01: Jody Day, Founder of Gateway Women Unclassified Woman

Jody Day is an author,  social entrepreneur and the founder of Gateway Women a global friendship and support network for childless women.  She is a founding member at AWOC, (Ageing without Children Collective) and a Fellow in Social Innovation at Cambridge Judge Business School at Cambridge University in the UK.  Jody’s book, Rocking the Life Unexpected: 12 Weeks to Your Plan B for a Meaningful and Fulfilling Life Without Children is an Amazon bestseller. Jody runs workshops, social events and private sessions for women coming to terms with the life that doesn’t include motherhood as well as speaking out about the issues and prejudices that childless women face. You can find out more about Jody’s work here.  

In this episode, Jody shares how she be turning 51 this year and her journey and experience of being a childless woman up until this point in her life.  At 20 years old she had an abortion. She was in a long line of women who have had children at a very young age and her mother had impressed upon her that she needed to live her own life before she should have children.  At 29 she tried to conceive with her then husband. However, by 33-34 she still was not pregnant. By this time she was doing all she could to conceive.  Unfortunately her marriage started to deteriorate. At 38, her husband suggested they try IVF. However she realised that it wouldn’t be right to bring a baby into their marriage. After having a nervous breakdown soon after and many realisations, she decided to divorce her husband. By the time she was 43 and had experienced a few other relationships, she realised that that her opportunity to be a mother had passed.
Reflecting on her life and wanting to have a child, Jody realised how obsessed she had been. She admitted that at one point she even was willing to ignore her husband’s addictions because she wanted to have a child so badly. It was a very difficult and challenging time. Realising and accepting the fact that she wouldn’t be a mother was an excruciating and long process. For about 15 years she had the strong feeling of connection within her belly that she put her life on hold and planned her whole life around that feeling. She called this, psychologically nesting. She was preparing this space in her life for the family that was coming. She was living a half-life – it became one-track. It was a massive shock realising that this life would never happen. She went into a profound period of grieving which she wasn’t aware of at the time. Since she couldn’t find the right help for herself at that time, she decided to become a psychotherapist.
At first she thought that she couldn’t be a good psychotherapist since she wasn’t a mother but then realised that after going through her experiences she could be a great one. She is in the process of completing her studies.. When she was going through the portion of her class on grief she realised that was what she was going through a few months previously. She wrote down a map of her emotional experience including the emotional experiences of the women she was meeting while she was writing the Gateway Women’s blog and realised that it was a perfect fit. With great relief she realised that:
There was a name for what she was experiencing.
She wasn’t going crazy.
This will be over one day.
She compares this grief to losing a parent. Once you lose them, you can’t have another. That’s the same as realising that you can never have a child, you will never have all the “firsts” experiences. The grief also came in the form of alienation from her peer group or how they thought about her because she’s childless. The loss of her identity as a woman. Some of her friends were understanding but it was too painful for her to be around them. She withdrew. People made the most hopeless but well-meaning comments.
How do you deal with some of the inappropriate questions or comments? “It depends on who the person is, what the sit