Do you have kids? Short answer: No.

Lindsay Bane
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Education

A collection of personal stories from women who identify as Childless Not By Choice, for people of the CNBC community and for people who want to learn about the CNBC experience. 

Episodes

  1. 2d ago

    Ep6. Chaney Williams: Microdosing Motherhood

    Chaney Williams has been a full spectrum doula for the past 8 years, and she's been helping people with birthing and raising their children her whole life.  Chaney's world is taking a big turn into the unknown at this very moment.  In the past year she's come to accept that she will not be able to have her own pregnancy. She's also recently made a decision to give up her doula work and instead focus on being a caretaker in her family, and spending more energy on self-care.  She shares that she is choosing herself instead of pursuing a challenging path into motherhood, mainly due to the several medical diagnoses that would likely interfere with her wellbeing if she was able to become pregnant.  As she surrenders the dream to become a mom and the career ambitions in doula work, she determines that this time is for doula-ing herself.  Her childless grief shows up as an experience of sadness when around friends and their families, and also what she's describing as an identity crisis.  For her, the way through this grief requires spending time in nature, being in community, and integrating her creative life, sewing and quilting. She also believes in ritual practices to guide her in a slow healing process. Meanwhile, she still very much enjoys spending time with her friends' kids.  She applies the term microdosing to the experience of "microdosing being a mom" as she cares for other people’s kids. It's a way where she accesses the joy of being around babies and children, but then finds balance as she passes them back to their parents, rather than taking on a full motherhood experience.  Check out Chaney's Substack here:  https://chaneywilliams.substack.com/p/the-yearning-of-motherhood

    Ep6. Chaney Williams: Microdosing Motherhood

  2. Oct 3

    Ep5. Annie Simon: Let's Call it "Single"

    Brooklynite Annie Simon lives in a multicultural world where all kinds of lifestyles have their place and their people, where difference and diversity is seen with regularity on the street-level.  And yet, she also knows what it feels to be othered as someone without children. She describes a quiet sadness in not making a choice to become a mom, and also in not making the choice to be childfree. Even the term childless doesn’t cut it.  There’s an in-between category that is more elusive to define, one that is called Childless by Circumstance in the childless community. We discuss what that means to Annie, who also falls into the category of Childless Caretaker, the primary caregiver for her parents as they age.  We attempt to make meaning of an abundance of family heirlooms that Annie’s inheriting, and the puzzle behind who they go to after her own time  - because she is the end of the line on both her mom and her dad’s side of the family. Annie carries a heavy legacy. Even with a lot on her plate, Childless denotes a lack of something, and the term doesn’t sit right with either of us. Annie confirms that the term ‘Single’ works best to place her status as a non-parent. Annie’s experience as a Death Doula seems to help us work out some ideas around childless grief and also living fully without children.  In all of this, Annie curates her social life with an inclusive approach - sharing time with friends who are parents, friends who are childfree and friends who are childless. She shares a portrait of what it is to be someone who would have liked to have kids, but who was given something else, and what to make of that.

    Ep5. Annie Simon: Let's Call it "Single"

  3. Sep 19

    Ep4. Julia O'Reilly: Have You Got Children? No. F**k Off.

