Odds & ends

• Today is FIVE YEARS (!) since the World Health Organization declared the covid-19 pandemic. You can read all my pandemic-related posts -- from the beginning to present day -- under the label "COVID-19 pandemic." (I've been re-reading some of my posts from those early days of March 2020... surreal...)  
• Lisa Sibbett at "The Auntie Bulletin" examines the classic movie musical "Mary Poppins" and the lessons it contains for aunties, in "The Moral of Mary Poppins." 
• My mom took my sister & me to see the movie when it (finally) came to the small town where we were living in Saskatchewan, in 1966. For Christmas that year, we got a record player, along with an LP of the movie soundtrack, as well as an album of Julie Andrews singing Christmas carols. (For my 6th birthday a few weeks later, I got "Herman's Hermits Greatest Hits Volume 2" -- which I still have!)  
• My high school drama club did "Mary Poppins" as our spring musical the year I was in Grade 11 (in the late 1970s). (Our music teacher wrote Disney to ask about the script and sheet music -- she got some music, but no script, and wound up writing her own, based on a Disney novelization of the movie for children. In hindsight, knowing Disney's firm copyright grip on its properties these days, I find this amazing. I guess they weren't quite as strict on these points back then...!) 
• I was cast as Mrs. Banks and, I am proud to report, got to sing "Sister Suffragettes." :)  (My feminist credentials have deep roots, lol.)  
• "Adoption and Fostering Are Not a Cure for Infertility:" Lisa Kissane shares her personal experience with fostering in "Life Without Children." 
• On International Women's Day, Jody Day of Gateway Women reminds us (on her Substack) that "It's International Women's Day... not International Mother's Day!"  
• Also on IWD:  the Toronto Star is featuring this story:  "Revenge of the ‘childless cat lady’: New research shows single women are the happiest people in the world."  (The research comes from the University of Toronto.) I realize that not ALL single women are happy about that status (and the article does nod to that), but it's an upbeat look at a subject that is so often mired in stereotypes. 
• Happily, the Star recently instituted gift articles for paid subscribers (of which I am one!) Enjoy! 
• Jessica Grose, who covers family, religion, education & culture issues for the New York Times, recently wrote in her newsletter about falling birth rates and how to create a more pro-child culture.  One of her key points:  that shaming childfree people is NOT the way to do it.  The article focuses on childfree people (vs childless), but I think it's worth a read.  ​(**CONTENT WARNING:  the article is illustrated with a photo of a baby.** )
• There are a couple of other items, including a bit of commentary about the pronatalist movement.  And, at the end, a part you may or may not want to skip, about a comedian whose new Netflix special is called "The Mother Lode."  
• Labels -- and how unsatisfactory they are -- is a topic that I know many of my CNBC peers grapple with, especially early in their journey. The third post I ever published here (in early November 2007) was on this subject:  "Am I childLESS or childFREE?"  It's also the topic of Y.L. Wolfe's latest Substack post too: "I Used to Call Myself Childless…But I've Realized I Might Be Childfree, Too."  
• Wolfe also muses on how her feelings on certain labels have changed over time -- and how, the older she gets, the more she resists being labelled by others. I can relate to that too.  

It's International WOMEN's Day

-- i.e., it's not International Mother's Day. Too often, unfortunately, marketing, media, social media posts and special events for this day tend to centre on mothers and motherhood-related topics, versus issues that affect ALL women. (And they're often the same issues!)  

This may be truer than ever this year, if you live in the U.K.:  it's also Mothering Sunday/Mother's Day there this weekend.  Yikes, what a double whammy...!   

I've found a couple of great pieces this week focused on childless women and IWD.  Don't miss Jody Day's post on the World Childless Week website,  "It’s Called International Women’s Day, Not International Mother’s Day!" Sample excerpt: 

The last few years, it’s felt more and more like ‘International Mothers Day’, and whilst I celebrate women who are mothers, and appreciate that our society is still far from comprehensive in its support for the tasks of motherhood, I often feel that because women without children don’t need that kind of support, it’s presumed that we don’t need any kind of support at all. Having been writing and advocating on this issue for thirteen years, it still feels like childless people live in an imaginative blackspot for mainstream ‘hard-working families.’ (Please note the ironic use of quotation marks!) 

