Odds & ends

• Eric Topol at the Substack "Ground Truths" is a great source of science-based information about covid and other viruses (albeit sometimes the reading gets a little dense/technical...!).  His latest post, "The Indomitable Covid Virus" (subhead:  "How to respond without denialism or complacency") is worth a read. Have a look at the graph at the top. (Yikes -- no wonder I'm hearing about so many people with covid recently...!)  Some highlights of what he had to say (boldfaced emphasis mine):  

Fortunately, the rise in levels of the virus, still going up in all 4 major US regions (most recent CDC data below) has not been linked with as much severe Covid (absolute increase) as was seen in prior waves, but compared to last week there was a relative increase of 25% of deaths and 12% increase in emergency room visits due to Covid. No matter how you look at it, this is not a benign wave, folks.

Moreover, besides people getting sick from Covid, typically now from a recurrent bout (often 3rd or more), there will be more people developing Long Covid... less new cases of Long Covid but still a risk, especially in unvaccinated individuals...  

 

Added to problem of the virus‘s evolution and, as a result, is the blunting of our immune response, the big issue of waning immunity... The virus evolves and, at the same time, our immune response wanes. That’s not a good combination.

The other feature that promotes the virus is our complete let down of mitigation that we know (despite misinformation and disinformation) works. Few people are masking. Little has been done to improve air quality or ventilation. Indoor events are being held with big crowds, making believe that the virus has gone away. It hasn’t. It won’t....

Our best defense against Long Covid is not to get Covid. Our second best known defense is to be vaccinated. The better the vaccine, the less Long Covid risk.

• One of my high school friends recently posted on Facebook to wish her son/oldest child a happy birthday. His FORTIETH (40th) birthday. (!!!)  How are we (how am I) old enough to have kids who are 40 years old??!  (We graduated from high school 45 years ago in June!) 
• In a similar vein, my sister told me she's told her longtime best friend they need to plan an anniversary dinner in September. They've been friends since they met in Grade 7 -- both newcomers to town -- 50 (!!) years ago. There are marriages that don't last that long...!  
• World Childless Week 2024 this year is Sept. 16th through 22nd, and the deadline for submissions is midnight on Sunday, August 25th.  (I always have great intentions..!) This year's daily topics/themes are:  
• Our Stories (Monday, Sept. 16th) 
• Childless Person of Colour (Tuesday, Sept. 17th) 
• The Importance of Pets (Wednesday, Sept. 18th) 
• Childless Friend or Foe? (Thursday, Sept. 19th) 
• No Kids!  Do You Want Mine? (Friday, Sept. 20th) 
• We Are Worthy (Saturday, Sept. 21st) 
• Moving Forwards (Sunday, Sept. 22nd) 
• Aunties Day was two Sundays ago (July 28th).  I was in transit between Winnipeg and Toronto, so I kind of forgot about it  (as I often do...!).  But it's nice to have a special day to recognize aunties, and I wish it was better known & more widely celebrated. 
• From the July 9th edition of Stylist, a British magazine: "26 excellent books that explore life as a woman who doesn’t have children." (I've read 9 of the books listed, I think, and have several more in my TBR pile!) 
• Stylist also had two other articles on a topic of huge interest to many of us, I know. (The headlines read "childfree" but both childfree and childless women are included.)  Unfortunately, they seem to be behind a paywall. (Opening them in Pocket, which sometimes works for me as a paywall workaround, didn't work this time.)  Someone on a childless group I'm on posted screenshots of one of the articles -- 21 photos!  and it was interesting, albeit not exactly a smooth read...! If anyone knows a better way, let me know!  Anyway, for those of you who do subscribe, heads up!  The articles are: 
• “I don't want children... why do I feel so much pressure to make up for that?" (Blurb: “As a child-free woman, I feel so much pressure to make my life as big, exciting and impressive as possible to compensate for not having children. Where does that pressure come from? And how do I resist it?”) (Hint:  It has to do with pronatalism!) 
• “I feel like I need to justify my worth:  25 child-free women on the pressures they face." (Blurb:  "We asked 25 women to explore how the pressure to ‘make up’ for being child-free shows up for them, and how they navigate it.") 

