To attend the 2024 ‘Crones, Hags & Elder Wise Women of Power’ online summit (Sep 24 - Oct 1) get your free ticket here. My 2024 talk will be: ‘Mirror Mirror on the Wall: Befriending Our Reflection’.
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Quick note: my next free Fireside Wisdom with Childless Elderwomen webinar is Thursday 19th September. All ages, reproductive and gender identities are welcome. Recording sent out next day.
Below is a transcript of my 2023 summit interview with Alison Palmer, the founder on the topic of ‘Elderhood Without Motherhood’. The transcript has been edited lightly for clarity.
Alison Palmer
Welcome everyone to this most incredible gathering. We are crones, we are hags, we are elder wise women of power, and we're gathering together in this sacred circle so that we can reclaim and celebrate the amazingness of who we are as wise women in this often very long part of our life. I'm Alison Palmer, I am your host, and today I am so excited to introduce to you Jody Day. Now please read her bio because she's done a lot, you know. And as I was reading it, I was so impressed. So please read it, because then you'll really understand, like, how, how much she's bringing to our discussion today, but I'm going to say a few words about her to introduce her.
Jody is the founder of Gateway Women and she's often referred to as the founder of the childless movement. So that'll give you a key about what we're talking about. She's an author - we’re going to have a look at her book later on. She's an internationally respected thought leader on female involuntary childlessness. She's a TEDx speaker, and she's just done masses of very interesting things, and amongst which she's just built a house in Ireland, which is so amazing, and we're going to be talking about elderhood without motherhood. So welcome, Jody.
Jody Day
Oh, thank you so much. Alison, it's wonderful to be here, and thank you for putting this summit together. It's so powerful, and it's a real honor to be part of it.
Alison Palmer
Well, I'm really glad that you're part of it, and I love what you're bringing to share, talk about and explore with us today, because it's something that isn't often brought to the table, and this is why it's so important that we're doing it today—elderhood, without motherhood— because we make the assumption that most women are mothers, and clearly that's really not the case. So I think I wanted to start with asking you how relevant do you think this is to us as crones, to our experience of being crones, not having motherhood as part of our identity?
Jody Day
Well, once we get past our potentially fertile years, really the only acceptable term for a woman over sixty is grandmother—all the others are currently insults. You and I are both passionate about reclaiming the words that didn't used to be insulting, like crone and hag, but currently, most older women would not choose to describe themselves like that. I mean, my Instagram profile is @ApprenticeCrone, and many people are surprised by that - but I think it's a really important word to reclaim.
So really, as far as the patriarchy is concerned, once you are an older woman, you're either a mother and a grandmother or you're in some way involved in looking after someone else's children. And so if you're not doing any of those things, you are of absolutely no use to the patriarchal project; you're kind of on the scrap heap. And so I think when you don't have that identity to look forward to, or to exist within (the identity of motherhood and potentially grandmotherhood), it can be quite rough and lonely. And also working out how to move into our crone years without that identity—what alternatives are there?
And on the whole, the alternatives look pretty scary and negative, which is why I think it's really important to to say how many of us there are, and to start showing a way to inhabit an elderhood without children that’s powerful, productive, generative and exciting—and could possibly be something to look forward to, rather than something to dread.
Alison Palmer
Oh yes, I love that. It has to be something to look forward to! I'm sure that's your mission anyway. And I just was thinking... the words for women who didn't have children were labeled by the patriarchy… in fact, it wasn't even to do with not having children. It seemed to be that, I don't even know if there were words for for that, because it seems that the word that’s coming up for me is spinster, but that's somebody who wasn't married…
Jody Day
—and didn't have children. Those words are still very much in people's unconscious, even if they don't use them. And spinster is another word that's being reclaimed. But people will talk about a woman who doesn't have children as barren, as selfish, as not really a ‘real’ woman. You'll see things in the media about them, like Elon Musk saying that people without children shouldn't have a vote because they don't really have a real stake in the future. And several years ago, during a leadership campaign in the Conservative Party in the UK between two female candidates, and one of them (who was a mother) said that she should be the Conservative leader because her competitor, Theresa May MP, didn't have a stake in the future because she didn't have children.
