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Dearest First name / One,

 

It's been a cold, wet May here in Ireland, so my garden is struggling, and despite the long days and evenings as we move towards the Summer Solstice in the northern hemisphere, it often still feels like February! Growing food (or rather, watching it not grow) connects me to the weather and land in a way I've never experienced before, and that feels very precious; it gives me a lot of respect and admiration for farmers, too!  

 

Now that some of the energy-sapping parts of my Long Covid have eased a little, I've had a little more mental clarity and stamina, and so have been working on the third (and please goddess let it be the final) draft of my novel about a single, childless, middle-aged woman. I've been writing/not-writing it for over a decade, and so these days I feel I have more in common with the older characters in the book than with my main protagonist. However, writing from her perspective as a 45-year old single and childless woman, facing the loss of her last childless friend vanishing into marriage and motherhood, an unsympathetic mother who keeps sending her Daily Mail articles about batshit crazy fertilty treatments, and watching her promising journalism career turn into a bullshit job that barely covers the bills, I'm taken right back to those days, and how incredibly lonely and alienating they were to live through - so of course I've decided to stitch myself up like a kipper and make this novel a social comedy. Sheesh, I do like a challenge, it seems! (And just in case you're worried, no, she's not ‘fixed’ by a miracle baby!)

 

Interestingly, I'm part of an online women's writers group, most of whom are mothers, and they are incredibly receptive to my work, and are giving me a lot of food for thought about how hard it can be for mothers not to disappear into their motherhood identity - which is all society expects of them and rewards them for. When I was younger and still grieving my childlessness, that's not something I might have been able to ‘hear’, but the longer in the tooth I get, the more I can see how both non-mothers AND mothers are harmed by pronatalism. I was recently rereading the essay I wrote on this for Kat Brown's collection No One Talks About This Stuff, and, if I were to write it again today, I'd include more about that too. So it'll have to go into my novel instead because the last thing I want to do is to put any more us-vs-them barriers up between non-mothers and mothers. 

 

Now, if you've got something you'd like to get off your chest about your childless experience, World Childless Week has just opened its submissions for this September - its 10th year! I've been involved right from the start, and it's become such a valuable and powerful way for us to claim our identities in a world that tries to invisible us – apart from when we're paying our taxes, staying late at work so that parents can get home, or caring for ageing relatives! Grrr. 

 

Because of my Long Covid, I'm still not well enough to host webinars etc, but I am hoping to pull together a panel of our fabulous NomoCrones for a World Childless Week special edition of Fireside Wisdom with Childless Elderwomen. Other than that, you'll find me in the garden making mud pies, with my animals, reading or writing. Goodness, I think that's pretty well much how I used to spend my time when I was a kid; amazing how often we knew exactly who we were back then, before the world decided to tell us, isn't it?!

 

Until next month,

This newsletter takes a day (at least!) each month to write and produce. If you'd like to support my work, you can leave me a tip at BuyMeACoffee, and I'll probably do exactly that with it, no doubt, whilst also reading a book you've helped me buy :)