    Endo Advocate and Writer Julia O'Reilly (located in Spain) presented a Webinar at this year's World Childless Week entitled: 'You Should Get Pregnant: Endometriosis and Infertility'. She guides viewers through her experience with Endometriosis, and dismantles the myth that a good old-fashioned pregnancy can cure Endometriosis, a whole-body disease that also often leads to infertility. In our podcast conversation, we go a little deeper into Julia's personal story. She tells me to 'F**k Off' when I ask her if she has kids - rightly so. We get into the angry bits, the injustice and inhumanity of medical care, and the blind spots for compassion found with professionals and loved ones alike.  Julia offers truth and transparency while detailing the emotional roller coaster of Endo symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, followed by the ongoing quest for pregnancy through a brutal IVF trial.  While many of her life decisions were initially driven by family-planning, her childlessness causes her to question the relevancy of those choices now. She sites how neurodivergence and looping thoughts have given her an extra challenge as she tries so hard to find answers.  Many moments in our conversation are marked with observations on the absurdity of social systems and culture. Julia's fighting spirit keeps pulling us back to a positive place, even as she describes what it means to sit in your grief as a childless person.  She definitively recalls the moment she experienced a death - after being told she wouldn't be able to have kids - her greatest fear - and she also offers up her thoughts on where she is now: Rebirth!  This is a raw time for processing a spectrum of emotions that comes with losing the baby she didn't get to have. Julia shares her story so that someone else can listen, relate and feel worthy of a full life without children.   WCW Webinar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx7Z_Ghje9o Substack: https://sheilaiswriting.substack.com/p/have-you-got-children #endoawareness #infertility #childlessness #endometriosis #IVF

    Ep4. Julia O'Reilly: Have You Got Children? No. F**k Off.

  4. Sep 5

    Ep3. Stephanie Joy Phillips: Bringing a World of Acceptance

    In anticipation of World Childless Week (September 14th-20th), we connect with with its Founder, Stephanie Joy Phillips in Worcestershire, England.  Steph started World Childless Week ten years ago, after discovering there was no representation for the CNBC community anywhere she looked in the world.  She opens up about her own childless experience and the many lessons that came from that. With invisibility often at the core of the CNBC experience, she found that being seen and heard by people in online support groups was immensely transformative.  Online and through World Childless Week, she gathers many people together to share similar and different struggles, and to remember their value in a community of people who care.  She keeps an open and non-judgmental policy for creative expression in World Childless Week submissions, providing an outlet for genuine connection. We talk about the courage of speaking up and also how nervous it can make a person feel, but how it gets a bit easier - and rewarding - with practice.  She promotes the idea of employers recognizing childless employees, to include them in policies, as one way of creating more equity for CNBC people. She also believes that teaching children that it’s normal to grow up and not have kids would take away the fear behind it.   We expand on the symbolism and language of the Forget-Me-Not flower, emblem for World Childless Week.

    Ep3. Stephanie Joy Phillips: Bringing a World of Acceptance

  5. Aug 22

    Ep2: Narinder Bazen: on becoming a Creator (and not a Mother)

    Artist, Death Worker and Founder of Nine Keys School of Death Arts, Narinder Bazen, tells the whole story from the very beginning, for the first time on the mic, on how she came to be Childless Not By Choice.  "Where's the people like me, the artist, the neurodivergent person, the queer folk who go through this?"  By telling her CNBC story, she invites the next person to share theirs. "When one woman tells her story she frees up the next woman to tell hers, and so on and so on."  She's calling on culture to change the way society interacts with CNBC people and claims that the grief in Childlessness can be a loss so deep and traumatic that it can also be life threatening.  She also asks: "Did I really want to be a Mother? Or did I want to be a Creator?" Her death midwifery apprenticeship program was recently renamed a Death School of the Arts, and nurtures death workers into their own unique creativity. Learn more about Narinder and what she offers here:  https://www.narinderbazen.com/

    Ep2: Narinder Bazen: on becoming a Creator (and not a Mother)

  6. Aug 2

    Ep1: Introduction with Lindsay Bane

    Introduction to 'Do you have kids? Short answer: No."  I give you the Who, What, Where, When and How behind this concept. Then I have a conversation alone with the Omniscient to kick things off. I expand on my own personal answer to 'the question' and tell you a bit about my devastating and course-altering experience with Thoracic / Diaphragmatic Endometriosis, and how I do and don't have kids, and how it became impossible for me to have a baby in this broken but enduring body. My life continues and so do new dreams that continue to unfold everyday, I offer gratitude with the lesson.  This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. With you, the listeners and future contributors.

  • 6 Episodes

About

A collection of personal stories from women who identify as Childless Not By Choice, for people of the CNBC community and for people who want to learn about the CNBC experience. 

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