What We Worry About is Not Death, It’s Vulnerability

Jody Day on aging without children.

Jody Day

If you imagine today’s interview isn’t for you, think again.

If you’re a parent, you need to hear what aging is like for people without kids – including the Aunties in your life and the Aunties you hope to have. We need you to read this.

If your own elderhood seems far away, take it from me – it’s going to approach faster and faster until it’s no longer approaching; it’s here. Ignoring it won’t make aging go away, and indeed, in my experience, the more I have turned toward the truth of my mortality, the better equipped I’ve been to truly value every day of my one wild and precious life.

On the other hand, if you suspect today’s interview is for you, boy are you ever right. If you’re into or approaching elderhood yourself, prepare to feel seen. If you’re worried about how you’ll manage in old age, get ready to recognize that you’re in good company. If you are involuntarily childless – or even more so, involuntarily childless and single – well honey, this one’s for you.

I am stoked to share with you today’s interview with Jody Day. Jody is an international leader in supporting and advocating for involuntarily childless women (a group that includes me, sort of, as well as over 20% of Auntie Bulletin readers). She founded the UK-based online community Gateway Women, has given TED talks about childlessness, wrote the excellent book Living the Life Unexpected: How to Find Hope, Meaning, and a Fulfilling Future without Children, and has spoken with thousands of women without kids over the years. Importantly for today’s purposes, Jody also has a fantastic newsletter about aging without children. It’s called Gateway Elderwomen, and I think everyone who doesn’t have kids of their own should be reading it.

For example! Since it came out in December, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Jody’s “3am Bag Lady Blues.” This post helped me start to recognize that I have big, unacknowledged fears about aging without children. In the interview that follows, Jody lays out a beautiful – and practical – vision for how all people might be able to age with dignity, surrounded by love.

Drink it in, Aunties.

How is Gateway Elderwomen different from Gateway Women?

I wrote my first piece about aging around Christmas 2019. All of this material came out about my aging process and a sense that there was a crone trying to emerge in me, but because I look younger than my age – I was only 55, 56 at the time – there was this sense that it wasn't welcome. I realized there was a lot I needed to work through. So I started my Gateway Elderwomen newsletter in January 2021.

I needed a different space than my Gateway Women blog that I’d been writing since 2011, and which later became the backbone of my book, Living the Life Unexpected. That audience – women coming to terms with motherhood not happening for them – was not necessarily the same audience as I wanted to speak to as an “apprentice crone,” having transitioned through the grief of childlessness, and integrated that loss into my being rather than got over it. Because it’s not something we get over, it's something we grow around. But still, I felt that my peace with my childlessness could be quite confronting for people who were still in the early stages.

Get it at Bookshop.org.

I'm one of the original ambassadors for World Childless Week, which has been going since 2017. I ran a World Childless Week webinar in 2020 on the theme of “inspirational elders,” where I invited a panel of amazing childless elders to come together on Zoom. It was so empowering and such fun, and it got a great reaction. I thought, I'm going to do this again.

I had craved the company of my elders; I’ve never had any around me. My mother was very young when she had me, and she died quite young so I've barely had any grownups in my life, let alone any elders. So there's this sense now of a real craving for that. I'm 60 now, and there is a sense that we need elders. Elders need youngers and youngers need elders.

So we started a regular series with a shifting panel and we’ve been meeting quarterly ever since for free webinars called Fireside Wisdom with Childless Elderwomen. We've got another one coming up in March, on eldering in a time of collapse. I have to say, when I chose that theme back in December, I didn't realize how appropriate it was going to be.

Saturday, March 29, 8pm GMT (find your timezone). Here’s more info. If you can't make it, register anyway and receive the recording.

The Fireside Wisdom calls are incredibly well attended, and when I drill down into the data from registration forms, there are people attending from their twenties to their eighties. Probably the biggest group is women in their forties and fifties. The depth, the frankness, the wisdom, the humor of the panelists – the audience are just as hungry for it as I was.

We've done a session on, “Who's going to be there for me when I'm old?” and we’ve done ones bringing together both childless [by circumstance] and childfree [by choice] elders. As opposed to my Gateway Women work, Gateway Elderwomen is inclusive of all non-mothers. I had this sense that perhaps as we get older, and if we’ve had the opportunity to integrate our losses, that perhaps the things that can divide childless and childfree women can soften, because we're all facing the challenge of aging without children.

