filling the silence in the motherhood discussion
Pamela over on the Silent Sorority blog is putting together a directory of sites relating to childless and childfree living. I’m going to be checking these out over the coming weeks and sharing some of the posts with you here.
If you have a favorite blog or website (other than this one, of course!) relating to living childless or childfree, please share it below, so we can all take a look.
Dear Spammers,
While I appreciate your need to drive business to your websites via mine, I strongly suggest you take a closer look at your keywords, or whatever nifty little high tech devices you use to identify prospective targets. Just because you often find words like INFERTILITY, BABY, and PREGNANCY among these blog posts and associated comments, you may also note that the name of this site is “Life WITHOUT Baby.” This ought to imply that neither I, nor any of my beloved readers, are interested in your egg donor agency, your express adoption plan, your foolproof tips for getting pregnant, or any of your other sordid little get-rich-quick schemes. Please bugger off and bother someone else.
With warmest regards,
Lisa
P.S. Google ads, this applies to you, too.
It’s Whiny Wednesday, Ladies. If you have anything to gripe about, now’s the time.
We all have our own personal lists of most despised celebrity parents and our own reasons for that scorn. As it is Whiny Wednesday, it seems like the perfect time to have a rant about the celebrity parents we love to hate.
I’ll get you started with my top three:
Kate Gosselin
Kate Gosselin
Kate Gosselin
Oh, sorry, I have others:
Nadya Suleman (Octo Mom)
The assorted Kardashians (remind me, why are they famous?)
Levi Johnson (somebody stop this man!)
and if she doesn’t get a grip, Angelina Jolie is going to make it on there before long, too.
Your turn….
Happy Friday. It is a happy Friday isn’t it?
We often get caught up in the things that go wrong and add to our list (sometimes long, granted) of what’s not good in the world, in our lives, and in our heads. So, today, I’m choosing to focus on what’s good in my life right now. Here’s an abridged list of 10 things for which I am grateful today:
What’s on your list today?
This image is part of the collection in Monica Wiesblotts’ new exhibit “Barren: Life on Infertile Soil.” Monica is a photographer whose work “examines the quiet reflections of a life without children, in a child-centric world and what it means to navigate daily in those constraints”. She says:
“The inspiration for the show was not only the discovery of my own infertility, but the silence surrounding it. The longstanding stigma of shame has made us a silent tribe of women.”
If you find yourself in Southern California this fall, make your way to Ventura to see Monica’s show.
BARREN: life on infertile soil
Personal Images of Infertility by Monica Wiesblott
September 30, 2010- October 23rd, 2010
Meet the artist: October 1st, 2010 5-8pm
Artist reception October 9th, 2010 4-6pm
Gallery 255
255 South Laurel Street
Ventura CA 93001
I’m hoping to make it to the show and will report back when I do.
I’m getting ready to go on vacation. (Hurray!) I have plane tickets and hotel reservations. And that’s about it. The night before we leave, we’ll throw what we think we need into a suitcase, add half a dozen books, and go. The details of our trip, i.e. how we’re going to get around between our various destinations, where we’ll eat, what we’ll do, will all unfold in good time. Right now, I’m too tired to fuss with those kinds of details. If there’s something important we’ve forgotten to pack, we’ll buy it when we get there (the reason I own a large collection of phone chargers and power adaptors.) Passport, credit card, phone–all we really need.
It’s this kind of loosey-goosey traveling that make me appreciate not having children.
Recently, I had a revelation. I’m not going to have children. Big news, I know, but the real revelation came in the idea that, if I wasn’t going to be a mother, I must be destined for something even greater.
I have several friends who have big dreams. One has a natural ability for spotting new musical talent, another would love to quit her accounting job and become a landscape architect, and at least two others would love to go back to school and earn their degrees. But they all have children and their obligations prevent them from following their hearts. For some, their dreams are on hold for now, but for some, they’re on hold forever.
We don’t have those obligations. Yes, we have bills, partners, jobs, and assorted other things we have to do, but we don’t have other human beings relying on us for food and shelter. In a lot of ways, it’s very freeing.
Several of you have already made a leap in your life and gone back to school or changed careers, but let me ask you: If you could be or do anything you wanted, what would you do? And if you’re not going to have children, are those things now a real possibility?
Oh, how I wish I’d found this article closer to Mother’s Day. What a great and inspiring list of incredible women this is.
If you ever find yourself having those feelings of being incomplete because you’re not a mother, take a look at this list and ask yourself whether these women made a difference. I’d say that they did…and then some.
When I first started this blog, Wednesday’s post was always Whiny Wednesday. It was fun for a while, but then I got tired of hearing myself complain. But I’m not tired of hearing you complain, so Whiny Wednesdays is making a comeback…with a twist.
This week the Whiny Wednesday topic is wide open; you can come and complain about anything you choose, related to this site or not. The only caveat is that you have to whine in sentences of three words only. Example: Mad at cat. Ate my flowers. Puked on carpet. Scratched my furniture. Refused my tickles. Getting a dog.
(This idea is stolen from a writing exercise in Abigail Thomas’ book, Thinking About Memoir. The original exercise is to write about a whole decade of your life in sentences of three words.)
Anyway, whine away!
Last week a great discussion ensued about the lack of magazines for women who don’t have children. A number of people bemoaned the fact that women’s magazines are either focused on fashion and dating or kids, and that many of us have stopped reading them because we can’t relate to the stories.
So, let’s play make-believe. Let’s pretend we have unlimited resources to start a magazine aimed at women who don’t have (or don’t want to talk solely about) children. What would it contain? What kinds of stories would interest you? What issues do you want to read about? What are subjects would you like to see covered?
And finally, what would you call the magazine?
Have fun with this. You never know, Oprah could be watching.
~ "a raw, transparent account of the gut-wrenching journey of infertility."
~ "a welcome sanity check for women left to wonder how society became so fixated on motherhood."