So there is this idea that there is part of our archetypal function as women that has not been fulfilled if we don't have children. And although that may be true in some ways, but it doesn't mean that we have nothing else to offer; to see us only as our reproductive function is a function of patriarchy.
And one of the things about becoming an elder is that we are past those years, whether we've gone through them with children or without them, we are in a non-reproductive part of our life. And it is an amazing moment to show that actually, there's a lot more to me than whether I did or didn't have children. This is our time, and I think it's potentially a really powerful time for women without children, because it's no longer about whether we're a mother or not. Instaed, it’s what kind of crone can I be? What kind of hag can I be? What kind of witch can I be? (I like witch: magical and powerful, I'm taking it!)
And in what ways can I contribute to future generations? I really strongly believe that just because I'm childless, it doesn't mean I can't be a good ancestor.
And I think childlessness—whether you chose it, or it chose you (and for most women without children childlessness chose them rather than the other way around)—I think it's a time when we can maybe reclaim and reshape our identity.
Alison Palmer
I'm so pleased you mentioned that. You know, for some people, it's choice, and for some people, it's not choice, because there is this, this labelling, you know, patriarchy is full of labelling and othering and condemning people because of prejudices—and we don't even stop to make this distinction or to appreciate that, that that there might be differences in how you feel about it, whether you've chosen or whether it's chosen you. (I liked how you said that.) I just wanted to just explore that a moment. How important do you feel is this distinction?
Jody Day
I think it's a spectrum as well, rather than a binary between what is called childfree (which is by choice) to childless (which is not by choice). And I think each woman without children sits somewhere on that spectrum, and maybe moves around it at different points in life. Certainly, I'm someone who probably started as a very young woman, as childfree (although I didn’t know the word), and then I became childless when I was later unable to conceive, and then having gone through the work to heal the grief of my childlessness, these days, internally, I probably feel as at peace with my non-motherhood as if I had chosen it—a childfree state of mind—but I didn't choose it.
I did a webinar with a group of both childless and childfree crones for my Fireside Wisdom series and one of the things we discussed is whether childless/childfree is perhaps a false binary that ageing perhaps subverts? Because I think as we get older and are past our potentially reproductive years, and have either got used to our childlessness or have come through our grief, that maybe our very fixed identity around motherhood and non-motherhood might soften a bit?
However, when you are in your early years of claiming your childfreeness as someone who has actively chosen not to be a parent, it's very important. And at that point, the difference between you and someone who is struggling to conceive, or struggling to find a partner, or for any of the many other reasons that might come between a woman and motherhood, can feel very different… and then if you’re childless not by choice and people presume that you've chosen, that too can be something you find hard to deal with. For a childfree women, if someone presumes they may be infertile, it might elicit a, 'No, I didn't want children!' But I do think the ‘binary’ softens in time, and I'm enjoying it softening in me and being able to be around more childfree women and learn from them, because many of them have huge amount of wisdom to offer because, having chosen their path—often at a very young age—of not doing this thing that patriarchy says every woman should do, they're actually pretty radical women, and I love their company.
Alison Palmer
Yes, you said earlier, that it can feel like a very frightening thing to look forward to your elder years. I'm guessing that again, that fluidity is there, that sometimes it can feel frightening, and sometimes it can feel very empowering, and sometimes it's moving around, and there's other elements there, because, because we're complex beings. But I just, I was very struck by the fact that you said that word, that it can feel frightening at times.
Jody Day
Yeah, terrifying!
I think when you first realize you're definitely not going to be having children, and that all of the options of how that might pan out for you are definitely over, it’s often the next thought that comes up —and it may have never come up before, which is this: who's going to be there for me when I'm old? And it’s terrifying, because actually, there isn't anyone.