In 2014, I was one of four activists in the UK who came together to form a group called Aging Without Children. We got a lot of press, a lot of publicity. We put on a couple of conferences and did a big government report, but it folded in the end because it couldn't get any funding. It went through three years of funding rounds before the founder, Kirsty Woodard said, “I can't do this anymore.” It went into mothballs. Another couple of people picked it up and turned it into a UK charity, but as far as I’m aware, funding is still an issue. However, it continues the powerful work we began in 2014 with a big Facebook group and some local member-run AWOC groups across the UK.

We were unable to get funding even though the pandemic came along and revealed how vulnerable older people are who don't have people in their lives for whatever reason: estrangement, your children having died, your children are incarcerated, your children have adult care needs of their own, your children live on the other side of the world. There are so many reasons why we can arrive at a potentially vulnerable old age without adult children in our lives. So this is a massive issue that cuts across society.

Quite a few parents have said to me, “I didn't have children so they could take care of me when I'm old!” – implying, I’ve sensed, that I’d planned to birth my own longed-for children into bondage. But the thing is, when I was trying to conceive for over a decade, it never crossed my mind once. However, once I knew I definitely wasn't going to be a mother, biological or otherwise, my very next thought was: Who's going to be there for me when I'm old?

I respond to these affronted parents by saying, “It's absolutely wonderful that you don't want your children to have to take on that responsibility. I'm really curious: what plans have you made as an alternative?” I think you can probably imagine the look on their faces! At some smart work-related cocktail function (remember when we used to have such things), they’d just say, “I think I need to refresh my drink,” or look over my shoulder and find someone more interesting to talk to. It seems I’d hit a nerve and had revealed an uncomfortable truth to them; they were unaware that they were in fact potentially relying on their children in the future, and they didn’t feel good about that. And it’s a hard thing to become aware of – I get that and I understand why I didn’t make myself popular.

But for those of us without children, or who for whatever reason know that our children aren't going to be able to be there for us should we need them, we simply don't have that unconscious fantasy cushion that somehow it’ll be okay, and thus we can just put off and put off and put off thinking about how we're going to organize our old age.

Leaving all your thinking and planning about your old age to your kids and not doing any planning often turns out to be a really bad idea, for lots of complex reasons. But human beings avoid thinking about death and old age; our psyche is constructed not to think about it, so by bringing it to the forefront, we're also bringing up a lot of anxiety. As far as we know, we're the only sentient species that knows it's going to die, and we have psychological mechanisms to stop us waking up every morning and freaking out about that. Apart from a brush with our own or others’ mortality, or personal experience of caring for a vulnerable person, we push thoughts about old age, vulnerability and death out of our minds. We live in an adolescent, grief- and death-phobic culture that worships youth, strength, growth, and invulnerability.

So my work around aging without children, just as with childlessness, has elements of consciousness-raising. It’s about helping non-parents recognize that their anxieties are valid and real – and that in some ways, they are also manageable and there are things we can start to do.

Given that you've talked to thousands of women without children over the years, what have you learned about what we worry about as we age?

I think what we worry about is not death, it's vulnerability. We worry about being that person who is in a hospital, nursing home, or residential facility and having no one to be an advocate. Or we fear being alone in our home, unable to function as well as we’d like, and with no clear idea who or how to ask for help, scared to do so in case we get railroaded into a residential facility.

The healthcare system is still set up to believe that everyone has a family. They often react with disbelief if you don’t have a next of kin – but for so many people aging solo without a partner or children, this is often the case. And if they did have a partner, their partner may have predeceased them, or may have complex care needs of their own.

So even when you're trying to be discharged from the hospital, the idea that, “No, there isn't anyone who can come and give me a lift. No, there isn't anyone who can take care of me at home for a couple of days,” it’s almost like complete disbelief that this could be the case. But our numbers are massive! We’re an average of one in five women over 60, and Dr. Robin Hadley, also a World Childless Week ambassador and the UK specialist on childless men, he’s estimated that childlessness is the same or slightly higher in men.

With the way the birth rate is going in many countries, we'll probably soon be seeing one in three adults without children, as it already is in Japan. In fact, in Japan, there’s a strong possibility that it may rise to 50% over the next fifteen years. We are a massive cohort coming up into the aging process with completely different life experiences, support networks and expectations, and our society is not in any way set up to deal with it. “Family must do more,” is the politician’s favorite mantra; the idea that so many people might not have family is brushed under the carpet.