...On International Women’s Day, let’s celebrate mothers, but let’s recognise that they are more than their reproductive identity, they are women first. And we are more than our childlessness too. 

I'd also love to draw your attention to a couple of pieces from Medium on this subject. Unfortunately, most Medium pieces are paywalled  :p  but if you can find a workaround, they're worth reading!  

• Berenice Smith of the Full Stop Podcast has two pieces this week on the IWD/Mother's Day theme: 
• "International Women’s Day, not Mother’s Day" (hmmm, I sense a theme here!  lol). 
•  "We’re not inspiring inclusion this IWD, we’re accelerating progress." 
• And I absolutely loved this one from Ali Smith, who is childfree by choice. IWD is only mentioned at the end, but it's very much in the spirit of what we're talking about here: "Why Can’t a Woman Just Be a Woman?" (Subhead: "A woman’s worth should never be dictated by her relationship and reproductive status.")  Excerpt:  

You are more than your relationship and reproductive status

I know many people do this, so I mean no offence. But when I see women fill their bios with “wife” and/or “mum,” I feel a little sad.

Because the Patriarchy has peddled the message that the value of a woman is inextricably linked to who she is to others.

And yes, men may complete their bios with “husband” and/or “father”, but it’s not as prevalent. Take a look for yourself.

We’ve subconsciously lapped this up.

All around me, women jump at the opportunity to fill their bio in with their relationship status and then their reproductive status. An exclamation to the world: “Look, I’m loveable. I’m relevant to someone. I’m chosen. I’m doing what is expected of me. I’m not flawed.”

We claim our “wife” and “mum” titles as accolades, life flexes, and badges of honour. And by this very notion, we silently suggest that being single and not having children is associated with inadequacy and a lack of love and, by comparison, is less than.

Sure, be proud of being a wife and mum, but I encourage you to ask what message you are trying to convey by including it in your bio. Does it define you? 

 

...On International Women’s Day, my wish for all women is that you know your worth.

Whether you are single or in a relationship — no matter what that looks like to you — I hope you are happy.

Stand tall as a woman. That is enough. You don’t need to prove yourself by leaning on what nouns you can claim.

Yes, we are all daughters. Some of us may be sisters, nieces, aunts, wives and mothers. But the familial link between you and others doesn’t dictate your worth as an individual.

First and foremost, you are a woman. And that is enough in itself.

(Past IWD-related posts here.) 

Odds & ends

• This five-year old TED talk popped up in my Facebook feed last weekend... the speaker, Christen Reighter, is childfree by choice, and her talk focuses on the difficulty she had persuading doctors to perform a tubal ligation on her.  Although she came to a life without children from a very different place than I did, I found her words inspiring. "Motherhood is an extension of womanhood, not the definition," she says. She got a standing ovation.  :)  
• I listened in live as Christine Erickson of New Legacy Radio celebrated International Women's Day with Gateway Women's Jody Day -- fabulous conversation! You can listen here or on most other podcast apps. 
• This coming week, on March 15th, she'll be interviewing Laura Carroll, a longtime childfree activist, about how we can bring together both childless and childfree people to build a shared movement for meaningful change. 
• Pamela of Silent Sorority talked about being an infertility survivor, ethics in the fertility industry, and what happens when fertility treatments don't work, on Slate's "The Waves" podcast. Read Pamela's blog post here and listen to the podcast here or on your favourite podcast app. (Pamela appears about halfway through, around the 23-minute mark -- but the entire episode is worth listening to. Have kleenex handy!) 
• From Elle magazine's March 2022 issue, a rare article that spotlights the experiences of some working women without children during the pandemic. I'm retired (and very thankful for that!), but this echoes the experiences I've read & heard about on various childless/free forums. Sample passage: 