Interestingly, in 2014 I was one of four British people who came together to form a campaigning group in the UK called Ageing without Children to look into the issues facing those who are aging without children, whether they're childless or childfree, or don’t have children in their lives for other reasons. And I do remember this launch event we hosted for a report we’d commissioned, where some of the guests were parents. And it really struck me, because this conversation happened a few times, that parents would say to me, 'Well, I didn't have my children so they could take care of me when I'm old!' And I’d respond, 'Yeah, I completely believe that, because when I was trying to conceive, it never crossed my mind that that was one of the reasons I wanted to have children.' And I’d follow it up with, ‘So I’m curious, what strategies and plans have you put in place to make sure that doesn't happen?' And I’d be met by an uncomfortable silence. Because they hadn’t many any plans.
Unconsciously, they were relying, when it came down to it, that their children would step in. They didn't even know they were relying on it, because it's unconscious. But the fact is, when you don't have children, you don’t have that unconscious fantasy comfort blanket.
Now, maybe it’ll turn out to be a good thing that they're not thinking about it, maybe their children will be able to help out, or maybe they won’t need any help… That’s fine, but it’s all under the unconscious blanket that says, ‘I'll think about that later; I don't really need to worry about that now.’
But when you don't have children, you have to think about it now. And it's a very difficult thing to plan for, because when people think about caring for someone old, often their thoughts tend to go to straight to intimate care—to feeding and bathing—when in actual fact, the thing that makes a real difference to most older people's lives, and what helps them to continue living independently, are daily living tasks—it’s fixing the wifi when it's broken, it’s getting the car reinsured, it’s maybe taking someone to and from a doctor's appointment. It's the daily tasks of living, some of which can perhaps become really challenging as you get older. I mean, there's data that shows that people without children are 25% more likely to go into a long term care facility than people with children, at a younger age and at a lower level of dependency, and that’s because they don’t have advocates from the next generation to help them with those daily tasks.
So that's something I'm really passionate about, which is to start creating ways to help people to think and to plan and to build—I'm calling it Alterkin— which was a word I created for the Ageing Without Children group—alternative kinship networks. Because I think that we can make this possible for us to support each other, but only if we're prepared to be brave enough to look our elderhood in the face and go... even if I'm super well and I never have any debilitating illnesses, the chances are there's going to get to a point when I'm going to need a younger person around who understands how the modern world works to help me with things, even it's like everything going online. I mean, imagine what the world might be like in twenty year’s time, when perhaps you and I will be old, and AI will have taken over—it’s be the online revolution fifty times over!—and we're going to have to keep up with it. And if we can't keep up with it, maybe the lights are going to go out in our home, and we're not going to know how to sort it out. So that's the kind of thing you need younger advocates for.
You need people to keep you company, to keep you relevant, to keep you connected to the next generation, to keep you part of the community and part of life.
And there's something very strange going on in that our society seems to be existing in silos more and more. And if you don't have a biological family ‘silo’, it's actually very easy not just get cut off, but to get cut off from the next generation entirely. People are having smaller and smaller families and many of those fewer children are not having children. So those nuclear networks can get very, very thin, so it's very easy to not have younger people around you.
Alison Palmer
It's so interesting because, as you're talking about this—I've got two children—and you're right, you're absolutely right—because my experience is that I don't look at what it will be like for me when I'm older, because part of it is just this assumption that I'll be able to talk things through with my kids, and that they will find solutions.
And then there is this other element… I mean, you mentioned that you're caring for your 93-year-old mother-in-law who lives with you—and my mother is 96 and she lives by herself about 30 minutes drive from me. And everything that you said about that needing support in the everyday tasks—absolutely—it is absolutely time consuming, and it has brought me up against thinking about this issue. Nobody faces that we're going to get old, hardly anybody does!
And so, maybe you and your organizations and your willingness to have these discussions is really going to lead the way for everyone, not just people who don't have children, to discuss things with, or to help with the daily tasks.
