I’m losing my shame

As long as we buy into the idea that we’re “washed up and finished” nothing will change. We first need to dismantle the internalized oppression

Jody Day, psychotherapist, author, and founder of Gateway Women

A couple of days ago, I read a fascinating fact about birds. They shed all their feathers in the course of one year. More surprisingly, they lose feathers in pairs on the wings and tails. It’s a silent miracle and nature’s way to ensure smooth take-offs and landings. The thing is that I recently got very interested in birds. Or, better, I should say that the birds hopped into my life. Because of the warm climate of Thailand, we live in an open-air house and the birds, from a bench or a canopy, observe my dealings. I had to acknowledge that ours were not casual encounters; I have actually been adopted by a couple of inquisitive mynahs. To keep them out of the kitchen, I set up a feeding spot on the garden wall and the procession of species began. They look at my movements with the head titled on one side, waiting for their share of crumbs. Sometimes, they line up for their turn to peck. The oriental magpie-robin with a white stripe on its pitch-black wings and its unmistakable tail pointing up arrives early in the morning. The red-whiskered bulbul with its red cheeks and a black crest of feathers makes sure there are no cats around before landing from a palm tree. The spotted doves with their smoked plumage and white-dotted black collars are the last ones to feast. All the birds come in couples and the mynahs, surprisingly, arrived one day with their offspring and began to feed them tenderly from beak to beak. 

Jody Day entered my life with the same grace of these birds. In her way, she’s nourishing the world and, in doing so, she opened a window into an overlooked aspect of aging: the double stigma that hits childless women as they grow older. Jody is a psychotherapist, the author of Living the Life Unexpected and the founder of Gateway Women, the global friendship and support network for childless women.. As I learned talking with her, depending on our age and where we live, between 15 and 30% of women are now reaching midlife without children and, consequently, grandchildren. (1) - Footnotes are at the end of the interview These are women deprived of the title of grandmother, “the only single positive word in the English language for older women,” as she noted. Only ten percent of women without children are childfree by choice, another ten per cent are childless due to infertility and the rest are what Jody calls “childless by circumstance.” And those circumstances can be many and diverse. It’s just because of the fortunate encounter with an insightful doctor that, at the last minute, I ended up in a different group, but I didn’t forget how dark the darkest months in my life felt like. And so it resonates with me the double challenge that women - and men - have to face when they age without offspring in a society that stigmatizes differences, praises homogeneity, and commercializes any options in between. 

Childlessness and aging have some elements in common. Which are the ones that pop into your mind?

Both childlessness and aging are devalued by Western society. On the negative side, both are unchosen, stigmatized, and feared conditions which feed on our internalized prejudices – a good deal of the pain of involuntary childlessness can be attributed to the fact that the cruelty many experience from others echoes the harsh judgements they’ve internalized. A lot of this is due to pronatalism – the ideology that says that the only acceptable way to be a fully mature adult is to be a parent, and that parents have more value in the world than non-parents. Pronatalism impacts all genders but falls more overtly on heterosexual cis-gendered women, and at a younger age.

For most of us, the ideology of pronatalism is unconscious until we’re in its firing range, and thus we often have no idea how it’s shaping our beliefs, decisions and identities. And that why it’s so important, as the consciousness-raising movements of seventies second-wave feminism showed, that we get to the roots of our unconscious beliefs, hold them up to the light and make our own conscious decisions about what we believe. Doing so can be a liberating (and humbling) emotional and psychological process, one that has the potential to free up thwarted life-force and direct it towards what I call a ‘Plan B’.

But thinking again of the comparisons with aging, there are not only negatives—both childlessness and aging can be incredible portals to personal growth when they are seen as transitional periods, as powerful thresholds of consciousness. And daring to think of them as such is similarly counter-cultural…

You mentioned that childless women are a threat to the status quo and that one in five women of the post sixties generation belongs to this group. What are the implications for the future?

