Odds & ends (including a World Childless Week webinar!)

I've been struggling a bit lately, with writing more regularly in this blog -- and with other parts of my life too. It feels like there are a gazillion things demanding my attention, and all I want to do is bury my nose in a book (Kobo reader?) or my phone and scroll mindlessly. I bounce from one thing to another and accomplish nothing, and fret over the dumbest little things. Frankly, I think I might be a little depressed -- and I guess it's not surprising, given the events and stresses and losses around me this past year(s/) -- both personal and in the broader world. 

Writing IS (always has been) a comfort and an outlet, though, and I have been collecting more odds & ends to share with you here (albeit there are a lot I meant to flag that have slipped through my fingers). Here are a few things I've been noticing and thinking about lately:   

• Latest annoying/anxiety-inducing thing:  Our GE Profile dishwasher (original to the condo, so likely about 12 years old) is leaking water from the bottom. :(  We've stopped using it (washing dishes by hand), and even turned off the valve to shut off the water to it, but it's still getting wet under there. 
• I've been sliding rags or sheets of paper towel underneath to catch and mop up the drips, and swapping them out for dry ones every few hours. 
• Beyond the leak, the springs on both sides of the door have snapped in recent years -- meaning we can't just open the door and let it drop (because it DROPS!) -- we have to either hold it or balance it against a hip and load/unload the dishes that way -- or lower the door very gently, and then rehook the hinges up to close it back up properly again. 
• Given these issues (and the likelihood of more to come), and given that 12 years seems to be ancient in appliance terms these days (yikes), we recently went dishwasher shopping. What to pick, from a dizzying array of choices?? (Did I mention I've been having some anxiety issues lately??)  
• We eventually selected a KitchenAid model. It's being delivered next Monday. 
• (I had to notify the property manager of the impending delivery -- and cough up a $500 (Canadian) security deposit in case of damages to the elevator or hallways during delivery/removal of the old machine. It will be returned, assuming all goes well. Sigh...) 
• Huge congratulations to Mali at No Kidding in NZ, who has been named People's Champion for World Childless Week 2026!!  She wrote about it here, and you can read her WCW profile here  So well deserved!!  
• Speaking of World Childless Week, it's next week!  I'll be writing more about it in the days ahead, but I especially wanted to give you a heads-up that I'll be appearing in a Zoom webinar/panel discussion on Thursday, Sept. 17th at 9 AM (Eastern time), along with three of my friends from the Childless Collective:  "All in the Family: Childless women, Caregiving/Caring and Family of Origin Dynamics." 
• Y'all know, I live some 1000 miles away from my family of origin -- and my (younger) sister has been the main point person as our parents have aged (and, in mom's case, passed away in January). But Sandy, the webinar organizer, thought it would be interesting to have my perspective on caregiving and contributing from a distance, so...! 
• You can watch live on Zoom, and the video will be posted on the WCW 2026 website and YouTube channel later that day for later viewing. More details and a sign-up link here.  
• We lost three childless/free icons in short order recently:  first Dolly Parton, then Tim Curry, followed by Gloria Steinem. (Did I mention I've been a bit depressed lately?? -- this didn't help...!) There's been some great writing on various childless/free blogs, etc., about these three and what they meant to us. 
• Gloria Steinem in particular was a familiar presence when I was growing up in the 1970s. Going through my old school essays when we were cleaning out my parents' house last spring, I was amused to find a declaration in one along the lines of "I'm not a big women's libber" -- ah, youth!!  Even if I was reluctant to embrace the F-label as a teenager (lol), there's absolutely no doubt what a huge impact Steinem and the women's movement had on my life, and that I have evolved considerably since then.  ;)  
• I was fortunate enough to briefly encounter Gloria Steinem twice in my life:  
• In 1994, I stood in line at a bookstore in the underground city that runs below Toronto's Financial District during my lunch hour to get her to sign a copy of her latest book, "Moving Beyond Words" (which I still have).  
• Several years after that, she was speaking at a convention of the Ontario Human Resources Professionals Association. Someone had given one of my coworkers tickets;  she was working, but my mom was visiting me and I was off that week, so she gave them to me and Mom & I went to the Toronto Convention Centre to hear Gloria speak.  We also caught a glimpse of her walking through the halls outside the meeting rooms. She was in her 60s then and wearing a miniskirt -- and she looked fabulous in it.  :)   Rest in power, Gloria. And thank you. 
• I was sad to read in the Toronto Star that Gilda's Club recently closed its doors here. 
• I was reminded of a post I wrote wayyyyyy back in 2012 (!) about Gilda Radner (who was childless not by choice) & Gilda's Club. (I also mentioned Gilda in this post from last year, about the Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary celebrations.) 
• Sidenote:  The O'Keefe Centre/Hummingbird Centre/Sony Centre I refer to in that 2012 post has been Meridian Hall since 2019.  Sigh... 
• (The SkyDome is still the Rogers Centre -- but there's now also the Rogers Stadium, which -- as many unsuspecting event ticketholders have discovered, to their dismay! -- is about 20 miles away from the Rogers Centre, in a completely different part of the city...!) 
• New York Times gift link:  "When the Choice to Be Childless Is Not Your Own" by Anna Louise Sussman, author of the upcoming book “Inconceivable:The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty.” The article is U.S.-specific, but some of the questions it raises would apply in many other countries. 
• Sample quote:  "...what if we thought of starting a family as a fundamental human experience that should be available to all? What if we extended the ability to have a family — one that many possess as a matter of good fortune — into a basic human right?"
• (Not sure I have the "right" to have a family -- no one can guarantee that -- but I believe it should be a lot easier to TRY to have one, if that's what I want...)
• You've probably heard of "manspreading" -- entitled and oblivious men, spreading out and taking up valuable public space (particularly on public transit). How about "mumspreading"?  Emma Harris thoughtfully explains (on her own website, and on the Life Without Children Substack -- well worth a read!):   

