Odds & ends as October ends

• Infertile Phoenix has been blogging for 10 years now!  Go offer her congratulations on this milestone! 
• From Life Without Children, a subject many childless/free women will relate to:  "I Won’t Be Having a Baby Shower, So Please Come to My Book Launch:  Why women need to selfishly celebrate their accomplishments" by Maria Cassano.  (I'm not sure about "selfishly," but this one resonated!)  As excerpt:  

...I attend roughly two dozen showers, bachelorette parties, weddings, and children’s events every single year.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy to participate.

When something is important to the people I love, it’s important to me, too. But as most women know, these events are notoriously time-consuming, socially demanding, and expensive as hell — especially when you’re a self-employed introvert....

Typically, women justify these big asks using the rule of reciprocation: “When it’s your turn, you’ll be thrilled when everyone finally shows up for you.”

But what if your turn never comes?

• Also from Life Without Children:  Ali Hall is done with making parents more comfortable with her childfree by choice status by reassuring them that she doesn't hate children. (She doesn't -- but that's not the point...)  A couple of pithy excerpts (but do go read the whole thing!):  

I’ve spent too much time and energy wrapping up my choice not to have kids, or simply not having kids in general, into something digestible and palatable to make it easier for others to swallow. But I’m done. If they choke, that’s on them...

If we don’t have kids through choice, then every time we have reason to speak of this choice, many of us childfree women feel compelled to round the edges, to soften the perceived sharpness of this choice with a declaration of love for children, and an admiration for parents - particularly mothers - as if bowing down to a higher power. We feel the need to exclaim loudly that we aren’t monsters in the hope that we won’t be cast out....

When did you last hear a mother talking about her kids, while caveating her words with expressions of support and recognition to those who are childfree by choice, or an acknowledgement of the disenfranchised grief of those who are childless not by choice?

...I’m no longer softening my childfree existence for others. If anyone wants to believe I’m a monster simply for not reproducing, that’s a flaw in them, not me. 

• Dh watches a lot of reruns of "The Simpsons" -- and I made him turn the channel when I realized it was an episode that I got quite pissed off at when it first aired a few years ago. (Hint: It involved the tensions between parents and childless people.)  I wrote about it here at the time!    
• There's a paywall, eventually, but I loved what Elizabeth Day, a well-known British novelist, journalist and broadcaster, wrote before you hit it -- a moving post about her pregnancy losses and the UK's new two-week bereavement leave policy (!!) for losses before 24 weeks ("Maybe Our Pain Was Not Without Purpose"). (North American policymakers, take note!!) 

Last month, the government announced that women and their partners who experience a pregnancy loss before 24 weeks – including miscarriage, terminations and unsuccessful IVF embryo transfers - would be entitled to up to two weeks of unpaid leave from next April. The Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, posted a statement on Instagram. It was the first time, to my knowledge, that a British Prime Minister had ever publicly stated something so concrete about pregnancy loss. And it felt seismic.

Not because it was perfect. But because it marked a meaningful direction of travel... 

To have a government willing to acknowledge miscarriage as bereavement affected me deeply. Because for years, I had been busily trying to give voice to that silence and misplaced stigma. I wrote about fertility and spoke about it and tried, as much as possible, to ensure that no-one else would feel as alone as I did.

A lofty ambition, you might think. But that ambition gave me a mission. It gave me connection. It was a choice to attach meaning to what might otherwise have remained meaningless.