So what women fear is vulnerability. Falling victim to elder abuse. Loneliness. Just not being able to cope. And having no one to take on, not just their care, but also no one to pass on their wisdom onto, or their treasured possessions, no one to keep them connected to the next generation. That’s a really big fear and loss too.

Huge, truly. And then what do you think people hope for?

Well, when I talk about my ALTERKIN project – which stands for Alternative Kinship Network – people just absolutely jump for it. It's like, “I want this. How do I have this?”

It's been very interesting to me to see people's responses because it's almost as if it's a product they’d like to buy – because that's the paradigm we've been conditioned in.

So I’ll say, “Community is built by doing inconvenient things with inconvenient people at inconvenient times.” It’s not necessarily easy, and it's not necessarily fun. It's not about having a big gang of friends. It's slow, human-paced relationship-building. There are no shortcuts.

I have about 6-8 people in my very rural Irish community who are interested so far. What I'm envisioning is a 20-minute drive-maximum intergenerational group. Some of the people interested in joining are in their early forties, and one lady is in her mid-seventies. Another I think is in her eighties. The idea for ALTERKIN is for it to be an in-person, non-hierarchical, intergenerational community of care based on a mutual aid model.

Many women who respond to the idea online love the idea of it, but they're really scared of asking others to be involved. “What if people don't want to join me?” Well, it's an incredibly vulnerable thing to do, particularly if you're also single and childless. Because so many of us have necessarily become so hyper-independent. Middle-aged women without children and without partners, we simply don’t exist within patriarchy's framework – we’re detritus at the edges. Yet there are so many amazing women: solo women without children and partnered women without children.

Their nervousness that I sense (and share!) is, How do I begin to do this? I think with the pandemic and so much of our lives being lived online, people's relationship-building skills have atrophied. Something I say is: “You don't need to learn how to do this, you need to remember.” This is what it is to be human. This is how our species evolved: to survive by cooperating in diverse groups.

I don't want to start another organization and I don't want to be a leader. What it might evolve into is a loosely federated web of ALTERKIN groups that support each other around the world.

I love the point you make about remembering, and like coaching people to cultivate courage.

It's vulnerable on all sides, right? To be the elder who is asking to build a kinship relationship with a younger person, or to be the younger person who's asking to build a kinship relationship with the older person, both of those can be scary.

At The Auntie Bulletin, I write about this in the context of people with kids and people without kids. Often the people with kids really need help but are very hesitant to ask for it. They don't believe people want to give it. And then the people who don't have kids, when they offer and they're rebuffed, they are kind of crushed. They collapse, and they don't want to try again. So there's all this fear associated with putting ourselves out there and developing intimacy with people.

Most of the things we need to thrive in life have become products. So we don't just go talk to a wise person we know and trust, we go see a therapist. We might have once gone to see a priest. We can get our shopping delivered, so we're not even interacting with the people where we buy our food. We might not have to go to the post office or the bookstore anymore. We can schedule our rubbish collection online. So many things that used to bring us into daily encounters have gone.

And then there’s the hollowing out of third spaces, free spaces to meet. Now I live in rural Ireland, but I spent my twenties, my thirties, and my forties in London. I saw London transform in that period of neoliberalism. Every big open space, like big libraries – or in the concert halls there used to be big cafes with loads of space around them where in the daytime you could just go – every single big space like that is now one where you have to buy something to be there.

A bunch of Starbucks.

There used to be a cup of watery coffee that you could get from the one coffee shop, and then like 300 seats!

Jody shared this photo of an unknown woman (by Fleur @flossyboots88, via Threads) in a lovely roundup of older women writers on Substack.

It's very hard now for people to meet in community. Gateway Women runs these workshops around the world called the Reignite Weekend, which is a transformational and healing weekend for childless women. It's been going for fourteen years, and many thousands of women have participated, but the biggest challenge these days is that it's getting harder and harder to find a venue. The primary cost of the weekend is actually finding somewhere private and amenable.

There's a sense of everything being monetized, everything being capitalized, everything being a hustle. Where is the spaciousness in our lives? To quote unquote “waste the time” in a conversation with a neighbor?

We have a local community Whatsapp group; even in our rural community, you don't go and bang on someone's door who might only be a couple of minutes walk away and say, “Is the electricity off in your house as well?”

So the modern world has accelerated this disconnection and this de-skilling of our very natural instincts. But I genuinely believe we're just out of practice; it's not that we don't know how to do it.

