No One Talks About This Stuff by Kat Brown (for people childless not by choice)

[blackcatsruleok]

I forgot I’d pre-ordered the Kindle edition of this book until it showed up this morning.

Anyone read it? I thought I was too fragile to read this right now but that I’d just give the intro a go, and that alone has helped me today so I just wanted to share.

HI I'm 62, got married at 32 but children never arrived. I was OK with it until we divorced in our 50s (husband's choice). The thing I'm going to share is that I did briefly join Gateway Women which is for the childless not by choice. But in the end I found it was lonely childless women talking about being lonely and there wasn't much comfort in it.

Oh, interesting - I’ve been wondering whether to join, but concerned about exactly what you describe.

I used to be a a member of Gateway Women. Tried to run a local meetup group but it was so hard. Not many people came and those that did could never agree on when or where to meet. I gave upon the end. Gateway Women is a great organisation but at 62 I feel I’ve outgrown it.

I'll take a look at the book. I'm childless by circumstance rather than due to infertility, but I guess it's a similar sense of loss, albeit a different journey...
Currently really grieving and struggling. I so wish I was a mum 😔

There was a discussion on Woman’s Hour on 10 April with Kat Brown about this book. Link below

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001y28f?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

I have looked into Gateway women, but like @CLiz I think I'd find it to be a bit sad and would just make me focus on the negatives of my situation more. I do not like the language they use either - why for example are some of them calling themselves the 'NomoCrones'. Sounds awful to me!

I have downloaded this book and started to read it but thought I’d give a heads up that not all the contributors are actually childless. It is subtitled Twentytwo Tales of Almost Parenthood. As far as I’ve read, one contributor has two children by IVF, one had a termination for medical reasons but subsequently had another child. There is also a contribution from a trans woman, which maybe problematic for some. This is not to say the book is not worth reading, but if you are childless not by choice it may not be exactly what you are expecting.

I heard the Woman"s Hour piece about it and it sounded interesting. My understanding was that the point of including voices of people who do have children now is that everyone - whether they eventually had kids or never did - is affected by a culture of silence around struggling to conceive, having IVF, experiencing miscarriages and chosing terminations. Talking about it more shouldn't be restricted to childless women, it needs to be a whole-culture change.

Thank you for the heads up @KimberleyClark

I agree in principle but once parents joined my workplace infertility group, they tended to talk over the rest of us by offering tips to get pregnant, impliedly suggesting that we’d all left it too late, or by getting emotional over the thought of not having their own. I don’t go to many of the sessions now.

(This isn’t to say that someone with secondary fertility or having had kids through IVF couldn’t join and share their experiences but that wasn’t the situation here. Like, imagine this board but in real life and that‘s pretty much what it’s like now.)