Pre-Voldemort Day thoughts, and some odds & ends

You will understand that, as a childless-not-by-choice woman (via stillbirth & infertility), That-Day-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, coming up this weekend (which I've dubbed "Voldemort Day") is not exactly my favourite on the calendar. (Check out the tag "Voldemort Day (Mother's Day)" for past posts on the subject.)  And as someone who hasn't lived within 1000 miles of her parents in 40 years, whose mother-in-law died before I ever met her, I haven't had to worry too much about family considerations on this day either.  I'd send a card, give Mom a call, maybe chip in on a gift that my (childfree by choice) sister would buy and deliver, and do whatever I wanted for the rest of the day.  

This year, I'll be spending Mother's Day AT my parents' house, for the first time in about 35 years. (I had a business trip in the early 1990s that brought me to Winnipeg just before Mother's Day, as well as my grandmother's birthday. I arranged to spend the weekend with them. I am so glad I did.)   

Except (major plot twist) Mom won't be there -- she died in January. I am now motherless, as well as childless. I was lucky enough to have my mother for almost 65 years;  my daughter never took a breath outside my body, but I miss them both, and especially on days like this one.  

My dad and sister have not mentioned MDay at all. (Yet?)  

I am not going to remind them. 

And now for some links:  

• We were at the mall one morning earlier this week.  It's not uncommon to see young moms there, out with their babies in strollers -- sometimes by themselves, sometimes in pairs. I thought I'd seen everything the day I saw four moms with four strollers. 
• Reader -- I had not. On this particular day, I encountered a group of moms with babies in strollers coming my way. TWELVE of them!!!  (I counted.)  12!!! Walking in a group, two or three abreast.  
• (A while later, I saw another group of five!  Not sure if they had broken off from the earlier group I saw, or if this was an entirely different group??)
• All I could think was that it was a good thing that I'm in a relatively good place these days. I mostly just shook my head in disbelief, texted dh (who also saw them, and thought it was hilarious) and... carried on.  Also that if this had been 20-25 years ago, it would have finished me off, sent me home immediately, and kept me away from the mall for weeks.(Progress?) 
• (I also wondered whether this en masse outing had anything to do with the fact that it was just a few days before Voldemort Day/MDay??)  
• Y.L. Wolfe absolutely nails it with her latest Substack piece at On the Outside: "Why This Childless Woman Chooses to Celebrate Mother's Day...Alone."  (Content warning:  Photo of mother & baby at the top of the page.)  A couple of excerpts:  

Don’t misunderstand - I absolutely believe mothers deserve a day of celebration and pampering. They deserve more than a day, in fact.

But that doesn’t mean it has to come at the expense of other women or exist in a space that ignores any other woman’s life circumstances...

I believe women like me need the same thing that mothers ask for: space to take up, validation, and support. In the absence of getting that from a culture indifferent and sometimes hostile to women without children, then we must give it to ourselves.

• This article also absolutely nails the childless-not-by-choice experience and why it can be so painful.  The lengthy title says it all:  "The hardest part of being childless by circumstance, not choice, often may not be the grief people expect — it may be the invisibility of living a life other people have no template for."  Excerpt:  

When women in this position describe the hardest part, they rarely lead with the absence of children. The absence is familiar by the time they’re forty-five. They’ve been around it. They have, on most days, made some sort of working peace with it.

What they describe instead is something more like a slow, ambient erasure. The conversations at dinner parties drift to school catchments and they’re not in them. Their friends speak in shorthand about a life stage they don’t share. Their own parents go quiet about future grandchildren. They are, increasingly, in rooms that aren’t built for them, and the architecture of those rooms gets repeated until it begins to feel like the architecture of the world.

• Virginia Evans, author of "The Correspondent" (which is high on my "want to read" list), is a mother, but she wrote an article for People that I can heartily agree with:  "Mothering Takes a Village. This Mother's Day, Let's Celebrate the Other Mother Figures."  (h/t to Kathleen Guthrie Woods for flagging this one on social media!). (And content warning:  there's a photo at the top of Virginia with her children.)  
• I got tears in my eyes reading this interview in the New York Times with Tracy Clark-Flory:  "My Mom Had a Secret Daughter. I Finally Found Her."  I've put her book on my wish list. (Gift link.) 
• At Afterglow, Katie Dunn welcomes a guest post from fellow Substacker Lexi Weber: "The unexpected intimacy of infertility."   
• Lexi writes at "Not (What I Was) Expecting." I've added her to my blogrolls here and on Feedly. Recent (also excellent) post: “You never know what could happen.” (and why that's not something you should say to someone going through infertility or facing permanent childlessness).