I had a classic childlessness journey for a British woman born in the mid-sixties to a mother who had none of the birth control, educational or workplace opportunities open to me. In my cohort there is a big bump in childlessness - one in four - dropping to one in five for those born in the seventies and looking like it’s going to rise again for the eighties Millennials. However, the numbers don’t tell the whole story; around 6-10% of women (2) reaching midlife without children have chosen childlessness – they are ‘childfree’ – but journalists routinely conflate the data to back up their position – either writing headlines saying something like ‘1 in 5 women are choosing not to have children’, or ‘1 in 5 women are childless’. It’s a lot more complex than that, and making it a binary position doesn’t match many women’s internal experience anyway.

For a while I’ve been predicting that we will see a big increase in both voluntary and involuntary childlessness amongst Millennials and early indicators, such as the fact that 47 per cent of thirty-three year old British women (born in 1987) have no children, compared to only 18 per cent of their mother’s generation, (3) would seem to confirm that. And their reasons will be complex, just as they have been for the women who’ve gone before them, for whom 80% of us are childless by circumstance. (4) Amongst Gateway Women’s members, it’s clear that ‘social infertility’ is on the rise too (not having a partner to conceive with), something the World Health Organization recognizes and, controversially, it chose to include it in its 2017 redefinition of infertility.  Women and couples may choose not to have children because they can’t afford them, for diverse relational, economic and political reasons, or due to any number of complex systemic issues. I’ve sat with young women in their late twenties weeping with grief over their choice not to bring children into a world that is heading for climate breakdown. Such choices are hardly the glib, ‘Wow! I’m so happy to be childfree, think of all those holidays and lie-ins!’ that often parody the childfree choice – these are often ‘rock and a hard place’ circumstantial and systemic choices often informed by a deeply maternal sensibility.

Falling birthrates are always seen as a threat to the status quo, which they are – but maybe that’s no bad thing! When motherhood was the normative expectation of every woman’s life, the narrative of shame and failure that surrounds childlessness may have gone unchallenged. But when it’s an average of one in five women not having children, it’s really starting to look very shaky as a prejudice… Shame is a very powerful tool of social control and Millennials are much more shame-resilient than their parents’ generation and considerably more willing to reveal their vulnerabilities to each other, and to the wider world. I hope that for them, the notion that childlessness is a guaranteed life sentence of misery is not something they’ll take onboard so unquestioningly; it is my dearest wish that the involuntarily childless women coming up behind me, those who could have been of my own children’s generation if it were not for my ‘unexplained infertility’, will liberate themselves from the toxic pronatalist narrative with greater speed and in larger numbers than we’ve managed to do. 

The human desire to be generative is a strong one and if it’s not directed into parenthood there are many other ways to contribute that loving life force to the world. So much of the sadness in the childless women I work with comes from them not believing this, and thus not seeking out the support they need to make sense of their losses and rebuild their lives in new ways. The message that childless women receive from society is that you’ve failed, you’ve got nothing to offer, you don’t fit in. It’s pronatalist propaganda but as long as we believe it to be true it has the potential to be a self-fulfilling prophesy. However, with the support of your conscious childless tribe, you can rebuild your self-esteem, rise from the ashes of your dream of motherhood and find your own unique way to contribute. Childless women are everywhere in our civic society, supporting it to function for all. We all need to open our eyes to the shocking loss of human potential that arises from the stigma of childlessness, just as it does from other prejudices including racism, sexism, ageism and homophobia. 

The message childless women receive from our culture is: you failed; you’re not a real woman. What happens when, on top of this, the pronatalist society puts ageism on the shoulders of childless women?

The combined stigmas of pronatalism, sexism and ageism can create an unholy trinity of suffering for childless women. I see this so often in my older members, many who come to Gateway Women in deep pain because, having not had the support to heal from the loss of motherhood when they were younger, find themselves heartbroken all over again as their friends and family members become grandmothers. Many of them experience a repeat of the #FriendshipApocalype they went through as their friends became mothers, and once again find themselves socially isolated and misunderstood. Becoming a grandmother is the only socially powerful identity for older women in our culture, there isn’t a single other word for an older woman that isn’t disparaging. 

