What is this all about?
This is a newsletter for anyone who is aging without children, whether by choice or by circumstance. . .
This is also a community where we can gather around the topics of making meaning, reclaiming legacy, and journeying through grief and joy as women and individuals without children.
For us, cultivating community is especially important—it can be difficult for us to fit in, to find support, and to find resources. Loneliness and isolation are common. We are often misunderstood, stigmatized, or looked down upon.
Childless individuals, while definitely still in the margins of society, have been in the news a lot lately. Some of this is thanks to recent infamous comments on “childless cat ladies.” But there has been a lot more chatter than that. In the New York Times alone, more than a handful of articles over the past 8 months have explored childlessness from many angles.
My work here is to unravel the internalized negative messages society perpetuates around the taboo of not becoming a mother or parent. We’ll look at shifting the traditional life script, and explore how to anchor into our reality with purpose and clear intention. We’ll move through our grief instead of around it, and we will support each other in cultivating joy and reclamation.
I am excited to be launching this Substack during a time when there is a surge of interest in childless women. I hope you will join me in this vision and one day find community with others who are walking this path of childlessness into middle age and beyond.
Who is this for?
Although many of my posts specifically name childless women as the focus, this community is for anyone with ovaries and a uterus who is living a life without kids—whether by choice or circumstance. As this community evolves and grows, I hope to include a diverse chorus of voices from the childless community that reaches across the continuum of gender, sexual orientation, race, culture, able-bodiedness, trauma, and socioeconomic status.
Why I often use the term childless women
I aim to be intentional in my writing, but sometimes I admit to defaulting to terms like childless women and AFAB individuals for brevity’s sake. But pausing to reflect on the terms I use has helped me clarify a few things:
Sometimes I do intend to focus on cis women and femme-presenting AFAB individuals because I believe that there is much consciousness-raising needed in this community around the pressures they face from a white supremacist pronatalist culture that stigmatizes individuals within this identity. I also believe that this stigmatization is often internalized and catalyzed as shame, depression, or disconnection, which can appear as unresolved grief, over-working/overproducing, perfectionism, isolation, or a super-sized inner critic. There is a lot to liberate around childlessness for cis women and AFAB individuals, and the way into liberation is community. Ultimately, raising our own consciousness around our identity allows us to come to the table and hold a more generous space for diversity, which deepens connection with the larger world rather than being pulled into “othering,” even within our own community.
I identify as a white cis-het/queer-adjacent childfree-mainly-by-choice woman who is on the verge of menopause. Therefore, I can land in a secure “authorship” of my story through these specific lenses. I have been in deep exploration of my own childless identity as I cross over into the second half of life. I believe it is imperative that I continue to mine my own identity, background, and cultural upbringing in regard to my evolving childlessness so that I can own my shit and also be a more robust companion to those journeying through life without kids. I do not intend to speak for others who identify as non-White, non-binary, queer, nonheteronormative, or who were not raised in the traditional model of a nuclear family (all factors that impact our experiences of childlessness). That said, I wish to echo the sentiment of historian Peggy O’Donnell Heffington, author of Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother, by asserting that there is a calculated effort to divide people along lines of difference, including mothers and nonmothers, parents and nonparents, and—I would add—childless individuals with diverse identities (like cis-het versus queer/nonbinary). Therefore, although we must revere our differences to avoid dehumanizing or bypassing levels of privilege or historical trauma, I also hope to grow into a community where all voices feel safe enough to be heard here around childlessness. As a therapist and administrator of this community, this requires my ongoing commitment to growing my edges around diversity in childlessness.
I wish to credit the voices from Black, Womanist, 2SLGBTQIA+, and Anti-Colonialist communities, as well as communities of culture and individuals living with disabilities, who have and will continue to inform my ongoing learning and awareness-growing around childlessness. One of the driving factors in my own consciousness raising around childlessness has been learning about the Reproductive Justice Movement, inspired and guided by Black women. Which leads me into the last point:
As a result of personally and clinically exploring the experiences of cis childless women and AFAB individuals, the roots of eugenic-based, white-supremacist pronatalism have been laid bare. I want this community to be a safe haven to have an ongoing conversation around this reality, and to also serve as a place to rest together in radical self-care and care for each other.
Who am I?
I’m Jackie, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and a Gen-X childless-by-(mostly) choice cis woman. I work with individuals experiencing grief, loss, and other transformative experiences, supporting them to reclaim their core selves. I offer deep, transformative therapy that is somatically- and trauma-informed and approach my clinical work through a reproductive and social justice lens. I also run support groups for childless women and individuals. I intend to hold space for childfree and childless women and individuals to be held in an understanding and empowering community where they can connect to joy, form a robust self-identity, and explore their lineage. I hope to alleviate the stigma around being a woman and not having children, and ease the loneliness and isolation that can come along with this identity.
At the end of the day, know this: We too will one day be the ancestors of our future family members as well as the larger communities we live in. Our mission is to deepen our connection to the larger world in a way that surpasses the traditional family model, reminding us of the unique medicine we offer to future generations. We are not alone, and our lived experience is legitimate and valuable.
I hope you subscribe and join our community of like-minded individuals who are navigating the same waters as you. And please share your voice in the comments!
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