“The fact that I don’t have children is the least interesting thing about me” - Jody, Ireland

Beyond childlessness: redefining identity, building Alterkin, and creating communities of care

I would love it if I didn't have to be childless or childfree or a mother. If my reproductive identity were not the most important thing. I think the fact that I don’t have children is the least interesting thing about me.

My childlessness is not who I am, it’s just part of my identity. However, there was a time when I was grieving, when it was the most important part of my identity to me. Rather like someone in an Al-Anon meeting or at AA: “Hello, my name is Jody and I'm childless.” It felt like the most important thing you needed to know about me.

However, that's not how I feel anymore. I'm a partner. I'm a daughter. A dog bed. A writer. I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a psychotherapist. I'm a very recent gardener. I'm many, many things. One of those things is that I'm childless, but it is not the most important thing about me. Pronatalism makes it one of the most important things about me as a woman, but I've integrated it into part of my identity.

I'm the unmothered daughter of an unmothered daughter.

I was an unplanned teenage pregnancy, to wild Catholic hippie beatniks in London in the early sixties. My mum was 17 when she got pregnant with me, 18 when she gave birth. My parents split up before I was born - in the Home for Fallen Women in Honeypot Lane, West London.

My mum brought huge shame on her working class Catholic family by getting pregnant. And then, because  my rebellious tendency didn't come from nowhere, she refused to give me up for adoption, which was really a major deal. The nuns threw her out on the street with nowhere to go. My family did take her back in, but my mum was an unhappy young woman because her mother was an unhappy young woman.

She got married when I was three, to a man she didn’t love, in order to give me a “respectable home”. Everyone forced her into this marriage and he was physically and emotionally abusive to us both.  So my mum was trapped in an abusive, loveless marriage, and she was unable to really mother. She had a lot of substance abuse problems and mental health issues, because of what she was trying to survive.

I was that kind of classic Gen X latchkey kid - just run out and play on the motorway, come back when the lights go off. I was very independent, very bright, really creative, and saw that was my path through life. I have memories of writing books when I was about seven. I was always writing.

I was a bit of a nature sprite. Luckily we were living in the country by then, and nature was my friend, my safe place. I’d be up a tree, reading my books to the fairies. I generally didn’t play with dolls. And if I did, I turned them into a school and I was the teacher. Never the mummy.

I don’t remember at what age I decided I wouldn’t have children, but I knew I didn’t want to repeat this whole thing. As a child, you can’t imagine a family other than the one you have. I wanted to move to London, have a red sports car, and be the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. I left my childhood with several suitcases full of trauma, all of which I was completely unaware, and catapulted into my young adulthood.

I started for a very short time as a model, then worked for a designer, and ended up in fashion PR. We represented a knitwear designer, and I fell in love with him. We got married four years later. His family had its own dysfunctions, but it was very loving -  I started to see that being part of a big family could be very different. And I thought, “OK, maybe I'll give it a go.”

I wasn’t able to conceive. And my thirties were all about trying to get pregnant. I became completely obsessed, went down a baby mania rabbit hole.

I think I was longing. Longing to heal the wounds of my childhood by having a family. Longing to feel deeply connected to the world.

I was always a bit weird, you know? I think I just wanted to belong. Having children looked like a route to belonging. And I think I thought it would settle my husband down, bring a kind of a stability into our life which was spinning out of control.

My very glamorous bohemian husband was a workaholic when I met him, and a big drinker. Over the years the alcohol turned into alcoholism. Then the alcoholism turned into cocaine addiction. And by the time I was 37 and we were thinking about IVF, he'd moved onto crack cocaine. It took apart our business, our savings, our home, our health, our life, everything.

After my marriage imploded I had a nervous breakdown-slash-spiritual awakening - thank you, Brené Brown, for that statement. I ended up in a psychiatric hospital, because  no one else knew what to do with me.  If I'd been amongst different people or in a different culture, they would call what happened to me a spontaneous kundalini awakening. It was an extremely physical and spiritual experience that happened one lunchtime and profoundly changed me.

It was like I woke up in my life. I woke up with this awareness and was unconscious on the floor after it. After a few days in hospital, when my nervous system had calmed down again, I was looking at the ways I showed up in my life, and thinking, “Who made all these decisions? Why do I do this?”

It was if I had a second chance to reorientate myself in my own life. I changed so much through that experience, and every relationship and every decision in my life had to be reoriented and revalued. At 44-and-a-half, when I realized I definitely wasn't gonna be a mum, I decided to train to be a psychotherapist.