Such ‘isms’ are rampant across the media too where the dominant narratives for older childless women are gloomy predictions about how they’re going to break the social care system as they age (no mention of the equal and growing number of childless men!) Although there are many inspiring childless elderwomen, and indeed I interviewed six of them for a short film for World Childless Week 2020, we have been symbolically annihilated.

In 2014 I was invited by Kirsty Woodard, to become a founding and board member at her new organization, AWWOC.org (Ageing Well Without Children) to tackle this issue. AWWOC sadly had to close in 2019 due to its inability to secure funding from any private, institutional or governmental agency to continue its work, although the website containing its research remains and Kirsty Woodard continues to campaign on the issue. When you consider that four million adults over the age of fifty in the UK have never been parents and that adults without children are 25% more likely to live in a residential facility than those with children (and at lower dependency needs), and that family still provide 92% of informal care for their parents, the fact that no one was prepared to even consider this to be an issue that merited extremely modest funding says all you need to know about the confluence of aging and pronatalism. And the fact that every working childless woman has willingly contributed taxes towards schools, hospitals and benefits across the life-course for other people’s offspring, appears to be conveniently erased by these prejudices too. 

Talking about childless women you said “We’re not washed up and finished.” What does it take to develop this awareness? Can it be extended to other older adults, too?

Never before in the history of our civilization have so many intelligent, liberated, educated, financially independent childless women been alive and free to shape their lives as right now. We saw something similar in the early twentieth century in the UK when the ‘surplus women’ (the shaming name given to that generation’s high level of childless women) won the right for women’s suffrage. Women have the vote thanks to them, and many more rights due to second-wave feminism. There has probably never been a better moment to be a childless woman, or to age as a childless woman. But in order to realize that, first of all we have to liberate ourselves from the shackles of shame, come together for mutual support and combine our considerable strengths to create change. As long as we buy into the idea that we’re ‘washed up and finished’ nothing will change. The first step is to dismantle the internalized oppression. The second step is to get support and company as you test out your new identity. And after that? Well, after that, what happens will be as unique as each woman’s personality and opportunities. There is this unconscious message from pronatalism that you have to do something ‘big’ with your life to ‘make up’ for being childless, but that’s just more internalized shame talking. You can be a radical role model in quiet ways too; just being a childless woman living shamelessly as you age is already radical enough.

In my opinion, it’s the same with dismantling ageism – it has to be an inside job. And that’s very liberating to realize because you discover that far from being powerless, you have agency; that you can choose to educate yourself about ageism by following blogs like ‘Age Buster’ and rooting out your own internalized prejudices. I’m not for a moment trying to downplay the structural inequalities that shape our experience of aging as childless women; they are far too depressingly real. I’m just keen to point out that we don’t have to believe everything we think… And that once your eyes are open, you are then able to see more options to shape those areas of your life where you do have some agency.

You mentioned the “power of disagreement.” Does our sense of isolation play a part in the fact that we “forget” that we always have this opportunity?

Absolutely! Shame encourages us to hide from others, to shun community; we feel too exposed, too vulnerable and so we pull back into our shells. And in doing so, we confirm our most feared beliefs about ourselves, which reinforces our need to stay disconnected. That’s why it’s absolutely crucial to ‘find your tribe’ as we say at Gateway Women. Once you are able to share with others those things you feel most ashamed of, or hear other women sharing them and notice how you don’t judge them as harshly as you do yourself, it’s like opening a window and letting fresh air into your mind and soul. And with that, begins the possibility of disagreeing with ourselves, of questioning our own thinking. However, a word of warning, it’s a bit like taking the ‘red pill’ in ‘The Matrix’: once you’re able to see pronatalism and ageism, you start to see it everywhere! You become more aware of the entrenched systemic factors that have led to your oppression and how the privileged protect them fiercely as if they are some ‘natural’ right, rather than a cultural habit. I like to quote this sentence that has evolved from those fighting prejudice: “When you are accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” Oppression sounds like a heavy-duty word with regard to childlessness and aging, but I use it with care and good evidence. It’s vital to understand pronatalism and how it has created what I’ve termed ‘pronatalist privilege’ in order to appreciate how it may unconsciously skew the judgment of even some very compassionate adults. Anytime you read the phrase, “As a mother…” you are likely to be seeing it in action - it’s a way of valorizing one woman’s experience over another… because when do you ever see, “As a childless woman…?” 