I've been reading and saving a LOT of articles and posts about a certain U.S. vice-presidential candidate and his callous remarks about "childless cat ladies," and I'll be posting separately about that soon, with some relevant links (once I manage to go through them all and assemble them into a semi-coherent piece...!). :)  

Odds & ends

• Last Sunday (July 23rd -- always the last Sunday of July) was Aunties Day. I had it written in my calendar, or else I probably would have forgotten about it completely -- it's not like it's well known outside the childless/free auntie community, right? (and it's not even that well known there/here, sadly...)(unlike that "other" holiday...! -- as I wrote a few years back), and I haven't been on social media much lately to notice if anyone else was posting about it. Anyway, here's to all the unsung aunties & godmothers out there!  
• Yael Wolfe wrote about Aunties Day after the fact on Medium: "It’s Aunt’s Day…and It’s Time We Celebrated the Aunties of the World."  It's for members only (and there don't seem to be gift links), but here's an excerpt:

As a culture, we seem to understand the value (at least to some extent) of having grandparents actively involved in their grandchildren’s lives. We understand how enriching it is to all parties, helping generations bridge the gap across time and build strong family legacies.

Strangely, we do not seem to recognize the value of having aunts and uncles actively involved in their niblings’ lives.

I’m not surprised by this — again, I call out pronatalism that would attach the most value in families to relationships that are forged by parent-child bonds. We value grandparents more because they are parents. Aunts and uncles might not be, and even if they are, their contributions to their families are often seen as secondary in the absence of these parent-child bonds.

and 

We love them. We absolutely love them.

And what’s all the more notable about this is that we don’t have to. Parents are stuck with the kids they push out into the world. They have a legal and (ideally) emotional obligation to them.

Aunts and uncles are under no such obligation. And yet we keep showing up just because we love those little beings.

Makes you wonder about all those parents who say women without children could never know true love and true sacrifice, doesn’t it? They don’t have any choice but to practice “true love” (whatever that means) and sacrifice.

But aunts do, and many of us figured that out without having become mothers… 

 and 

If we’re so committed as a society to value our children and the family that raises them, why don’t we make more of an effort to show those who pitch in how much it means to us?

• I haven't had much time for podcasts lately, but I did manage to tune in live to hear Christine Erickson in conversation with Stephanie Joy Phillips about World Childless Week on New Legacy Radio. You can listen to the replay here, or on many other podcast platforms.  
• World Childless Week 2023 is coming up!  Sept. 11th to 17th.  Deadline for submissions is Sunday, August 27th!  The list of this year's topics is here.   
• I love, love, loved this recent New York Times story about intergenerational friendship between two women/neighbours. (It pays to get to know your neighbours!)  Bonus: children are not mentioned as part of either woman's story. I am assuming they are both childless/free. (Gift link.)
• The Guardian recently talked to an embryologist at a fertility clinic about how her own infertility journey and losses have affected her and how she now does her job.  Headline: "The IVF specialist who lost multiple pregnancies: ‘I had spent years making people’s dreams come true. It felt so unfair’." 
• From the Daily Mail:  "Why we childless women are sick of being exploited by mums in the office during the holidays."  
• Sample quote: " 'What upsets me most is that I had their backs during lockdown, manning the phones in the office so they could stay at home, as I understood how hard it was to work while home-schooling kids. I feel sad the same goodwill doesn't seem to be there for me.' " 
• (This was a frequent issue mentioned in the discussion about "Your Childless Experience" on Anne Helen Petersen's Substack newsletter, "Culture Study," which I wrote about here.) 
• Jody Day of Gateway Women appeared on two different radio programs to comment on this issue: 
• BBC Essex (link available through mid/late August) -- the relevant segment begins around the 3:09 mark, and Jody appears around 3:24.
• And on Newstalk Breakfast (Ireland)(link within story). 
• This Globe & Mail article doesn't mention pregnancy loss, infertility or childlessness, but I thought it was still highly relevant:  "Paying the ‘grief tax’ and the other hidden costs of caregiving." (Gift link.) 
• Mel recently posted that it's been 10 years (!) since the demise of Google Reader (and shared a great article about it). Says Mel: "Social media is often blamed for the decline in blogging, but I think closing Google Reader contributed to the mass exodus to Facebook updates. Make it hard to read blogs, and people will stop reading blogs. Alas."  
• I think she's right. I sometimes mention blog readers to women in some of the non-blogging childless communities I participate in -- and they have no idea what I'm talking about. 
• I still miss Google Reader. As you all know well (I've complained about it enough here, lol), I used Bloglovin quite happily for most of the past decade, but it rapidly went downhill in recent years and became increasingly unreliable. I finally bit the bullet, downloaded Feedly and paid for the premium service (because the free version limited me to 100 blogs -- hahahahaha....).  I haven't had a lot of time lately for blog reading, but so far, so good...  

