'll be asked them at some point by someone. So it's great to have your answers ready. But first of all,

when you get asked those questions, take a breath. Just take a breath. Take that moment to assess the situation. As Brené Brown says, people have to earn the right to your story. And also, you are not gynecological Google. You know, you do not have to explain what's going on. They probably don't really want to know that level of information anyway. But when someone says, you know, well, you know, you said I've just had a miscarriage and, you know, I'll say something like, oh, well, that's good. At least, you know, you can get pregnant. That's a bingo. Yeah.

At least it wasn't very far on. Bingo. Is work out, okay, what is the nature of this interaction what is this person trying to do are they just trying to connect with me socially are they just trying to find out you know whether we're in the same club or whether one on whether one among those weird child free or childless women and choose your answer accordingly, and have a range of answers from humorous, you know, someone sometimes would say to me, you know, do you have children? And I'll go, I'm not sure. You know, and I'd say it with a kind of a funny face, and then they would laugh, and you know, it would, it would break the moment, you know, or, and it also really depends where

you're at in your healing, in your grief, because some days you might be on the floor with grief when someone asks you an impertinent and detailed question about your childlessness. And you can be so panicked and in the headlights, you don't know what to do. And it's OK to say, I'm not really up to answering that right now. Well, that's actually a bit more personal than I can deal with right now. And switch it around and say something, you know, often, nearly always when someone asks you if you have children, it means they do. So you can just turn it back on them and go, no, but I'm guessing you do. No, how old are they? know you can deflect so you also it can be a teaching moment if you're feeling a little bit bolder and you're a little bit more at peace with your grief when someone asks me about my childlessness sometimes I might

say no I'm don't I'm part of the one in five women in our generation that reaches midlife without children most of us not by choice you probably know lots of women impacted by this issue you know when I ask people I said you probably know someone impacted by involuntary childlessness you see that special that their eyes go up or to the left that they move into their thinking brain every single person I've ever said that to has said, oh, actually that friend of my daughter-in-law, oh, that woman at work, actually my daughter is really struggling. Or yes, my best friend is. And they start to realize that you're not some freak representative, but you're actually part of a very big part of the human story

that is unfolding around us right now. I mean, there are so many of us. And we are so hidden in the shadow of pronatalism. And we are doing ordinary and extraordinary things with our lives. And both are completely okay. Can you speak to what we can do, or what someone who is experiencing childlessness not by choice can do with their grief i was really struck by a sentence i heard you say recently you said grief is a process of identity transformation yes that this process of childlessness or what I experienced which was infertility just turns us into something that we just don't recognize and how to how to be with that as part of the process also well I have no tips for enjoying transformation it feels like crap

it looks great on a little instagram meme but what transformation feels like crap. It looks great on a little Instagram meme. But what transformation feels like is everything in your life has gone to crap. You have no idea who you are. Nothing you used to be suits you anymore. And you have no idea what's happening. And the idea that this is turning you into a new version of yourself. Well, you haven't met her yet. You don't know her. I like to refer to the caterpillar inside. OK, the caterpillar crawling along one day, munching on the leaves. And suddenly it starts to spin this prison. And in a couple of days, it's completely cocooned inside this dark, hot prison. And then its body starts to turn to mush. And its DNA turns into a soup. Don't tell me that doesn't hurt. Now, it doesn't know it's going to

be a butterfly one day. It just knows that it's in prison and its body is melting. And it has no idea why. And then one day, the the DNA is transformed the new body is built the chrysalis opens and the butterfly comes out and everyone talks about the butterfly as the process of transformation but no it's what happens to the caterpillar that's what transformation feels like in the dark turning to, no idea what's going on. Everything is terrifying and you don't know what's happening. That is transformation. So I think we need to be a lot kinder to ourselves.

We are meaning making machines, human beings. So we're always trying to understand what this means, what's happening. I think one of the really scary things about transformation is you don't know. You actually don't know who you're going to be at the end of it. So also, I think it's really important to try not to make any irrevocable decisions. This is probably my number one piece of advice about grief. Try not to make any irrevocable decisions because the person you will be later in this process is someone you haven't met yet.