Because I don't have enough time to look after my mother and my siblings live abroad, so it's an ongoing struggle. So how does she get the support that she needs when I’m working? And I think that's the case for many people, but it's different, because she can say to me (if she remembers), 'Oh, the television isn't working', and then I can get somebody to sort that out. But it's exactly what you're saying: if you don't have those networks of people to say, 'Oh, I need help with this', then we've got to create them. And patriarchy wants to put older people into these isolated little units and forget about them—let's squash them away, forget about them, they're of no value whatsoever to society. So, I love what you're suggesting—let's rethink elderhood away from these family units. That's what you're thinking of, isn't it?
Jody Day
Let’s think about reevaluating kinship, yes. There's an amazing book called How To Be Childless (about both childless and childfree people), by Dr Rachel Chrastil, a history academic in America, and in it, she talks about the horizontal kinship networks that are much more common in indigenous communities, and even here in Ireland. And I grew up in a working class family in England, and it was the same then, which is that there were lots of people around me, in the street where I grew up, or in my community who were called Aunties. They weren't related to me, but they were adults that looked out for me; maybe I would go to their house after school when Mum was still at work, or maybe I would go to church with one of them because my Mum didn't go to church, or something like that. But there was this sense that there were there were adults around, but they were always women—and one of the reasons they were around was that not every woman was out at work.
So when politicians say that ‘families must do more, communities must do more,’ what’s that’s actually code for is, ‘women must do more.’ But we're all working! I mean, that's one of the reasons the economy has expanded so much in the West over the last fifty years—the workforce has doubled. When I was a child in the 1970s, being in the workplace for a lot of women (not all women; working class women have always worked) and having a job was an optional extra—it was something you did if your husband let you… At that time, not every woman had to work, and it was possible for one income to support a family—that world has gone. But in horizontal kinship networks, such as you still see in some African nations and India, it's quite common for a child to perhaps be brought up by a brother or a sister, and when someone is ill, for a child to maybe go and grow up with someone else.
The thing about the nuclear family network is that it's incredibly fragile. There are two parents, and if one of them is sick, or one of them dies, that's down to one parent supporting the whole system. They can be very fragile and lonely places.
Whereas if you have a horizontal kinship network, then basically everyone who is your parent's age is a sort of an auntie, and everyone who is your grandparents' ages are sort of grandparents to you, even if they're not blood related. It takes away this idea that the most important thing is blood relation, rather than affection and commitment and community.
The nuclear family is a very new thing, and it's a very Western thing; it came with the Industrial Revolution and really took hold in the twentieth century, and it works brilliantly to turn us all into units of production for the economy—but it works really badly for everything else, in terms of humanity, community, connection, the environment, people having time for caring.
Lots of us would like to be more involved in our local community and in caring for vulnerable people in our communities, and we simply don’t have the time. It's not the lack of desire, it's a lack of time. Like what you're talking about—your Mum is thirty minute’s drive away, so in doing an errand for her, that's going to be a two hour round trip out of your day, even for a short errand…
Alison Palmer
So how do we resolve this dilemma then, because I agree, there's a deep longing for community, and there's a deep reticence as well in being the person who reaches out, who takes the initiative. And then also, as you said, people are time-strapped until they retire. And then perhaps they're not, I don't know, but retirement is, again, very fluid....
Jody Day
I think retirement is something that’s going to be as bizarre to the generation coming up below us, as sending children up chimneys in Victorian times is to us, because no one's going to be able to afford to retire! Pensions are a Ponzi scheme that are going to go bust in our lifetime because they rely on more and more younger people paying into the pension system for older people when they need it. And because of population decline, that's not going to happen, so the pension schemes are going to fall over. And also, with us living much longer lives, the need to retire is changing. It's going to be a big change. The things we need to do, they're huge, but they are possible.
Community is something that happens locally. So in a way, globalization is also against community. A lot of things need to come back down to a smaller scale within our communities and those are things we can get involved in.
