I'm back! with more odds & ends...

• I'm back from spending last week (the Canadian Thanksgiving long weekend and the week afterwards) with my parents and sister, who also had the week off work. Much of what I wrote in this post from last year still applies  ;)  although (happily) my parents didn't bicker quite as much on this visit, and we got to see more of Parents' Neighbours' Daughter and the newest Little Princess #3 (who was 7 weeks old by the time we left).  We didn't do very much, except eat and play a lot of card games (which made my father very happy!), but that's okay.  
• We'll be back at Christmastime. (I saw another deal -- which, incredibly, actually applied to flights over the holiday period! -- and booked our flights while we were still there. The price was not as good as when we went this time around, but no doubt it was a lot better than it would have been, had we waited.)
• I wrote about our flight home for my #MicroblogMondays post... after we got home and emptied our suitcases, I asked dh if he wanted to take them down to our storage locker, or leave them up here until Christmastime?  At the airport, he'd been adamant that next time around, we were going to bring ONE larger suitcase, and check it. But by then, he'd calmed down (and apologized), and said we'll try again -- if we can get them onboard with us, great, if not, well then, they'll have to be checked. (Famous last words??).  
• He also said, "Next time, we should probably get in line to board earlier." I just about fell over.  DUH... that's what I was thinking while we were sitting in the lounge, watching the line get longer and longer. (Even if we were in the last zone allowed to board, we could have been at the front of the Zone 5 group instead of the middle, if we'd headed over earlier...!)  And I ASKED him, more than once, if he wanted to get into line now, and he said no!  
• I reminded him of this, and he said I need to be more direct/explicit with him (like:  "Dh!  We need to get in line NOW if we're going to have any chance of getting our bags into those overhead bins." vs "Would you like to get in line now?")   
• This happens with us a LOT... I will think something is the best option, or I'll want to do something, but instead of asking directly or stating exactly what I think we should do, I'll "suggest" or ask him if he'd like to do this or that -- and he doesn't get the hint. 
• I don't think I'm the only woman in the world who does this either (especially of my generation)...!  It's hard to break a lifetime of conditioning -- don't rock the boat, don't make a fuss -- but I think I'm going to have to start trying...! 
• Katy at Childless Collective did an Instagram reel/post that's well worth watching, about how some people will draw attention to the fact that someone is childless "as a way to discredit them or to portray them in a negative light." 
• Case in point:  earlier this week, two senators in Australia's parliament were debating a bill related to child welfare, when this exchange took place:  
• Senator Hanson: "Minister, do you have children?"
• Senator Chisholm: "It's not really relevant to this discussion."
• Senator Hanson: "Well, the answer to the question is, if you have no children, you have no heart. You have no understanding of what you're talking about."  
• [She was reminded that personal comments were off limits.]  
• If you want to watch the exchange, here's a link. It starts around 13.04.30.  
• Says Katy:  "News flash: being a parent doesn't automatically give you a greater capacity for being empathetic, caring, or kind."  Amen!  
• Has anyone heard the song "The Girl That Never Was" by James Blunt??  Someone mentioned it was about baby loss. I have not watched the video (so I have not linked to it here) but I Googled the lyrics and... Oh. My.  (Have Kleenex handy.)  
• Sarah at Afterward Honesty Yoga is testing her new website and system via a free workshop on Sunday, November 12 at 2:00 pm ET, via Zoom: "Your Breath as a Resource: Using the breath to land in your body." 
• Says Sarah:  "We’ll be sampling basic, gentle breath practices that can assist us in settling into our bodies.  Some simple (and always optional!) movement will be incorporated.  Talk and background on the subject of breath will also be included.  The aim is to explore tools to take with you and use on your own if you choose.  The breath has been one of my most useful - and favorite - things to turn to through involuntary childlessness (and a lot of other things too!).  So this is the workshop I just had to start with." 
• To find out more about the workshops in general, and to check out Sarah's new website,  visit www.afterwardhonestyyoga.com .
• Deadline: If you're interested in participating in the test workshop, please email Sarah at sarahafterwardhonesty@gmail.com, no later than Nov. 1. 
• This article ("Testing My Fertility at the End of My World") was flagged by someone on a childless forum I'm on. Blurb below the headline:  "The pandemic robbed Millennial women of peak years of fertility. The least we deserve is a space to process the grief—and reimagine what can come next."  The author's essay is followed by links to other articles about "people walking new paths."  Sample passage:  

Since 2020, so many of us have watched our plans slowly leak through tightly grasped fists. We’ve had to spill out the ideas we once held about relationships, family, and career, but worse yet, we’ve had to do it without a real space to acknowledge the loss. Why aren’t we discussing what happens when we lose years of living and fertility to pandemics, careers, and dead-end relationships? And why are we still, while living on a rapidly dying planet, asked to be so hyper-fixated on following an old script of love, marriage, and a baby in a baby carriage?

There is no clear way to have this conversation. No elegant script for talking about the unsavory feelings that come up when you have to accept that your life is going to look different than you thought it would. When you realize that the timeline you had for yourself might need reworking. When you know that you may have to accept the responsibility of building a new reality to exist within. But buried within that uncertainty, there is beauty. There are buds, poised to bloom. There is the possibility to change our minds about what we thought we wanted, to accept the grief about the loss of time, and to build new dream castles.

•  The Globe & Mail had a great article about "Evolving the thinking on women who age alone." (Gift link.)  It's not specifically about women aging while single and/or childless, but there's still content to relate to and think about. Here's an excerpt from the introduction:  

The woman who lives alone has been not been viewed charitably throughout history, or today. If she’s divorced or widowed, she is pitied; if she’s chosen to live alone, defying traditional scripts of marriage and family, she’s a spinster condemned to loneliness in her latter years.

Unflattering depictions are numerous in popular culture. The Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby collects leftover grains of rice following a wedding and dies alone, her funeral unattended. Charles Dickens’ Miss Havisham parades around her dilapidated mansion in a wedding gown after being left at the altar. The cult documentary Grey Gardens follows the Beales, a mother and daughter duo who hoard feral cats and live in squalor at the edge of the wealthy East Hampton enclave.

Much less has been conveyed about older women’s actual experiences, especially those who thrive alone.

...new research on aging women is yielding a complicated picture of a significant demographic growing rapidly in Canada.

Although public health officials have been sounding the alarm for years on myriad health problems linked to loneliness in older age – depression, dementia, cardiovascular disease, shortened lifespans, even increased risk of death during heatwaves – more thinkers are beginning to challenge the narrative, drawing sharper distinctions between living solo, social isolation and loneliness, highly personal experiences too often treated as interchangeable, especially among elders.