You can always tell some women are childless by the fact that they....

[NinaInCognito]

...get in the way of you when you are in the supermarket dragging around a pram, trolley and fiddly child and then they sneer down at you with their basket full of organic lettuce, baguettes and mini-tampons while your trolley is loaded with nappies, a giant pot of Sudocrem and enough chocolate bars to re-sink the Titanic.

You then have to manoever around them while they continue said sneering.

God you can tell what sort of evening I have had, can't you? And I am embarrassed to admit that I used to be one of those women. I apologise to all you mums out there unreservedly.

Now for chocolate bars and MN......

I meant has not as before someone picks me up on it!

I love mumsnet, nina don't flounce that is silly.
The point of mumsnet is that you posted something, someone was offended, you didn't realise what you said could cause offence, now you do, helps us to think outside of our own little box, and that is not me jhaving a go, it is good to realise tha people find different issues upsetting and that we should be sensitive to them.
Anyway this is nothng, you need to aquire a stalker out of it

I think the whole thing was that the word 'childless' can be potentially very emotive

Perhaps a poor choice of title

Otherwise I am sure no offence was intended.

I would just avoid really.

Although I haven't...

How is the word childless emotive? It's a factual description, it's not a pejorative word!

LB I think something like 'women who have never experienced the dubious joys of shopping with children'

might have hit less of a nerve - still someone would prob have felt upset by it

People without kids through infertility are vulnerable to hurt

I would be

x posts

Because it is often used to describe people who have not chosen not to have children.

Haven't you heard it used in that way before?

Bit later on, maybe ....

but you know you're a mum when you buy a bottle of wine, and two Twixes'.

your sister sounds like a right cow riven

jeez
yet another thread to HIde

how did that go so wrong

LittleBella - "childless" is very negatively loaded - ask any woman who's been there, I'm sure. "Barren" even more so. At least "child free" has a more positive spin, & not so judgey, IME.

Agree FlightAttendant.

Hey I am all up for siding with the OP. I can't say I ever had a trolley full of organic lettuce and mini tampons, but I sure as hell looked with horror at the mothers with their screaming, snotty-nosed toddlers. For a brief while (ie when I had toddlers myself) I guess I was too intent on getting round the supermarket as quickly as possible to notice them, but now I have older children and mainly shop without them, I have gone back to the horror (though with a little more understanding thrown in).

Now where's my stash of chocolate?

poor stepdaughter, riven....
Your sister sounds a bit like mine, tbh....

I agree with riven thread was lighthearted.I lost my parents when very young but dont pounce on people when they complain about their parents.I have child, know women in my profession who don't want them.

for the zillionth time, i'm sure that the OP meant the tone to be light-hearted, i'm certain that in her fantasy hilarious MN thread everyone would have been pissing themselves about how ghastly single women all love lettuce and hate children etc etc etc.

thing is, even when i was a nicely-dressed lettuce-eating single woman in a supermarket, i didn't sneer at mothers. i rather looked forward to being one, despite the pack of durex fetherlite in my basket. and now that i am a parent, i still don't encounter this sneering. and i've shopped in London, you know...

so given that the OP effectively insulted my former self by paranoidly instinuating that i would have sneered at her, just because her former self would have sneered at me, i think my first response was anodyne in the extreme and her first response passive-aggressively hostile in a way that much susrprised me tbh.

despite the fact that the rest of the thread wsa ho ho ho-ing away i just said that i didn't find it amusing and suggested another reason why those women could be looking, and suddenly it was a full-on discussion (albeit one characterised by yawnsome digs about oldies and newbies. interesting point by teuch earlier... what's better, 'oldies' ignore 'newbies', as is often the complaint, or answer them and then get abuse for it?)

fact is, childless is a loaded term. if the OP didn't know that before, she does now. and her OP wasn't funny. i bet there are fifty people who could have written the same thrust of an OP and couched it in genuinely amusing terms, which would have led to the discussion that some people wanted to have. but this was sneery and clunky and just generally naff about other women, about whose circumstances the OP was making huge assumptions.

but yes, let's make all this about an MN sense of humour failure... let's go off now and insult vast swathes of the female population just cos we don't look like them any more. let's start with women in pumps... they should be wearing high heels. and vice versa. join me, it'll be hilarious.

PS. your sister sounds like a right bizarre cow, riven. but you know her, you've spoken to her... seems reasonable to form an opinion about her.

Funny how this thread causes a furore while this one, which is pretty similar, really, gets on Mumsnet classics.

when you read these threads sober and in one big chunk they always seem gobsmackingly strange

quite different to when they are in real time lol

i do think aitch made a reasonable first post tbh

my sis is 6 years older than me and has no kids

i dont know why tho we are close and always have been

i very rafrely ev en think about the fact she has no kids and she is a londoner to the core

when i do think about it i think i wonder why

but its never seemed appropriate to ask

as far as the eccentiricity of childlessness is concerned she always bought my kids slightly unusual often really nice arty things...very expensive hand crafted felt shoes that were never actually going to fit and fantastic books with nice pics but unreadable stories etc

lovely

i only wish i knew whether she has found it really hard that i had three children or really good luck that she could ebnjoy mine withpout having to have her own

Blimey, people take offence fast here, don't they? And at the most extraordinary things. I simply cannot believe that people genuinely feel hurt because their county has been 'insulted', or because they believe their 'former self' has been 'effectively insulted'. Surely not? Surely life is unbearable if you are truly that thin-skinned?

When I was childless I barely noticed children at all, to be honest. Certainly not in the supermarket. Crying bothers me much more now I'm a parent. I think I simply tuned it out before, now I find it stressful and upsetting.

I agree Msd. CHildren didn't register on my radar 'til I had them. I swear I never saw a single child 'til my own was born. Where were they all?

I once asked a very young looking 42 yr old what moisturiser she used. She said "it'll be the no-kids moisturiser ha ha". I just laughed and rubbing cheapo olay on my wrinkles that evening.

Yes, it's like being pregnant. I don't think I'd ever seen a pregnant person before. Suddenly the world was full of bumps. Then all you see is sea of pushchairs.
Funnily enough, I've noticed teenagers only register other teenagers when out. Anyone older or younger is totally invisible to them.

Why does there have to be 'sides'?

I mean, how juvi is that?

And how do you know someone you perceive as sneering at you in a shop doesn't have children?

Or care, fgs?

I mean, seriously, are people that fecking over-sensitive and quick to take offense these days? Are most people really so incredibly self-centred they think random strangers are actually noticing them enough to sneer at them or purposely cause offense?

If so, that's it, I'm going to start producing Get Over Yourself and selling it in recyclable glass bottles.