Mumspreading, as I use it, describes something analogous: the ways in which some mums can take up physical, conversational, emotional space without much awareness of the impact on those around them.

This is, ultimately, a post about the invisible grief of childlessness, and what it means to take up space in a world not designed with you in mind.

"IVF is not a silver bullet." (No sh*t, Sherlock...)

I had high hopes when I a story from The Globe and Mail landed in my notifications this afternoon, with the title "IVF is not a silver bullet."  (Gift link.) 

**SPOILER ALERT/CONTENT WARNING:**  Let's just say I was disappointed.  (If you are not in the mood for miracle baby endings, or happy mommy pregnancy & baby photos, don't click over.) 

While the article does illuminate some of the frustrations and shortcomings of IVF treatment in Canada (and generally), I found it curiously terse and the (inevitably happy, with not just one but TWO "miracle babies" -- apparently born just four months apart?? -- after the author had almost "given up," of course) ending rather abrupt. (Several people in the comments so far seem to have felt the same way.)  The graphics were kind of cool, but Ifelt like more space and attention was given to those than the story itself. I would have preferred fewer graphics/photos and more of the story itself. 

I get that this was likely an excerpt from the author's book (In Fertility: The Story of a Miracle and the Big Business Behind It by Kathryn Blaze Baum, which comes out on Tuesday). .Hopefully the book gives a fuller picture of the many systemic issues, as well as the author's personal story.  I am debating whether I am interested enough in the author's critique of the industry (if not her personal "miracle" story) to pick up a copy. 

(But oh, it would be SO nice, just ONCE in a great while, to have one of these stories end without a "miracle baby" -- let alone babIES, plural! -- and a good life, still, regardless.... Why, why, WHY must EVERY story about infertility treatment in the mainstream media end with a baby?? ) 

A few odds & ends

A couple of articles/posts to share: 

• Tracey Cleantis Dwyer -- formerly at "La Belette Rouge" (a blog which no longer exists) -- has returned to blogging via Substack!  Check out "The Next Happy Project." 
• I highly recommend Tracey's 2015 book "The Next Happy," which is all about letting go of the life you had planned -- something Tracey, who is childless after infertility, knows a lot about. 
• Disclosure:  I'm in the book. :)  I answered survey questions for Tracey as part of her research.  I also reviewed the book on my blog not long after it was published, here. 
• This Sunday, March 15th is "Mothering Sunday" in Britain, and The Full Stop community and podcast has published a post on Linked In with suggestions for "Navigating Mother's Day When You're Childless Not by Choice." (Also very applicable for Mother's Day in May, here in North America & elsewhere in the world.)  