And the irrevocable decisions may not suit her. They may not fit with her. So, you know, by all means, cut your hair off and go blonde. You can grow it back. If, you know, but try not to move to another country. Try not to leave your partner. If you have one, try, you know, various things. It's a very, it can be a very creative time, but the ego can have such a strong desire to take control of the process because it's terrifying that it can start going equating any action with progress and it can get fixated on, okay, I'm going to do this, this, this, this, and this. So you can start making decisions, but you don't actually know who you're making

those decisions for. But it's a lot scarier to actually sit in the mush, in the liminal state of transformation. Probably one of the liminal states that nearly all of us will remember is adolescence. That's probably the last time we went through an identity transformation as profound as the grief process you know we didn't know what kind of adults we were going to be or even what an adult is no you just think it's a person who has kind of you know well more money in a car you have no idea of the responsibilities of adulthood or anything you know they can go to bed when they want get up when they want they've got money they can eat what they want they can watch what they want on the tv must be great and then you get there and go oh shit i'm here now

adulting is not fun it is it is overrated yes big time it doesn't have to ask to anyone listening though who is not yes not yet post-menopausal and you are a woman and you have a uterus is it does get better it does get better I mean my 50s so much better than my 40s and I'm on the cusp of my 60s now and yeah I'm just getting going. So speaking of life post-menopause it's a particular part of this journey to go through the menopause process as a childless woman. Absolutely. You've talked about it as being a death that you survive. Yes. It is a dark night of the soul. The menopause when you're childless, not by choice.

I have met women for whom they have held out some hope right up until that moment. Not necessarily logical hope because hope isn't always logical because hope is a form often, is, and, you know, it has crashed down on them, like an avalanche of darkness, you know, because they have to face the end of their potentially reproductive life, the end of the possibility of having children, the end of their youth and the beginning of their elder years, all in one go. I think the existential nature of menopause for women who are childless, not by choice, and have not had any support to help them process their grief through that is absolutely woefully understudied and underwritten about, because it is actually the end of your line. You know, when you age and die, you age and die more profoundly than someone who has children for whom their sense that they go on in the world. You're also facing old age and possible

dependency needs without children either to provide that or to advocate for you or to arrange it. There's an intense vulnerability to look forward to and an unknown vulnerability because you don't know what you'll need. And also there is no, there's a new project I'm working on called Gateway Elder Women, which is very much an emerging project, is that there is also no sense of any role for you to inhabit the only role you've had to inhabit is that of being a potentially fertile woman and then coming you know coming to terms with that not being the case but once you are you know once you are an older post-menopausal childless woman there is no word in the English

language to describe you that isn't an insult. The only word that is a compliment is grandmother, which is why you'll notice that quite often that term is used as a generic description of all women over 60, regardless of whether they have grandchildren or not, because that's the nice word to use. A group of grannies. No, it's a group of women. All of the other words, many of them need reclaiming. Hag, crone, witch. I call myself an apprentice crone. These words used to be powerful words because being an older woman used to be a powerful thing to be because there weren't very many of them. Childbirth didn't leave many of us left to be older, wise women. We'd been through a lot by then. We were valued and respected. We

were the keepers of wisdom and stories in our societies. And I do think there is a special kind of wisdom that comes with menopause. And I think also the distinctions between those who've had children and haven't had children, if they're conscious women, i.e. not just unconscious women who are still enthralled to patriarchy and pronatalism and totally over-invested in their role as grandmothers to the exclusion of other parts of their identity that could flower. Those sort of conscious older women, and actually conscious women who are mothers who are older, that's what I mean. And conscious women who are childless or child free, and are older, have a lot more in common. Sort of post parenting and post childlessness, I think there is a space, post patriarchy, for us us to connect because patriarchy and pronatalism wants to keep older