For two years, as COVID fortified the divide between parents and nonparents, women’s respective experiences have been framed in terms of work: emotional work, care work, career work. The image of the exhausted, overburdened mother has been emblazoned on the collective imagination. We saw it in the hard numbers—nearly 33 million Americans resigning from their jobs between April and November 2021, mostly women and extremely burned out. And we heard it in the “primal scream,” as a viral New York Times package called it, of mothers struggling to balance the demands of career and family in a time of virtual schooling, curtailed childcare, and not-so-secret disparities between men and women at home. The childless working woman, presumed frivolous by extension, her problems trivial by comparison, often quietly dissolved into her job. In the absence of contact with family and friends, the remote workplace became many white-collar workers’ stand-in for community. No doubt, work is work and, all told, parents had more of it. But career work, unlike parenting, does not offer love in return....

Throughout the pandemic, childless women who were fortunate enough to keep their jobs, and who could do those jobs remotely, comprised a privileged minority within a privileged minority. Their struggles were different from those of working parents, but they were no less real. Among some high-achieving women, the elimination of boundaries between work and nonwork life became a recipe for disaster—and, from there, a catalyst for a major reevaluation of priorities and purpose. 

Odds & ends

• Someone on the Gateway Women private community flagged this blog post about a childless-not-by-choice life (after infertility and attempted adoptions) -- which is unique because it's written by a guy!  The author is a Canadian living in New Zealand -- a chiropractor, yoga instructor, marathon swimmer and triathlete. He's written a book too.  Read the post and have a look around the rest of his site! 
• I couldn't cheer loudly enough when I read this post from The Uterus Monologues: "You can't 'manifest' a baby."  YES.  I have a few friends who talk on social media about "manifesting" various outcomes (albeit not babies, thankfully!), and it always gets me grinding my teeth...!    
• Donor-conceived children are using DNA analysis to unravel the secrets of their parentage -- and sometimes with unexpected results. This New York Times story reveals how, starting in the 1960s, not just one, not just two but THREE doctors in Rochester, New York, secretly used their own sperm to impregnate their infertile patients. In recent years, more than 50 (!) doctors in the U.S. have been accused of fraud related to donor sperm. Ugh. (Beware the comments... there are several people there (presumably men?!)  who don't seem to get why this is such a violation of women's bodies and trust.)  
• Yael Wolfe -- who is single & childless not by choice, and one of the "regulars" on Jody Day's quarterly Zoom chats with childless elderwomen  (another one is coming up on March 20th -- registration info here) -- recently wrote on Medium about "How I became a hoarder." I could totally relate to her post about planning and accumulating stuff for the life she thought she was going to lead, only to find herself facing something completely different. (For me, that resulted in having to get rid of a TON of stuff before moving into a condo that's much more suitable for the life we are living today...!) Some good comments, too! 
• New podcast alert!  Tune in on your favourite podcast app (or follow the next link) for New Legacy Radio, hosted by CNBC-er Christine Erickson, with new weekly episodes. In the first episode, from a few weeks ago, Christine chatted with Irish journalist Hilary Fennell about her groundbreaking radio documentary on childlessness (which I wrote about here and here).  She'll be speaking with Jody Day of Gateway Women on March 8th (International Women's Day). 
• As if the prospect of long covid isn't reasons enough to get vaccinated, mask up and avoid crowded public spaces, this New York Times article says researchers have discovered that the virus may infect tissue within the male genital tract -- with potential effects on fertility: 

Men infected with the virus are three to six times as likely as others to develop erectile dysfunction, believed to be an indicator of so-called long Covid.

Patients have also reported symptoms such as testicular pain, reduced sperm counts and reduced sperm quality, decreased fertility and hypogonadism, a condition in which the testes produce insufficient amounts of testosterone, leading to low sex drive, sexual dysfunction and reduced fertility...

