Midweek odds & ends

• Bloglovin is out (AGAIN) today.  :p 
• In The New York Times recently:  an article about why parents are deciding not to have more children -- or realizing that more children are just not in the cards (and yes, the pandemic has been a major turning point). (Headline: "More Kids? After the Last Two Years? No Thanks.")  
• I don't like to play "Pain Olympics" -- I recognize that not getting the family you had envisioned is painful, no matter how many children you wanted and how many you ended up with. But I do wish the article had recognized (even in some small way) that some of us don't get ANY of the children we dreamed about, AT ALL, and that the pandemic permanently killed many women's chances of having even one child. (Especially when fertility is mentioned as an issue.)  
• The Guardian interviewed Therese Schecter about her new documentary, "My So-Called Selfish Life," which examines motherhood, pronatalism and the choice not to have children. 
• Quote from Schecter in the article: "Of course, there are many women who want children and cannot have them. I can’t speak for them, but I don’t think it helps for society to keep saying that having a child is the single thing that makes people the most happy.”
• The film premieres online May 6th (just before the weekend and THAT day...!), and will be available to stream from almost anywhere in the world until May 16th (at this link). Should be interesting! 
• The Guardian called "My So-Called Selfish Life a "worthwhile look at a still fraught subject" in this review yesterday. 
• Schecter was also this week's guest on New Legacy Radio with Christine Erickson. They talked about the documentary, and about how childfree women are depicted in movies and TV shows. 
• Australian writer Sian Prior, author of the newly released "Childless: A Story of Freedom and Longing," recently engaged in an amazing, wide-ranging conversation with Judy Graham and Sarah Roberts of Gateway Women Australia about the healing power of telling our stories. I really enjoyed this one. Watch it here! 
• Judy & Sarah were also recent guests on New Legacy Radio with Christine Erickson, discussing their personal stories, their work as childless grief therapists and how they are advocating for people without children in the broader Australian community.   
• Emilie Pine, a childless-not-by-choice Irish writer who wrote the amazing essay collection "Notes to Self," has just written her first novel, "Ruth & Pen."  Of course, it is nowhere to be found (yet??) on any Canadian or U.S. bookstore or e-book site that I checked...! (eyeroll) but I'm sure it will... eventually...!  I'll keep watching for it!  
• I read & reviewed "Notes to Self" back in 2019 (here). Highly recommended! 
• Pine was interviewed this past weekend for the Irish Times, where she talked about her work, her infertility and her grief over her childlessness. Headline: "‘I miss the children I didn’t have. Some people get that and some don’t.’ "
• Sample passage (but please do read the whole thing!):  

We talk about whether miscarriage and fertility are still not written about enough.

“I don’t know about you,” she says, “but there are quite a few memoirs about IVF and infertility and a lot of them end with a baby. And I found that really hard.”

I tell her that I feel like a lot of those books are written from a safe harbour – the hardship has been endured and overcome, the baby is in the world.

“I find it very difficult to read that,” she says. “I’m delighted for them in their lives but that’s not my story. It’s one of the reasons why I wrote Notes. When you’re going through it, you’re looking for something that will make you feel better in that moment, that looks vaguely like your life. I struggled to find that in 2015. So I wrote it for myself, the title of it really is true. Now there is that small window opening up for those kinds of memoirs. But so often, they’re also twinned with extraordinary things, like, you know, ‘I swam the Channel.’”

We both laugh.

“Why can’t we just be ordinary?” she says.