Non-ALI/CNBC related:  

• It wasn't just our imaginations -- this winter really was as cold and snowy as it seemed, the Toronto Star confirms by looking at the historical weather data.  
• The time changed last weekend -- and it struck me that my mother was no longer here to complain about it (as she always, always did!).  Wherever she is now, I know it's a place where time is meaningless. Enjoy, Mom.  :)  
• This coming weekend (Sunday night) is the Oscars. 
• I used to follow the Oscar races like a hawk (I even won the office Oscar pool once!), and tried to see as many of the nominated movies as I could (the ones that interested me, anyway).  These days, I think I am only aware of "Hamnet" (with its ties to a well-known book and its grief/child loss theme -- not to mention Paul Mescal, lol), but not many of the other nominees.  
• Mel recently posted about "The Last Movie I Saw;" I think the last one I saw in-theatre was "1917" (which was very good, and one of those movies that really deserves to be seen in a theatre). The pandemic began not long after that and, well, you know the rest. We used to go to the movies, perhaps not every Sunday, but usually at least one Sunday a month. Many things have returned to some form of normalcy since then, but we still haven't been back to the theatre.  I am not sure how we got out of the habit, but we did.  I do miss it sometimes. 
• Nevertheless, I will be watching on Sunday.  :) 
• This will be my first Oscar night without my Mom. :(  She always watched, and when I was growing up, she would let me stay up late -- on a school night! -- to watch with her. I more recent years, I would always call her before the show started (even though she hadn't been to a movie theatre in years either). 
• I'm sure she will be watching from wherever she is now.  And I hope there's a bottomless bucket of popcorn, and that it doesn't bother her stomach, as it did in her later years (to the point that she had to stop eating it).  

Accumulated odds & ends

I haven't been that diligent about compiling notable stuff I've read lately, but for what it's worth, here are a few links!  (Some are a little dated, but no less readable!) 

• Have any of you seen the movie "Hamnet" yet, or read the book it's based on, by Maggie O'Farrell? I have done neither -- yet -- although I would like to partake of both. (For one thing, I think Paul Mescal is an amazing young actor.)  
• An online group of loss mothers that I belong to were debating whether to see it or not -- drawn to the themes of grief and loss of a child, and yet wondering whether it would hit a little too close to home? 
• I really appreciated the perspective offered in this post from Jennie Agg, who writes a Substack about pregnancy loss and grief called Life, Almost, about "Hamnet" the movie, and whether it's "grief porn" (as some are apparently describing it). 
• **NOTE: there are spoilers about the movie, including specific scenes and how they unfold. Also, Agg has a living child.**
• Excerpt: 

...for me, the film’s presentation of loss and grief is nuanced, considered, grounded in something true.

...What do we mean when we dismiss something as ‘grief porn’? I guess it’s implying something gratuitous, debasing, bordering on shameful.

Which is interesting when you consider the way many bereaved parents today often describe being made to feel, shamed into silence: it’s too much, we don’t need to hear it.

• Anne Helen Petersen (childfree by choice) -- whose Culture Study community has moved over from Substack to Patreon -- has been giving a lot of coverage to infertility and childless/free topics recently. A couple of highlights (I'm not sure whether some of these may be paywalled?):  
• A series of occasional posts titled "Big No-Kids Energy," about the joys of not having kids. 
• Here's the kickoff post where Anne explains what the series is about. 
• Anne has interviewed several childfree & childless people/couples for the series about their no-kids life. The most recent subject was Cathy, who is 60-something and childless not by choice, but making the most of things. She was a delight to read about. :)  
• A Culture Study podcast episode featuring a standup comedienne, about being a "childless freak" (!) that will have you nodding! The comment section is worth a read too.  :) 
• An earlier podcast episode (from back in early February) about "The Heartbreaking (and Largely Unregulated) Business of IVF."  A lot of what's discussed would not be surprising to many of us, but it might be an eye-opener for people not intimately acquainted with the fertility industry.  
• I made a comment that's received the most "likes." In part, I said: 
  