Even if just a small fraction of men experience such complications after a coronavirus infection, millions may suffer from impaired sexual and reproductive health in the aftermath of the pandemic, simply because the virus has infected so many people around the world, Dr. Hope warned... 

He will also look at whether the virus infects tissue in the female reproductive system.

Happy International Women's Day!

International Women's Day has never been much of a "thing" in Canada or the United States. I only started taking note of it maybe a decade ago, when my company started making a bit of a fuss about it.  IWD was more of a "thing" in our international locations, initially -- and I suspect the powers that be seized on it as and expanded our activities as a way to shore up their credentials as an "employer of choice" for women. There would be stories in the staff newsmagazine and internal online communications, perhaps a special guest speaker for the women's network group (which was, unhappily, only open to those at the management level & above -- meaning I never got to go), and donations to charities that benefited women & girls.

I never thought or wondered much about why IWD wasn't celebrated as much in North America vs the rest of the world -- or why Mother's Day is so feted here, but not quite as big a deal elsewhere -- until I read this article from today's New York Times. (In short, the reason is political.)  Eye-opening, to say the least. They had me at the subheading: 

Forget Mother’s Day. Today we celebrate women as friends, sisters, workers and comrades, too.

And this paragraph: 

For my part, I despise that Mother’s Day values women only as mothers. It reinforces the idea that this is our most important role: giving birth and sacrificing enormous amounts of unpaid labor toward raising the next generation of citizens. We are more than our wombs.

Some have tried to tell me that Mother's Day celebrates ALL women who nurture & encourage the next generation. Hmmmm, nice try, but I don't entirely buy it.  (Maybe it SHOULD be that way, but it doesn't always work out that way.) 

But IWD is (or should be) about ALL women, and all that we are -- not just our roles as mothers & caretakers.

(I wrote an IWD post last year along these lines.)

International Women's Day -- for childless women too

It's International Women's Day, which was never much of a thing when I was younger, but has gained momentum as an event/day of note in recent years. I suspect this is largely due to two factors: (1) the latest wave of the women's movement, fuelled by #MeToo, etc., and (2) IWD-related marketing campaigns by corporations seeking goodwill from their female customers and prospects.

Jody Day of Gateway Women in the U.K. has a great post about IWD from the childless-not-by choice perspective, and I'd encourage you all to read it (& watch the embedded TEDTalk video too, if you haven't already seen it).

Of course, "Celebrating women means childless women too!"  I think most people would reflexively agree (as I did at first).

But does it, really?

Jody reminds us that as many as one in five (20%) of women do not have children (the majority not by choice) -- and yet "womanhood and motherhood are routinely conflated" -- in particular by employers (who seem to believe that "family-friendly" policies, by definition, mean "woman friendly");  by marketers, who routinely target "Mom" in their ad campaigns;  and by politicians, who love to talk about their "family values" and policies that benefit "hard-working families."

"It’s time that marketeers and social policy thinkers understood that not all women are mothers or grandmothers and that not everyone has a family poised to take care of them in old age," she writes.

I did (thankfully) see plenty of inclusive tributes to women on my social media feeds. But after reading Jody's article, I couldn't help but notice how many of my friends were posting tributes to & photos of their daughters (as well as their mothers) -- and how many references there were to "raising the next generation." I even heard (via my CNBC friends & sites) about IWD events where motherhood and support for mothers was the main topic of discussion. Ugh.

As someone said in a Facebook comment on Jody's story, "On a day like today I expected a much wider scope -- it's International Women's Day not International Mothers' Day.'"

IWD is a day when (unlike Mother's Day) I would expect to feel solidarity with all ALL my global sisters.  I hope that, as IWD continues to grow in prominence, it doesn't become another "holiday" where (along with Mother's Day, Father's Day and now Family Day) my "otherness" gets rubbed in my face.  Let's keep IWD focused on the progress and achievements and common interests that bring ALL women together, regardless of their childbearing status.