We need to stop moving around, we need to stop commuting, we need to be near where we live and to build a network of people intergenerationally around us. Now, I've just moved from a small town of 4,000 people in Ireland to a little spit of a headland that sticks out into the Atlantic, which probably has about 20 houses on it. So my plan is that over the next few years I'm going to create a pilot study of how to intentionally create an intergenerational local network—what I call an Alterkin network. And I think if I can make it work in rural Ireland, which is still a very traditional place with strong Catholic family values—most of the people round here have children... Creating this will be about intention, about honesty, about the ability to face up to the fact that we're not just looking for friends, we're actually looking to create a network to support each other as we age.
It's a challenge too because it requires us to admit that we're going to be old. And ageism is a very strange prejudice, because it's basically a prejudice against our older selves.
It's like you said, None of us want to think we're going to get old, but it’s definitely going to happen, if we're lucky.
Also we are the products of a super individualistic society that has outsourced human needs—they've all been turned into products—so, if you have the money, you can buy those services, which means we've lost the art of providing them for each other, of gifting them to each other, of paying our energy and our love into relationships, because that is our investment in the future.
But when you do that, you also want to know that those people aren't just going to move. I mean, if you imagine you spend ten years building, for want of a better word—currency—in a local relationship, and then you're seventy or eighty, and everyone leaves and moves somewhere else…
So we need to start staying more local, and we need to admit our vulnerability. We need to learn how to ask for help, and that makes us very vulnerable—and we hate being vulnerable. So one of the biggest challenges, I think, is actually internal… for me, it’s about learning how to show up for that vulnerable part of myself without being seen as needy, as someone who’s asking too much from people, of coming across as a do-gooder—and this is just my internal monolog, I don't know what everyone else's is like!
But the alternative, which is to pretend that we're not going to age, to not make any connections in our local community, and to accept that we might be lonely and vulnerable in our old age because we couldn't work out how to do it differently—I'm just not doing that.
Alison Palmer
I love it, because it's really inviting us, as we move into this period of our life, to actually do something about it, to take responsibility for ourselves. It's like creating the world that we would like to live in, really, that's really what it's about...
Jody Day
Which is very powerful thing to do. For example, one of the things I ask the women I work with around this is—'What kind of old age do you want?' Because when we were adolscents, people asked us about what we wanted for our adulthood. About who we wanted to be when we grew up. And we didn't know what the future held, but it was an exciting question. So, what kind of old person do you want to be? What kind of old age do you want? We need to start bringing our considerable skills and excitement to those answers—'Actually, I'd like it to be like this.' And obviously we don't have a crystal ball, and we don’t know that we can make all of that happen, but if we do nothing, it's definitely not going to happen.
Alison Palmer
Yeah, that's really true. It's really empowering, this invitation and I just I love it, because then we we can reframe this fear of looking forward and just seeing this kind of like blurry, terrorizing mess of what we anticipate old age might be for ourselves. So we don't want to go there, because really it's too scary to look at.
Jody Day
And we need support with venturing into that scary territory; because it is scary. Human beings, as far as we know, are the only species that who are aware that they are going to die. So there is a whole complex psychological system set up, called Terror Management Theory which is the psychological mechanism that stops us from being immobilized with terror about the fact that we're going to die. It creates psychic ‘buffers’ which enable us, on a daily basis, to deny our own death, to deny our own mortality. And strangely enough, one of those buffers is having children, because having children gives an illusion of immortality, a way of feeling 'less dead' when you did than someone who doesn't have children. Another buffer is ‘fitting in’ with the in group and having high status. These are all things that give us the illusion of some kind of buffer against mortality. So to ask people to consciously look at their mortality and their potential vulnerability in their older years requires courage, and I think that's something that we can do in community; we can help each other to have that courage.
And I agree so much with something you said earlier, which I've said before, but it's the first time I've heard it said by a parent, which is just brilliant, is that this is something that can help all of us with the aging process. It's about going into it with our eyes wide open, courageously, compassionately and in community.