I wanted to do my own healing - most people who train to be therapists are wounded healers. And the journey to becoming a psychotherapist is a lot of therapy. I’d wanted to retrain for a long time, but I didn't think I could until I was a mother, because before then I wouldn't understand the human condition. And when I realised I wasn’t going to be a mother, I thought, “Actually, I think I’ve got quite a lot of experience with the human condition. I think I’ll be fine.”

Around then, I started writing a blog called Gateway Women, which I thought three people would read. It was picked up by The Guardian and went viral. I got a lot of press in the early days, because I was the first person talking about being childless beyond failed infertility treatments - I used my own name, a real photograph, and I spoke about being childless by circumstance, the experience of being single. I wrote about pronatalism. I didn't set out to do something different. I just did something that was completely me.

I was a  punky rock chick in her mid forties.  I had my red leather jacket, which everyone remembers. That’s my public, TED Talk stage persona - “Red Jacket Jody”.  I owned my life. The idea that I would be ashamed of my childlessness didn't occur to me.

I never, ever thought about my old age until I knew for sure I wasn't going to be having kids. And then it was almost the very next thought: “Who’s going to look after me when I’m old?”

It came of out nowhere and it terrified me. And yet all the time I was trying to conceive, I never had the thought, “Oh, I’m having children so they can be there for me when I’m old”. But when I knew they definitely weren’t going to be there, I couldn’t think of what the alternative was going to be.

In 2014, I was one of four campaigners in the UK who set up a group called Ageing Without Children, which is now a charity. There was a word I created when I was with them, which was “Alterkin”, which stands for “alternative kinship network”. And I thought I’d really like to see if I can make Alterkin happen in real life.

For the last two years, I've been thinking about it. Interviewing people who've done similar things in other countries. I've read stacks of books. And then I started having very vulnerable conversations with acquaintances, with neighbors, with friends, in this rural area of Ireland.

First of all, identifying people who didn't have children, and then getting to know them well enough as acquaintances. I'd meet them in a pub, in the cafe, and we'd share life stories a bit. I could then get to a point where I’d say, “I'm thinking of creating a sort of support group for people who are ageing without children in our local area. Is that something you'd be interested in talking about?”

Now we have our first Alterkin circle. We are six to eight people in this local area, either walking distance or a maximum 20 minute drive from each other. Our group is intergenerational, from around 40 years old to nearly 80. We meet monthly, and rotate through each other's homes. It is as deliberately low tech as possible, because who knows if technology's going to survive the next 20 years? But what it is about, is a shared and known and stated commitment within the group and why we're doing this.

This is not a friendship group. This is not a social group. It doesn't mean it's not friendly and it's not social.

We are all people who are ageing without children, and we are coming together to get to know each other intimately, becoming part of each other's lives. Slowly at the speed of trust.

Now, it's not necessarily going to solve everything, but it's better than nothing. And it could hopefully keep us out of nursing homes a lot longer than anything else any of us can think of. It doesn't require us to move into each other's houses. It requires absolutely no investment of money. To be honest, I'm at heart an anarchist. I don't want it to have anything to do with money.

I want the richness of Alterkin to be relationship, to be knowledge, to be trust, to be a deep commitment of care. And let's just say it: love. Some languages have 35 words for love, English only has one. This is a form of communal love and care for each other.

If the part of me who was devastated and grieving motherhood met me now, I don't think she would believe it was possible to get to such a place of peace. She might have even felt that it was quite blasphemous. When I started to come out of my childless grieving, I felt quite guilty about it. Because I thought, “How can I recover from this? Does that mean I didn't really want to be a mum?” But my grief was profound and life-changing. It was such a burden to carry. I felt like such a freak.

I wish I could have known women without children, in my life and in the media and in my family and in my workplace. I wish I could have seen them in my daily life, not necessarily to be role models, just to know they existed. So I think for my younger self, I don't know that I would necessarily want to introduce myself to her, but I would love to just be around. And for her to go, “She seems to be OK. She seems to be getting on with her life after childlessness. Actually, I quite like her.”

In many ways I feel now, post-menopause, like I did before puberty. I think about 9-year-old me, she was quite feisty. She knew her own mind. She spent most of her time up a tree. She loved writing and nature and animals.

Young me was really clear about her values and one of my biggest values was, and always has been, fairness and justice. I was so sensitive to unfairness as a kid, I just don't think I had the language.

I wouldn't have said I wanted to make the world a better place, but I did, and I still do.

Photos by Zoë Noble

Story Editing by James Glazebrook

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Jody Day is the “founder of the childless movement” at Gateway Women, a former founding member at Ageing Without Children UK, and World Childless Week Ambassador. She writes about the challenge of growing older as a non-parent at Gateway Elderwomen.