Dear First name / One,
Well, somehow it's December again! I remember when I was about thirty asking a man in his nineties if it was true that time keeps speeding up as you get older. ‘My dear,' he said, 'by the time you’re my age, it's breakfast every five minutes!' And now, at sixty, although breakfast is still spaced at reasonable intervals, I'm certainly feeling that Christmas has started coming so quickly that I'm wondering if it's really going to be worth taking the decorations down in January?! But I will, if only to have the pleasurable ritual of putting them up again next time.
I remember that during the hard yards of my forties, whilst grieving both my unchosen singleness and childlessness (and the
#FriendshipApocalypse that accompanied them both), it didn't occur to me to put up Christmas decorations. Because what did I have to celebrate? Who would even
see my tree if I had one? I had neither the energy nor the self-love to realise that my life was precious, unique and valuable
just as it was, regardless of what the overculture thought.
Looking back through the blogs I've written over the last 13 years, I can see that things really started to shift for me in 2012 when I was 48 and just a year into having created the ‘old’ Gateway Women Online Community (now the
Childless Collective). I'd been mostly single for several years (after a couple of disastrous post-divorce babymania-driven relationships) and more and more I'd made my peace with that. In that 2012
blog I wrote that my plans for Christmas were to stay home with the cat and feel gratitude for, amongst other things,
the healing of the open wound of my childlessness into a scar I can live with. That year was the first time I put up a tree again; it was a tiny one and I bought delicate white and silver ornaments for it. I sent Christmas cards to other Gateway Women via the community Christmas Card exchange (still going in the
Childless Collective!) and allowed myself to feel the bittersweet joy of my childless grief receding. The thing is, I could never have done it on my own; grief is a form of love and until I had other childless women who
completely understood why my childlessness had absolutely floored me, I was stuck in what I now call ‘unrequited grief,’ something I explore in Chapter 4 of my
book.
Which brings me to the photo that opens this month's newsletter. The woman on the left is one of my childless soul sisters, Kelly. We first met when she and her friend flew all the way from Los Angeles to a retreat I ran in Oxford in 2014. And then in 2016, she and her husband had me to stay with them for a week whilst Kelly helped me to organise and run the first US Reignite Weekend. She later went on to train with me and hosted Reignite Weekends herself for a while, until the pandemic brought our US offerings to a close. I'm thrilled to say that we've become firm friends through the process, sharing a surprisingly offbeat sense of humour as well as (see photo!) Irish heritage. And next year, Kelly and her husband are moving to Ireland, just along the coast from where I now live. She and I have stood side-by-side in the storms of grief, and now, in a beautiful moment of synchronicity, both of our ‘Plan Bs' have brought us to West Cork to grow old together. (And yes, that photo was taken where I live, pinch me!)
I know that this time of year can feel bleak (whether you celebrate or not, whether you're solo or partnered, whether it's sunny or cold, whether you're home alone or with others), so I wanted to share this story with you for two reasons: (i) grief is not a life sentence of misery, it's a wise and profound psycho-socio-somatic process that transforms you into someone able to move forward with life again; and (ii) just because you're childless, it doesn't mean you'll automatically ‘gel’ with every childless woman you meet - but when you do, it can lead to the kind of soul friendships that can set you up for the rest of your life unexpected. And for that, and for so many other things in my childless life this December, I'm so very grateful.
Twenty years ago, when I first needed support (and even some
language) around my childlessness, there was nothing out there; eventually I set about creating it for myself and others. Now there's a banquet of options to choose from including workshops, podcasts, books, online communities and in-person social events from
Gateway Women, the
Childless Collective,
World Childless Week and
The Full Stop Podcast, just to mention a few. All of them created by people who
know what childlessness means, because they live it every day too.
So my hope is that each little bit of support, recognition and connection I'm sharing here helps your childless heart this holiday season.