Childless women need sisterhood. Does it play a bigger role as we age?

Childless women need sisterhood at all stages of life – especially as so many of us lose some, or all, of our peer group when they become mothers and we don’t. It’s not always a ‘falling out’ but more of a ‘ghosting’ as our old friends divert what little free time they now have to their new relationships with other mothers. Childless women don’t have the natural ‘matchmakers’ of children to introduce us to another group of friends, so building those new connections isn’t easy, which is why Gateway Women and other childless groups are so important. It’s also not uncommon for childless women to lose their sense of safety in groups of women after years of being excluded, shamed and judged for our childlessness. It can feel safer not to risk making new connections, but we can’t heal without them. Grief is a social emotion, and the disenfranchised grief of childlessness needs conscious others who ‘get it’ in order for grief to do its loving work and heal our broken hearts. 

Probably the number one fear of childless women, once they realize that childlessness is theirs for the life course, is ‘who’s going to take care of me when I’m old’. And the fear is justified. With social care systems around the world breaking down under the combined pressure of aging populations and neoliberal underinvestment, we can no longer rely on the state to be there for us. And it’s not just intimate and residential care we need, it’s advocacy; it’s having a trusted younger person to help us manage the complex logistical and administrative tasks of modern living so that we can continue to age in place, if that’s our wish. Many childless women have learned to be fiercely independent, particularly if they are also unpartnered, as many are. Developing connections with other younger childless women is going to be crucial to fill this need; it’s not a quick fix, reciprocal trust doesn’t form overnight and so it’s vital to start building real social capital in those relationships long before you might want to rely on them. Social media can help us to make those connections, but it’s lived experience with each other in our day-to-day lives that will allow those layers of trust to develop. These kinds of mentoring friendships can be so nourishing for both parties and I really hope Gateway Women will play a part in helping them to form.

For childless adults, men and women, partnered and solo, aging represents logistical and psychological adjustments that are hard to ‘look forward to’. As a result, many choose to stick their head in the sand instead, feeling scared and powerless, and allow things to unfold in ways they may later regret. This is not exclusive to childless people – it would seem that very few parents are making concrete plans for their old age either, unconsciously pushing those thoughts aside knowing that, when the time comes, their children will be there for them. Those parents that I’ve challenged on this are adamant that they didn’t have children so that they would be there to take care of them (and I believe them, it certainly wasn’t in my mind when I was trying for a family), but the fact remains that unless they are conscious about making plans to prevent this, this is what they are unconsciously setting up. It makes me so very cross that ageism has scared so many people away from even thinking about their old age, let alone planning for it whilst they still can!

Whilst the ‘Golden Girls’ fantasy - “I’ll be OK, I’ll just get a house with a group of friends and we’ll all age hilariously together,” - is quite a prevalent form of denial (er… What happens if everything is not hilarious?), there are still many interesting opportunities around co-housing, intentional communities and shared intergenerational living that can be explored and planned for. But that’s only possible if each of us embraces the fact that we too will be old one day, rather than imagining that aging is somehow something distasteful that we can ignore.

I am hopeful that the conscious work we’ve done as childless women to heal our hearts, deal with being ‘othered’ by society and discover new ways to create lives of meaning will pay dividends as we age. That we will come together to support each other as we create new ways to grow old together. One of Gateway Women’s members is already doing the research to set up a Co-Housing Community in the UK for childless women. We know that if we want something to happen, we have to create it ourselves. And I have great faith that if we can make aging without children easier, it will spearhead creative thinking for those aging with children too. Radical change nearly always starts with those outside the system, and childless women know all too well what it feels like to be those outsiders.

In my recent interview with Susanna Harkonen, we talked about the need to grieve aging. You mention that grieving is a process of transformation. It takes us from one identity to another one. Is this a thing we fail to understand about aging?

