Dear First name / One,
After a LOT of travelling in September and October (finishing with a wonderfully restorative time in sunny Greece), I am very happy to be home once more in the misty greys and greens of Ireland as we turn towards winter here in the Northern hemisphere.
One of my trips was to Belfast in Northern Ireland to take part in an ancestral healing retreat with the American teacher and ritualist,
Daniel Foor; the image above is the
despacho forty of us co-created during the retreat. This was about as far out of my comfort zone as I've been for quite some time, but with the deaths in the last year of both my mother and mother-in-law, as well as that of a beloved childless elderwomen who was a therapy client, my sense of wanting more connections with my ancestors has been clamouring for attention. I am still integrating the experiences and learnings from my week in Belfast (wonderful city, hello!), and they feel perfectly attuned with my own emerging work with childless elders as part of my Gateway Elderwomen project, something I wrote in some depth in
last month's newsletter. If this is something you feel drawn to explore too, and can get to Edinburgh, you might want to attend one of Liane Maitland's ‘
Systemic Constellations’ workshops (more on that below in ‘Events’).
With ‘Singles Day' coming up on Monday 11th November (it's originally a Chinese thing, and it's about the 4 x 1's of the date) I wanted to share with you some of the resources I'm aware of that support women who are both single and childless. If you've been around my work for a while, you probably know that after my divorce in my late-thirties, I remained unpartnered for much of my forties and early fifties and, although there were some undeniably some tough times, it was also an absolutely transformative period of my life. Although I did go on to meet ‘Mr Gateway’ in my early-fifties, it has not dimmed my allyship for unpartnered childless women, because it's an identity that comes with layers of toxic othering that you might not be aware of unless they're in your face. Whether it's nasty patriarchal slurs around ‘not being chosen’ by a man to be a partner/mother (and thus, what's ‘wrong' with you), the hefty financial challenges of surviving alone in a society based on a dual-income model, or the additional concerns around ageing without children, these are serious social justice issues that deserve much more (and much kinder) attention.
So whether this is your own experience, or perhaps if you want to be a better ally to your single sisters, do have a listen to the the
interview with Donna Ward I've shared in this month's ‘From the GW Archives’, consider registering for the December ‘
Solo Elderhood’ webinar, and perhaps help crowdfund an upcoming memoir on the single and childless experience,
Childless: A Woman and a Girl in a Man's World by Fabiana Formica. And don't forget that the Childless Collective online community has a thriving subgroup of around
200 single and childless women too - because sharing the cognitive and emotional load of singleness and childlessness can
really help; I know it does, because that's how Gateway Women got started all those years ago!
Quick links on what's coming up this month's newsletter:
Most of my work, including the day (at least!) it takes each month to write and produce this newsletter, is unpaid. If you'd like to support me, you can do so by becoming a paid subscriber to my
Gateway Elderwomen Substack, or by leaving me a one-off tip at ‘
Buy Me a Coffee’. Thank you so much to those of you who support me already, it means a LOT. And please know that if this is not possible for you, I still deeply appreciate you as a reader and I hope my work continues to support you in your life, and through your childlessness.
The photo below (wet boobs from snorkelling and all!) was taken off the island of Rhodes at the end of October. I absolute adore being on boats (and they don't have to be glamourous ones in warm seas either!) and it's something I intend to do more of here on the chilly Atlantic Irish coast. Because something I'm coming to increasingly realise is that, in these challenging times of societal, systemic and ecological unravelling, finding ways to love this incredible world and bring joy into my heart is necessary medicine for my soul. I'm very good at putting my shoulder to the wheel, but less good at filling my cup. But you can't do one without the other...
