Life Without Baby

filling the silence in the motherhood discussion

Welcome Back!

P1160940I’m back! I feel as if I haven’t written a blog post in months, so I hope my brain and fingers are still connected, and I can still string a sentence together.

How was your summer?

I had a wonderful time on my vacation. I got to spend a long and fun weekend with my dearest and oldest friend in Scotland, got in a hike and dinner with another wonderful friend (both sans children, by the way), spent a week hiking with my mum, and saw all but one of my nieces and nephews. I also managed to get some serious time alone with my novel-in-progress. It’s not finished yet, but (and you heard it here first) it will be before this year is out! Hurray!

Before I left, I put together a survey to find out more about you and what you’re looking for in this site. So far, almost 100 of you have responded and I’m incredibly grateful for your help. Some of you also offered to chat with me in more detail and I’ll be taking you up on that once I’ve sifted through the results and have specific questions.

I’m going to leave the survey open until the end of this week (Sunday, September 8), so if you haven’t had your say yet, you can find the survey here.

As a thank you, I’ll be giving away a signed copy of my book and will do the drawing once the survey has closed.

So, our regularly scheduled programing will resume this week. I’m looking forward to sharing the contents of my brain and heart with you and hearing about the contents of yours, too.

Summer Vacation and a Request for Help

P1160705By the time you read this I will be trekking through the Shropshire Hills with my mother (who turns 81 in a couple of weeks) and two of her friends (both in their 70s), and hoping I can keep up with them.

So that I can fully enjoy visiting my family and friends, and get a brain break as well as a physical break, I’m planning to give the site a vacation for the month of August.

Beginning on Wednesday, I’ll be posting reruns of some of my favorite and your favorite posts from the past year. Just like an episode of I Love Lucy, I hope you’ll get to enjoy these conversations again.

While I’m gone, I’ll also be contemplating what’s next for Life Without Baby. For those of you who’ve been tagging along with me for a while, you’ve probably noticed that the site go through a growth spurt about every six months or so, as I try to make it what I think it ought to be.

I’ve largely gone through this reinvention process on my own, noodling and brainstorming what I think is best for the site. This time, I’m getting smart (finally) and I’m asking you what you need most and what you want the site to be.

I’ve put together a short survey (8 check box questions, that’s all) and would be enormously grateful if you could offer me 5-10 minutes to let me know what’s important to you, so that I can then attempt to make it available.

Yes, I’ll take the survey!

Front cover-hiAs a thank you for your time, you’ll have the option be entered into a drawing to win a copy of my book, “I’m Taking My Eggs and Going Home: How One Woman Dared to Say No to Motherhood.” Just be sure to complete the survey by September 2 to be entered.

So, for now, enjoy your summer, enjoy the posts, and I’ll look forward to catching up with you again in September.

Whiny Wednesday

Whiny_WednesdayLast week I went out for a short hike in my local park and decided I felt so good I would run a bit.

So I did.

And I fell.

Again.

Fortunately, this time I sustained only a knee scrape, sore hands, and a bruise.

Until I got up the next morning and realized that the impact of my fall had to go somewhere, and it had gone up my arms, into my shoulders and neck, down my back, and basically into every single muscle in my body.

Never have a felt every single day of my age (or even single ounce of my weight!)

It’s Whiny Wednesday. What are feeling sorry for yourself about today?

My People

Last week I attended the World Domination Summit in Portland, OR. Despite what you may think from the title, this was a gathering of creative folks and people living their lives along a slightly different track. For four days, I was amongst “my people.”

wds-2013

When people asked, “What do you do?” I could tell them that I’m a freelance writer, that I run a website for women without children, and that when I grow up I want to be a fiction author, and no one went cross-eyed and looked at me as if I was some kind of loser. They got me.

In a crowd of 3,000 people, I think perhaps two asked me if I had children and both understood and respected the fact that I didn’t. I even had an in-depth conversation with a woman who had a biological daughter and was now trying to navigate the world of adoption and learning first-hand that it’s not the quick-fix so many believe it to be. These people got me, too.

So many of the speakers addressed the topic of community. Jonathan Fields included “find your tribe” in his Good Life Project creed; Steve Schalchlin talked about living in what he calls the “bonus round” and brought the entire audience to tears with his story of his friends’ love literally kept him alive. When he sang, “We should all be connected to each other,” I got it. In fact one of the main themes of the summit was “community” and the importance of being among people who understand you was never clearer to me.

After the summit end, I went home via the Portland airport. It was full of families returning home from a long holiday weekend, and never have I felt more like an alien crash-landing on a strange and hostile planet. I wasn’t among my people any more.

But the next day I sat down to write this blog post and I realized that I do get to be among my people, around people who understand me. And those people are you. Here on this blog is one of the few places I can talk about it’s like to live without children, to get blank stares of misunderstanding from people who don’t get it, and to feel as if I don’t belong. Here I am among my tribe and today, I appreciate my tribe more than ever.

Whiny Wednesday

Whiny_WednesdayI love to receive pitches from guest bloggers, especially from regular LWB readers. I think there’s great value in sharing our stories and points-of-view on a topic that doesn’t get much “air time.”

I’ve included Writer’s Guideline” on the site, so that writers who aren’t familiar with the blog can understand what we’re all about here and offer up something appropriate.

So it drives me potty when I receive pitches like “8 foods to feed your child’s brain” and “Me time for busy moms.”

As a writer, I used to get annoyed when editors wouldn’t respond to my submissions. Now I realize that their inboxes are probably so full of inquiries from people sending out random and completely inappropriate pitches that they just delete the lot.

Anyway, it’s Whiny Wednesday. What’s bugging you today?