More on women and work (including me)

It's International Women's Day... and I've been doing some more thinking about my previous post on women and work, and about Sheryl Sandberg's new book, Lean In. I haven't read it yet... but neither have a lot of people who have been writing about it, lol. And from what I hear, the people who have actually read it are being much kinder to Sandberg than those who haven't. 

In my previous post I said, "Some mothers (and non-mothers) are perfectly happy with "average jobs." Not everyone is cut out for the C-suite. Not everyone WANTS a C-suite job."  (Also, there are only so many C-suite jobs to go around. Someone has to do the actual work, after all. ;)  )

And I don't want to let men, and corporations, off the hook. They have a responsibility to level the playing field in the office, and to step up their own game at home.  It's just plain common sense. (I recently saw a hockey analogy about women's equality that went something like: "A team isn't going to be playing its best if half the players are sitting on the bench.")

Apparently Sandberg does acknowledge this in her book. But her focus is on what women themselves can do to advance in the workplace. And I get what Sandberg is saying, or at least, what I think she is trying to say. Too many women sell themselves short. We don't ask... and so, often, we don't get.  We close off our options, sometimes without realizing the long-term consequences of what we're doing. As Sandbery put it in her infamous commencement address to Barnard College graduates, women too often "leave before they leave." 

I will admit it: I'm one of those women who leaned back (probably prematurely), instead of leaning in. If I had put a little more thought and effort into my career and what I wanted out of it, I probably could have advanced further than I have. I'm not genuis-smart (although I was known as a "brain" in school) -- but I think I am fairly bright. I just never had a huge ambition to manage people and budgets.

Why?

Partly, I think, because my interests lie in the work itself -- in the content, in writing. And right now (more than ever, it seems), it's all about the process. Meetings upon meetings, project plans, background briefs and (of course) round after round of  approvals. (But that's not something that's entirely within my control.)

Lack of self-confidence?  Yep, that's definitely me. ... I have never been one to shout "Look at me!" and increasingly, the people who get ahead are the ones who are good at self-promotion (if nothing else...!).

Laziness? Well, yes. ; ) I'll admit it, lol... Don't get me wrong, I do my job and there are plenty of days (particularly at certain times of the year) when I am run off my feet.  There have certainly been times when I have stayed late &/or taken work home with me.  But (thankfully) it's not a regular thing -- and that's just fine with me. I find that a standard work day -- which stretches to 11 or 12 hours most days, when commuting is factored in -- is definitely enough.

I have a friend who is a high-powered corporate lawyer for a big law firm. She routinely puts in incredibly long hours and works weekends. Yes, she gets the big bucks, but... I like being able to leave at a decent hour, and leave my work behind me. I am just lowly enough at work that I don't have a work-issued BlackBerry. I remember when my former boss got promoted to a level where they gave her a BlackBerry... I told her, "I'm not sure whether to congratulate you or offer my condolences," lol.

Part of it, I think, is that I am a product of my times. Yes, I am a proud feminist and I grew up in the age of Ms Magazine, Gloria Steinem, the fight to ratify the ERA in the U.S. (defeated) and the successful battle to ensure that women's rights were included in Canada's new constitution in 1982. 

But -- I did get my start in the 1960s. Mindsets and roles were still pretty traditional when I was growing up. I was told -- and I (mostly) believed -- that I could be anything I set my mind to be. And one of the things that I wanted to be, assumed I would be (besides being a writer) was a mom. I knew that I was going to school, and that I would have a career. But I thought (for awhile, anyway) that I would stop working when I had children. As time went on and the economy floundered, I came to realize that I would likely have to keep working once I had a family. But in the back of my mind, marriage and family still loomed large. I still saw my future primarily in terms of the family I would have.