Weekend odds & ends

• Finally!! The thermometer cracked 20C on Tuesday afternoon, and headed into the mid/high 20s over the next few days. Dh & I went for our first gelatos of the season, and I pulled out my capris & sandals. (I haven't been for a pedicure since fall 2019, before covid, but I'm seriously tempted...)  The balcony door has been open for most of the day for the past several days. Finally!!!  
• While it's been warm & pleasant, there wasn't any humidity for several days. On Thursday evening, after the balcony door had been open all day, the thermostat (showing the temperature inside our condo) read 79F (about 26C) -- but because the humidity was only about 30%, it was not at all uncomfortable.  
• We did start getting some humidity on Friday, and turned on the air conditioning then. 
• (Our weather forecasts and readings are in Celsius, but our thermostat is set to degrees Fahrenheit, as it has been my entire life. Which is to say, I'm a typical Canadian, especially of my generation, lol -- straddling both Imperial and metric systems!)   
• The downside of having the balcony door open all day: (as I've complained here many times before) our next-door neighbour appears to be a cannabis addict. :p  We often see (& certainly smell) him smoking on their balcony, which is only a few feet away from ours. I smelled it no less than FIVE times in one day this week. It's one thing on a Saturday night, or even in the evening after supper or something like that -- but FIVE times (sometimes more) a day?? 
• We got our fourth covid shots/second boosters on Wednesday afternoon (almost exactly 5 months after the last one), at the vaccine clinic attached to our family dr's office. Unlike the last time we went, we were the only ones there!  Dh asked the (very friendly, chatty) nurse if they'd been busy and she said it was pretty steady -- right up until the province dropped all the restrictions and mask mandates in March -- and then business fell off like a stone. She also works in a hospital ER and said none of the people coming in with covid have had their boosters. 
• I'd had to pick a vaccine when registering for the appointments, so I put down Pfizer, since that's the last one we had -- but she said they had both in stock and we could have our pick. She said Moderna tends to build more antibodies and lasts longer, so we went with that again. (We had AstraZeneca for our first, Moderna for the second, Pfizer for the third and now Moderna again for the fourth!) I had a sore arm and was very tired/fatigued that night (but that could also be because we'd spent the morning chasing Little Great-Nephew around the park...! lol).  There was some arm soreness over the next few days, but that's entirely normal for me with any kind of shots. 
• Sad news:  SIL is giving the puppy to her niece. :(  They're coming to get her this weekend. The puppy is a good, sweet little dog -- but, she's a puppy! -- and SIL admitted it's been just too much for her to handle, particularly on top of taking care of her grandson/our Little Great-Nephew. (But the niece's little boy -- SIL's great-nephew -- is thrilled!) 
• We got to spend some extra time with Little Great-Nephew this week, in addition to our usual mid-week visit at his grandma's (SIL's) house:  his mom had a Zoom interview for a higher-paying job on Friday afternoon, so we drove up to their house (about an hour away) and spent two hours playing with LGN in the back yard while she got ready and had her interview. 
• (She texted me as we were driving home -- they called her back, and she got the job! Not only does it pay more than her current job, she can work from home, which will mean big savings on gas, and will make it a little easier for her to juggle when LGN starts school (junior kindergarten) in the fall of 2023.) 
• Yael Wolfe announced "I'm retiring from aunthood" on Medium. Food for thought, for both childless/free aunties (and uncles) and the parents of their nieces and nephews. You all know how much dh & I love being an uncle & aunt (and great-uncle and great-aunt) -- but I know not everyone's experience has been as happy as ours has been -- and yes, there have been times when the relationship has felt a bit one-sided... Sample quote: 