Alison Palmer
Absolutley. I think from what you're talking about, I would love to have a completely different way of engaging with getting older and anything that that entails. And I would love to know that I could fully feel part of a supportive community that didn't put all of the stress upon my kids having to wait that they might not be able to fit into their lives at all or might not want to.
Jody Day
You know, even those people who do have children, their children could pre- decease them; their children could live on the other side of the world; their children could have complex care needs of their own; their children could be incarcerated; they could be estranged from them. There are so many reasons why even someone who has children, when they reach old age, might not be able to rely on that support, and if you've done nothing to prepare for that, you possibly may be, as vulnerable as someone who doesn't have children and hasn't prepared for it. But it requires opening our eyes to where we are kidding ourselves.
And I love the idea that we have a network. I already know probably about ten childless women in the the Irish county that I live in, County Cork, and I’ve been running a ‘Gathering’ (like a meetup) for them for a couple of years now. There are some members who are twenty years younger than me, and in time I hope to meet others who are twenty years older. And I like the idea that I'm a mentor to the younger women and they to me, it goes both ways. So let's imagine, in twenty years time, some of those relationships have developed in certain ways, and there are other people as well. And I, let's say I was widowed and I had to have an operation, and that meant that when I got home for a week, there would be lots of things I couldn't do. I love the idea that there would be a group of people locally who knew me, who had invested in a relationship with me over time, and they could say, 'Okay, I'll walk Jody's dog' and another might say, 'Okay, I'll do the shopping', and another might say, 'I'll go and clean her house.' And that there might be a group of people who could perhaps get involved, rather than, as you say, all that care falling heavily on one person, when it's too much, on top of managing their own life and commitments. And I love the idea of having a sort of team around me who are doing it because they know me well, even perhaps love me, because we’ve spent years actively supporting each other with our lives. And the support hasn’t been covert, we haven’t said that this is about ‘friendship.’ I mean, maybe some do become friends, but the group is something different to a friendship—we are actively co-creating an Alternkin group - an alternative kinship network to support each other with the good stuff and with the hard stuff. And I think that needs to be made very clear that this isn't just a social group.
Alison Palmer
This is really exciting to me, and I'm kind of feeling into it here, because I live in an incredibly rural situation, in a culture that is very closed, very focused around the families, and very distrustful of others, even other families!
Jody Day
It’s also very hard to break into if that's not the culture and the community that you came from.
Alison Palmer
Exactly. And as you were talking, I was thinking, yeah, rural living - this rural living - is not that conducive to creating community, and yet if this is where we live, then we then there's the challenge. Okay? So instead of closing down and thinking well, that's not very conducive. Let's open it up and explore. Because you know, even in my my village, about 122 people spread out over a very huge area, there's going to be people who are thinking, "If only I had a community to belong to', and, you know, a proper community, and so we can take the initiative.
Jody Day
I mean, it's a big thing to do because it requires a lot of love and a lot of time, and probably quite a few dead ends. And you and I are both entrepreneurs so we know what that's like! It's 'Well, I'll try it like this. Oh, that didn't seem to work. Well, I'll try it like that,' and you keep trying until you get to ‘Oh, that seems to work, that seems to fit.’ And you and I are in different situations, but similar situations. I'm living in an English-speaking country but I'm in a very, profoundly rural area and, although I’m half Irish/half English, because I was born and brought up in England, I have an English accent and background and so I represent the savage colonial history of the English in Ireland: I am both colonized and colonizer. So it's going to be really, really interesting doing it here. But I hope that if I can make a pilot study work here, and learn from it, perhaps it could be a model that I could offer to others to use and tweak in their own communities. I mean, I used to live in London until five years ago; I could do this in a heartbeat in London. However, communities are more transient in London, so although I might have been able to have got it going much more quickly, ten years later, would those people still have been there? Probably not. But people here tend to stay put!