I hoped that I might be able to afford to work part-time while my children were small. (Whether I could have actually afforded to do so is another story...) In fact, around the time that I got pregnant, I had some tentative discussions with my office best friend/coworker about job sharing -- she may have even brought the subject up. I saw part-time work as an ideal way to spend some extra time with my long-awaited baby and still keep one foot in the workforce and in the company where I had already established myself. She was in her 50s, hoping to retire at 55, and thought she could ease her way gradually into retirement with such an arrangement. Job sharing was relatively new to our company, but I had done some stories for the staff magazine about several such arrangements that were working well.  I think we could have made it work. We worked well together. We figured we could each work on our own projects, for the most part, and each put in two full days a week, and figure out how to split the fifth day. We would keep each other updated, and would be accessible at home if there were problems.

But then I lost my baby. :(  And the stock market tanked with the dot-com crash of the late 1990s/early 2000s, and the investments she was counting on to help fund her retirement lost value, and she wound up working until she was 59. And that was the end of our job sharing discussions.

And while I haven't got a family as my "excuse" for not climbing the corporate ladder, I can't discount the impact that pregnancy loss and infertility have had on any ambitions I might have once had. I don't think I was hugely ambitious, pre-Katie.... but I think it's safe to say that I have never felt quite the same way about work and my job in the years since then. There's nothing like death, like stillbirth, to drive home what's really important in life -- and believe me, it's ain't work. I am a firm believer that nobody lays on their deathbed wishing they had spent more time at the office.

But... we all have mortgages or rent to pay, and food to put on the table. And so we work. At least I had a good job to go back to after my loss. I heard numerous stories, as a pregnancy loss support group facilitator, and as a longtime frequenter of pregnancy loss & infertility forums, from women who made career choices based on what was best for the hypothetical family they hoped one day to have. They "left before they left." Some of them actually quit their jobs when they became pregnant. And wound up with neither job nor baby. :(  And, sadly, sometimes without the partner they had hoped to build their family with, too. So I think we need to think carefully about the choices we make at work, and why we're making them, and keep as many options open for as long as we can.

As for me -- right now, I feel like I've painted myself into a bit of a corner at work. I've been in the same department doing much the same kind of work at more or less the same level for almost 27 years now. For a long time, 15+ years, I worked with the same core group of people. There wasn't much in the way of specific job descriptions or established procedures (that has since changed), but we all knew each other well, and what we could do together. They knew me, knew what I had done, knew my capabilities. I remember one of the senior managers once told me he had such tremendous confidence in my writing, that he knew he could throw anything at me and I could quickly turn it around into something lucid.

And then, one by one, they all left. :(  

(Retired, fired, moved to another department or another company altogether.)  I can remember when I went in for a "getting to know you" chat with our new senior VP (who has since left herself) and she told me that of all the people in our department she was having the hardest time figuring out exactly what it was that I did. "I do anything and everything that anyone asks me to do," I told her, which was basically the truth. I thought I was being flexible, and I thought that was good.

But so much has changed in the past 3-5 years. The department was restructured, and many of the projects that I used to work on or assist others with are now the responsibilities of others. People keep coming and going.  I'm having to prove (and re-prove -- I will soon be on my fourth direct manager in three years!) myself over & over again. While there are still a core group of us 40 & 50-somethings, the department has gradually been overrun with bright-eyed, ambitious, energetic 20 and 30-somethings -- kids, young enough to be my own children. 

Sometimes it's hard to keep up. It's hard not to feel old and tired, and sometimes overlooked and unappreciated. It's hard not to look at the calendar and start counting the days until I might be able to retire. 

But that's still at least three years away. What to do between now & then?

I don't particularly want to take on more responsibility at this point in my career. But at the same time,  I'm not entirely sure my my talents are being well or fully used, either. :p

"What would you do if you weren't afraid?" Sandberg asks. I'm not entirely sure. It's something I need to think about.

But I'm glad she is asking these questions, and making me think about them.

I'm hoping to pick up the book soon... if/when I read it, I'll definitely let you know what I think about that!