Aging is a dynamic process, like every other stage of life. We tend to view it as a decline, because we’re focused on the physical part only, bypassing the emotional, psychological and spiritual levels. Perhaps this has something to do with our culture’s hyperfocus on ‘surfaces’, on image and reflections. I know that the six-months I spent travelling in rural India in my late twenties, during which time I hardly saw a mirror or reflective surface, had a huge impact on me. I turned within and experienced myself as a living being with a rich internal life that felt like the true locus of my identity, once separated from my reflection. And that was before social media and smartphones and everyone photographing themselves all the time… As a culture too, we’re also deeply uncomfortable with anything we don’t have control over. Fertility and aging are very linked in that way, and many childless women, whether they’ve had fertility treatments or not, are given no support by others for ‘accepting’ their childlessness – the cultural narrative is one of ‘don’t give up hope’, and that everything can be ‘fixed’ with more money, more time, more science or a better attitude. And so it is with aging – it’s seen as some kind of moral defeat, especially for women, one that they should have tried harder to fight. But the last time I checked, the most positive attitude in the world was still no match for the natural entropy of the universe!

What this ‘surface’ approach to aging misses is that aging is the movement of energy to another part of our experience, to our interiority. That there’s a richness to be found in aging, if approached consciously, just as there is with the grief process. I think the key factor for me here is embracing aging as a conscious process, as a threshold. There are parts of the physical side of it that are already a challenge for me, so I’m not going to brightside it, but having cherished the gifts that arose from the dark night of the soul of my childlessness, I’m prepared to stay open to what treasures my aging soul may yet have in store for me. I’m only 56, the adventure is just beginning for me, and I’m excited to understand what it takes to become a conscious childless elderwoman, and to share what I learn with other childless women. Because there’s nothing out there written about it for us as far I can find – every book I’ve so far read about female aging or ageism, whether it’s depth psychology or pop psychology (with the notable exception of Joy Loverde’s practical guide) presumes that every older woman has had children, and that most have (or have had) a life partner. So we can add singlism to the ‘ism’ list too!

When it comes to dreaming alternative futures, aging is an unguarded territory. In terms of social activism, what do you envision for your getting older?

For the last four years I’ve shared a home with my partner’s mother, who has recently turned 90. Knowing her, loving her, has further de-stigmatized aging for me as I’ve understood, in my heart as well as my mind, that being old is simply another way to be human, just as being childless is. It makes me realize how much we’ve lost by the decline in intergenerational living that was so normal until just a couple of generations ago. It’s also made me less likely to romanticize the aging process too. 

As a thinker and change-maker it seems I have always been drawn to the liminal threshold passages of life, and to the power they contain for personal and social transformation - as a training psychotherapist I loved working with adolescents for this reason, and it’s the same supporting childless women to forge new life-paths for themselves, and now with my interest in narrating and hopefully shifting childless women’s experience of aging.  Being a childless, aging woman, I have sidestepped the male gaze and am considered of no further use to the patriarchal project – I am no one’s mother or potential mother. And that anonymity serves a double function as a kind of invisibility cloak – aging as a super power!  And wearing this cloak grants you the freedom to become quite radical; combined with the astonishing life expectancy of our generation, this creates the potential for an explosion of wisdom. I’m hungry for that, and I know a lot of other childless elderwomen are too and, having been gifted the title ‘Apprentice Crone’ by Marian Van Eyk McCain, I stand ready for Hecate’s call.  

P.S. In the Gateway Women online community, there are two subgroups for elderwoman members - "Nomo Tribe,” for those through the storm of grief and embracing the life unexpected and "Radical Childless Elderwomen,” for those with a desire to disrupt ageism by embracing elderhood.

Footnotes

(1) See Chapter 2 of Jody’s book Living the Life Unexpected for a full breakdown of the data, with references
(2) See footnotes 7 and 8 in Chapter 2 of Jody’s book for data sources
(3) See endnote 10 for Chapter 2 of Jody’s book for data reference
(4) See endnote 1 in Chapter 1 for data reference