I have been anything but selfish. I have been selfless. For fifteen years. For other people’s children.  

 Also this:  

I sit here writing this on Mother’s Day, my phone is pinging every few minutes. I’m not looking at it because I’m the only one in the group text thread who isn’t included in these Happy Mother’s Day messages. I’m the only one who doesn’t have kids. I’m the only one who doesn’t have presents to show everyone, like my sister’s new t-shirt, adorned with photos of the kids that says, “We love Mom!”

You know what? I want a t-shirt with their faces on it that says, “We love Auntie!” Yeah, I do. Selfish? Screw that. What have you done for your nieces and nephews lately? Wait until Aunt’s Day when it’s my turn? When’s that, honey? No, you can’t google it before you answer. If you don’t know the date off the top of your head, that shows you how little anyone cares about Aunt’s Day. It’s July 26th, FYI, and absolutely no one celebrates it. So again: screw that.

• I stumbled onto this essay on Medium, which had me nodding in agreement as I read:  "Stop Telling People ‘They’ll Understand When They Have Kids’ " (Subhead: "Not everyone will have kids."  Yes!)
• And finally, in the "WTAF??!" category: "Indian couple longing for grandchild sues son, his wife."  "A retired Indian couple is suing their son and daughter-in-law, demanding that they produce a grandchild within a year or pay them 50 million rupees ($675,000),"  the story says. (Demanding!!)(The son and daughter-in-law could not be reached for comment.) 

#MicroblogMondays: Auntie's Day

Yesterday was Auntie's Day, created by Melanie Notkin of Savvy Auntie in 2009 to acknowledge, honor and celebrate the aunts in a child's life -- including aunts by relation, aunts by choice, godmothers, and all women who love children not-their-own (with a special emphasis on women who don't have their own children to love). 

(I've seen a few references to it as Aunts & Uncles Day, and I suppose that's logical, but I know Melanie specifically created it as Auntie's Day.) 

It's nice to have a day to acknowledge and honour aunties. My own aunties, both genetic & through marriage, as well as honorary (e.g., I called several cousins of my mother's "Auntie"), have played important roles in my life over the years. However, as a holiday, I think Auntie's Day still has some way to go before it's recognized & celebrated at anywhere near the same level as Mother's & Father's Day. Outside of Savvy Auntie and a very few other sites for childless/free women, I did not see it mentioned anywhere yesterday -- not by any of my friends on social media, not even the childless/free ones. 

I debated whether to post anything myself -- I have, once or twice in past years -- but decided against it. Even if I framed it as wishing my own aunts (a few of whom are on Facebook) a happy Auntie's Day, I felt like it would seem like I was drawing attention to my own aunthood (and lack of my own children) --  asking for praise and recognition for myself -- and I didn't want my nephews to feel badly about it, that they should have gotten me a gift or something like that (even though I'm sure they don't even know such a day exists!). But then how else do we spread the word that this holiday exists, and that aunts deserve recognition too? 

Are you a proud auntie/great-auntie like me?  ;)  Did you remember it was Auntie's Day? Did anyone wish you a happy Auntie's Day? 

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.