So can we dream into what these ALTERKIN networks might look like in daily practice, when they’re flourishing? What would that intergenerational support look like and sound like and feel like on a daily basis?

I have a vision of both what it would be like for me to be receiving it, and also to be part of it and helping others. I'm 60 now, but let's say I'm in my seventies and I'm having a hip operation. Maybe my partner's not around anymore, maybe he is – who knows? And my ALTERKIN group, they've known me for a decade. I've been intimately entwined in their lives and them in mine, and they know me, they know my habits.

So the group meets, maybe on a Whatsapp, maybe in real life, and they go, “Okay, Jody's going to be in hospital next week,” and one person’s like, “Okay, I'll go and pick her up from hospital.” And then someone else says, “We need a rota to pop in and make sure she's eating.” And someone says, “What about her dog?” And it's like, “Okay, I'll do the dog walking this week, maybe you could do the dog walking next week.” They would come together as a community to support me in my needs, rather than it falling on one person – often the adult daughter, usually the adult childless daughter. There would be a sense of them coming together and each contributing something to make that transition for me back into my life possible, because it might not be possible without that support.

And then for me being part of it, it might be that I'm cooking extra meals for people who struggle to cook anymore. I might be driving people to appointments when they can't drive anymore, or it's a bit scary and they want someone with them. This is me thinking of the older people in the group, and also being a mentor to the younger women in the group. I can imagine mentoring them about menopause, about what happens as you age. And they might be supporting me about – well, I’m really technology savvy, but I know a lot of women who say, “I don’t know anything about computers, I don’t want anything to do with them.” Over the years I’ve said, “That is an attitude you cannot afford to have if you're aging without children.” Technology will keep transforming, and I could be an old person who – not because I’m dumb, just challenged by the pace of change – realizes I can’t access my banking anymore.

My mother-in-law died last year at 93. She lived with us, so I had a firsthand example of what it is to be very old. The things she could do, she did for herself, and everything else we did. She’d be like, “My iPad’s not working,” and it was because there’d been an update. Or the online banking software had changed, or the TV would need to be re-tuned. We dealt with the car, the insurance, the licensing. Everything to do with the admin of the modern world, we handled on her behalf.

It was an act of love, but it was significant, and had it not been for her living with us, she would not have been able to cope. She would not have been eating. She would not have been cooking. She would have died a lot younger unless she'd gone into a nursing home.

So I see us working as an intergenerational group where the energy flows in all directions. It's not that some people are doing the serving and some people are doing the receiving, it's going in all directions. That's really important to me, and I think that is what will make it become really embedded in people's lives.

Aunties, I hope you’ll join me at Jody’s upcoming Fireside Wisdom with Childless Elderwomen panel. It’s March 29th at 8pm GMT (find your time zone). I’m really looking forward to it.

Recommended Reading from Jody’s Newsletter

Who is that old woman in the mirror?

The 3am bag lady blues

Coming Attractions

For the remainder of March, we’ll be focusing on building loving, supportive relationships with our elders – elders in our families, our friendship circles, our communities. Check your inbox next Friday for insights from last month’s “Love for Elders” Auntie Collective Wisdom reader survey.

Speaking of Auntie Collective Wisdom….

Auntiehood is often considered second-tier if it is considered at all. It is supposedly lesser than parenthood, and emptier, and sadder. Aunties and childless women of all stripes are viewed as deficient adults, as people who have failed to be parents.

We need asset-based narratives about Aunties! We Aunties need them on a personal level, to help us recognize ourselves as fully valuable members of our communities; we need them on a community level, to help societies acknowledge the limitations of the nuclear family model and start to rebuild distributed models of kinship and community care.

So let’s explore: What are Aunties’ special powers? What can Aunties do that parents can’t?

There are two main open-ended questions in this survey, and they will take a little thought and time. Feel free to think broadly and creatively, answer expansively, and answer the questions you wish you’d been asked rather than the ones I actually asked you.

I’ll be collecting your ideas all this month. As always, when you complete a reader survey you’ll be entered to win a 12-month paid-tier subscription to The Auntie Bulletin.

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Thanks for reading all the way to the end! You get the secret scoop that if you can’t afford a paid subscription due to financial hardship, you can reply to this email, shoot me a message in the Substack app, or email me at auntiebulletin at gmail dot com and I’ll comp you a 12-month paid tier subscription, no questions asked.