powerful women separated and silent and I think together and noisy actually the younger people need us I think there is such a huge role for for powerful older women for younger people we you know we have a an explosion of old people but actually we need an explosion of elders I'm nodding my head here and have been for the whole of the conversation and I think that's you know as a childless woman it feels very powerful to me that because I I don't have any biological skin in the game I don't have any children or grandchildren so my care for the future and my care for the planet So my care for the future and my care for the planet and my care for the generations coming up behind me is kind of,

it's for all of them. I don't have to separate out that, that care as an ancestor in a way that is natural for someone, you know, who has to make sure that their children are okay and I really think that it is possible and powerful to be a good ancestor regardless of whether you have children or not and I really want to help you know to embody that and to get that message out there I've always felt and I ended my TED talk like five years ago talking about something like that and a few people said to me it's really weird that bit at the end when you talk about maybe there's a reason there are so many childless women around now. You know, what did you mean? I said, well, I think the planet and the future. I don't think it's an accident.

I think actually we're needed. And more and more five years later, I can see that coming into focus as we face you know ecological and economic collapse we're going to need some feisty old women you know to help the young people break down and recreate the world into something which actually supports life it's not anti-life whether that's human life or more than human life jodie how can people connect with you perhaps people who are interested in the elder woman project or could you speak a bit about the reignite weekends that you offer for childless women okay so you'll find everything on my website which is gateway hyphen women.com you'll find everything on my website, which is gateway-women.com. You'll find all the links there to the Gateway Elder Women Project, also to Lighthouse Women, which is the new name for the Gateway Women online community, which is an amazing community of childless women from all over the world. I created those in 2012. It's a healing and transformational weekend for women who are

childless. It's to help you process your grief, really think about who you are as a childless woman, break through the patriarchal and pro-natalist identity and create a new dream for your life as a childless woman. All in two days, you will be shattered at the end of it. Take one day off. And they happen all over the world. I have a team of facilitators running them. They run online and they run in person in Australia, New Zealand, USA, Canada, and UK, EU. Yeah. And I will be creating over the next couple of years, a new sort of retreat for childless elder women. It's very much emerging. I don't know quite what it is yet, but I'm working on a novel at the moment. And when that's finished, then the next thing

after that, which of course features actually a single childless heroine at the center of it. And after that, I'm really going to start thinking about my next book, which I've actually been researching for the last five years, which will be in a way, the book that I need to read, which hasn't been written yet, which is what living the life unexpected was. It was the book I needed that didn't exist. And now as, as a childless older woman, I'm discovering that the book I need to guide me doesn't exist. Almost every single book about getting older as a childless woman, and almost every single book about getting older as a childless woman and almost every single book about the menopause with a few notable exceptions uh presumes that every woman

reading it has been or is a mother it's the default female identity yeah j, thank you. I'm very moved and inspired by how close you live to the edge of your being. You're there walking your edges and then you're sharing with us, you know, and I'm seeing and sharing in the way that you do and that you have done. And I know it has supported so many thousands of people. And I hope this conversation has helped to create belonging and kindness in a place where people might be feeling lonely. Yeah, you're not alone. You know, there are there are women around you. There are women you don't know yet. There are women online. There are women in person. You know, there are, there are women around you. There are women you don't know yet. There are women online. There are women in person. You know, we are one in five women. In my, my cohort, 1964, we are one in four women didn't have children. The current generation, it's one

in five. I think it's going to go up a lot for the, the younger millennials and the generation coming up behind them. I think we're going to see many more people choosing not to have children and also many more people choosing having not to have children for systemic reasons that aren't really a free choice around housing and economics and safety and environment. So I think we need to start normalizing the idea that that parenthood is an if, not a when, and that women without children have powerful gifts to offer themselves and their lives. They are not just walking wounds.

You know, we are very, very powerful beings, and the world needs us. I want to extend such a warm thank you to Jodie for everything she shared in this conversation. So powerful. I hope it's been supportive for you. And again, I want to point you to gateway-women.com if you're looking for support in this area or if you know someone that is okay that's it for today thank you for listening and i look forward to being with you again in future on the menstruality podcast and until then keep living life according to your own brilliant rhythm