Whiny Wednesday

Whiny_WednesdayTomorrow is Independence Day here in the U.S.. This means fireworks, barbecues, family gatherings, and food.

As I’m lucky enough to live close to a beach that hosts a public fireworks display, this also means street closures, snarled traffic, drunks letting off fireworks late into the night, trash strewn all over the beach, the park, and my front lawn, and no parking within a four-block radius of my house for the entire four-day weekend.

There’s no wonder we usual get out of town!

It’s Whiny Wednesday. What’s on your mind this week?

Oh, and Happy Independence Day, too!

It Got Me Thinking…About Is She or Isn’t She?

Girl ThinkingBy Kathleen Guthrie Woods 

I am constantly on the lookout for cheros, that’s heros who happen to be childfree. When I explore different countries and cultures, I want to know if the groundbreaker I’m learning about juggled raising children with making history. When I’m in a museum, I note names of female painters who intrigue me, then I google them when I get home, hoping to discover they devoted their lives to creating masterpieces instead of babies. I want to find women like me who have lived amazing lives (sans children) and can inspire me to do the same. So when a phenomenal woman makes the news, I want to know: Is she or isn’t she…childfree?

That’s why I got really excited when I first heard about Julia Pierson, the first female head of the Secret Service.

I found out about Pierson’s recent appointment in a post by Marcy Twete, the founder of Career Girl Network. (Read the post here here.) As the head of the Secret Service, Pierson will oversee the offices that protect the president of the United States and address national security issues ranging from identity theft to terrorism. Pierson comes to the office with more than 30 years experience, having started her career as a law enforcement officer, and she’s more than up to the tasks of her new position. A woman in charge? This is a big deal!

I went in search of more information about Pierson and found her official bio. (Read it here.) Yes, I wanted to know about her background, but really I wanted to know if she was on my “team”. Could she be a role model for me? Could she be a chero?

Spoiler alert coming…. Turns out there’s no mention whatsoever of a spouse or offspring in her bio. At first I was surprised because including family details is the norm, but then I got to thinking: This is the way it should be. A professional bio should be about a woman’s—or a man’s—professional experience and achievements. Period. Is she? Isn’t she? Doesn’t matter!

This makes it possible for us to appreciate all phenomenal people for who they are and what they do, and I celebrate this.

P.S. Twete also notes that there is some serious girl power going on since Pierson will be reporting to Janet Napolitano, head of Homeland Security. Janet Napolitano, by the way—chero! Go, team!

 

Kathleen Guthrie Woods is a Northern California–based freelance writer. She is mostly at peace with her childfree status.

 

Whiny Wednesday

Whiny_WednesdayMy whine today is that I am tired of being tired. I have a day clear of appointments today, which means I can settle down and write, take care of a client project, work on the website, and read a friend’s book proposal, but all I want to do is lay on the couch and sleep.

It’s on days like today that I am thankful I don’t have children to care for. You’ve seen those photos of the big sow, flopped on her side with a dozen piglets clamoring all over her. I’m afraid that if I had kids, that would be me.

Anyway, it’s Whiny Wednesday. If you have the energy, feel free to have a good gripe here today. Just don’t wake me up.

Childless Men on Father’s Day

man - pixabayMother’s Day is pretty much the worst day of the year for those of us who didn’t get to be moms. But what about Father’s Day and the men in our lives? Do they feel the loss of fatherhood in the same way we feel it for motherhood?

Some of you have expressed frustration with partners who don’t want to talk about the loss and grief we women go through, or who seem to have accepted a life without children much quicker than we have. I know I saw a difference in the way Mr. Fab and I dealt with grief (or appeared to not deal with it at all) so I thought I’d do a little research on the topic of men and grief to see what I could learn.

Turns out that, when it comes to grief, men really are from Mars, as opposed to our home planet of Venus. They’ve often been taught to keep their emotions in check and brush grief under the rug in the hopes that it will just go away (which, of course, it doesn’t.) As a result, we tend to interpret their reluctance to grieve openly as a lack of feeling. But that doesn’t mean they don’t feel the loss just as keenly as we do.

Here’s what I learned about how men grieve:

  • Men often prefer to grieve alone, rather than openly, in a support group setting, or even with a partner.
  • Men are more likely to withdraw and to be introspective than to do “grief work.”
  • Men are more likely to express grief physically with actions or activities.
  • Men sometimes deal with grief by planning for the future rather than dealing with the present situation or looking back at the past.
  • Men sometimes let grief out in the form of irritability or anger.

In other words, just because your partner isn’t hanging out with other men in online support groups, sharing stories, and lending an empathetic ear to other men, it doesn’t mean he isn’t grieving the loss of fatherhood in his own way.

I’d be interested to hear how your partner has dealt with his grief. And if you’re a grieving man reading this, we’d love to hear your point-of-view.

Whiny Wednesday

Whiny_WednesdaySummer’s here and, for us, that means bike rides at the beach.

As pleasant as that sounds, it’s often not as relaxing as it could be. Much time is spent dodging drunks, small children on tricycles, and wandering tourists. Mr. Fab and I have both taken tumbles because someone else wasn’t paying attention. I’ve had only minor scrapes and bruises, but Mr. Fab has a permanently separated shoulder to show for his adventures. I’ve seen bent handlebars, cracked helmets, and some nasty road rash out there over the years.

Which is why it drives me out of mind when I see parents carrying young children on bike seats with no helmets! Never mind that it’s against the law here in California, and never mind that they don’t think they’re going fast enough to get into an accident. At any speed, four feet is a long way for a soft skull to fall to hard concrete.

Would I have been a perfect parent? We’ll never know, but as my record is free of parental infractions, that gives me the right to whine about offenders.

As it is Whiny Wednesday, feel free to get your gripes off your chest here.