Alison Palmer
Yes, people here tend to stay put too. When I lived in London, I belonged to the most amazing community—in face, two communities that sort of overlapped and it was phenomenal. Yet I was the person who left. So, you know, when we're the people who leave, because that is me, I am the person who leaves. So if you are somebody, because, you know, a lot of us do move around through choice, and sometimes not through choice, but often it is through choice, so that's something else we can explore. Okay, what's going on with this deep desire to keep moving, and how does that play into all that we've been talking about? I think these are rich discussions you've opened up —I'm getting images, like a rich seam of gold in the earth or something like that. And you're found some of it. And it's like there's so much to sort of move into and explore.
Jody Day
Yes, it's a huge topic, and it's interesting how the last twenty years of my life, and the last twelve years of my professional life have all been around creating community for involuntarily childless women, about helping them heal from the grief and devastation of not having that motherhood identity and everything that's goes with that. And then helping them reclaim their identity as women and move forward with their lives. It feels like this is the next piece, and although it is about being childless, I think it's bigger than that.
I think it's about how do we age in community, with dignity, with fun, with courage. And how do we start having different conversations about what it what it means to age, and how we can support each other.
And what are the positive things? I mean, your summit has so much positivity and possibility in it, and that’s great, but the shadow side of it ageing is vulnerability. It’s dependency. It’s loneliness. It’s disconnection. And so how can we include those part in the conversation, and how can we take care of each other in this part of our lives?
Alison Palmer
Just so beautiful. Wow. So there's obviously so much more to explore on this topic, which will have to be for another day. People are going to be excited about this, like I am, and it's just like…
Jody Day
I can see your new neuronal pathways, I can see them growing!
Alison Palmer
They weren't there before, this is exciting! So people are going to be eager to know how to find out more about you. And you've got a gift to give to people—can you share a little bit about that?
Jody Day
My gift is that a free download of the introduction and a chapter from my book Living the Life Unexpected: How to Find Hope, Meaning and a Fulfilling Future Without Children. Whether you have children or not, you might still find it an interesting read, because it's really about coming to terms with life not working out the way we want it to. The techniques can be used if that's the case, and chapter 12 is all about aging without children as well.
And also, I'd love to let you know that I run these Fireside Wisdom sessions every solstice and equinox with an amazing panel of childless elder women from around the world, and they're free to attend, and you'll find the details of them on my website. So there will be one on the on the autumn equinox and on the winter solstice and like that. So and you, as we say in Ireland, you'd be very welcome.
Alison Palmer
Well, that's fabulous. So the information about all of that and links is below here, and there's a link to the book as well, I believe. So if this is speaking to you, and you know if it's speaking to you, so follow that inner guidance—go with it—go where you're taken and see what happens.
Because, you know, what's really struck me is how this is so relevant to all of us. It's so relevant to all of us. And as you said, Jody about how it often falls to women, and this is something we can do. You know, this is something we can explore for ourselves. Like you said, how do we envisage our our own older age? What do we want? How can we start to create that?
It's fantastic. Jody, this has been brilliant. Thank you. Brilliant. Yeah. Thank you.
Jody Day
And I really look forward to the conversations that will arise from this.
And I think it's really important that, you know, whether we have children or not, we can be good ancestors. And I think that's that's really important. And I think we can also have interesting, connected and loving, old ages, whether we have a partner or not, whether we have children or not, we can be there for each other. We just need to find ways to find each other so that we can be there for each other.
Alison Palmer
Ooh, that's so powerful. Jody, thank you so much. It's been just, it's been, you know, neuron-exploding!
Jody Day
You've been Jody'd!
Alison Palmer
Yes, that's it! Yes, thank you. Thank you so much. And everyone, thank you for joining us. And don't forget, everything is below, links, information, it's the place to go. Thanks everyone. Bye, now.
The 2024 Crones, Hags and Elder Wise Women of Power Summit runs from Tuesday 24th September to Tuesday 1st October and features 30 speakers. Jody’s talk ‘Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Befriending Our Reflection’ is scheduled for Friday 27th September. All details and free registration here.
'Elderhood without Motherhood' Interview