One point I will take exception to:  the comment that "IVF works! -- it's very effective."  IVF is still (almost 50 years after the first IVF baby was born) very much a crapshoot.  Your odds of success might be better if you're in your 20s or early 30s -- and/or if you have the money and stamina to endure multiple cycles -- but once you hit 40,  they drop like a stone. There are many of us out here who went through infertility treatments and did not wind up with a child. You just don't hear about us. Clinics certainly don't want to acknowledge our existence, and patients currently in treatment don't want to hear about us either. 

I would also add that most clinics are abysmal at providing emotional support & counselling to their patients going through treatment -- and even less is available for those of of us who aren't successful. Even a referral to an outside counsellor, or a pamphlet listing resources we might consult would be helpful.  Any support I got was entirely the result of my own research.  

• Carrie Hauskins, who is childless after pregnancy loss and infertility, writes at Blooming With Care about the matter of "Heirlooms for No One" -- dealing with things from a childless aunt, as well as wondering about her own stuff after she's gone (something I think about a lot, especially as my childfree sister & I go through the painful process of emptying out our parents' house...). Excerpt: 

I told her we weren’t having kids, and when she said I could pass down her things to my children, I didn’t correct her. She knew the truth. And she still gave me her things. If she didn’t want to believe that her lineage of items will end with me, that’s her problem to work through, not mine. She was aware that I’m a dead end in our family's genealogy. 

 

...Legacy used to mean what I would pass down to my children. Today, it means deciding what to do with the ring once I melt it down. It might not mean the same thing five years from now. But for today, I think of my kooky aunt and her curmudgeonly way of life. I might not inherit her moods, but I do love the quirky jewelry. I do plan on having an eccentric estate sale. One that people line up for early in the morning and wraps around the block. Would my aunt love that? Who knows? It’s my legacy.  

• Katie Dunn at Afterglow (childless after infertility) ponders a question that doesn't get enough attention --"IVF doesn't work for everyone. So when do you stop?" -- and explains her own process for making that difficult decision. 
• Katie Hawkins-Gaar at My Sweet Dumb Brain writes movingly about grief, nine years after her first husband's death:  "The Grief Math Changed This Year." 
• "Anyone Can Be an Auntie. It’s a State of Mind," proclaims a New York Times Magazine article by Maya L. Kapoor. 

Odds & ends

• I've been tired and going to bed earlier for the past week or two. And after reading one of Mel's recent Friday Roundups, I realized why!  (Personally, I blamed all those late-night World Series games! lol) 
• "What Might It Look Like Not to Have Children?"  Glynnis MacNicol at Good Decisions (who is childfree by choice) provides links to a decade's worth of her writing on the subject. 
• Pamela Tsigdinos recently discussed "Surviving the Trauma of IVF" on the Beyond Pronatalism podcast. 
• Y.L. Wolfe explains "Why People Who Don’t Have Children Deserve a More Inclusive Label" on the Life Without Children Substack. 
• Subhead: "Childless, childfree, non-parent…we shouldn’t have to define ourselves as the inverse of those who have kids."  
• (Related: The THIRD post I wrote for this blog, back in November 2007, pondered this question of unsatisfactory terminology: "Am I childLESS or childFREE?")  
• Here's an excerpt from Wolfe's post: 

Why do childless and childfree women often do so much soul-searching trying to settle on just the right label when mothers just get to be mothers without any need for distinction or an understanding of how they got there?

I can’t help but think that the answer is simple. Motherhood is the approved lifestyle choice for women in patriarchal cultures. Therefore, no matter how you got there, you get your gold star and no expectations to explain your circumstances.

Being a woman without children, however, will earn you judgment, criticism, and even hate. You can’t just say you don’t have children. People want to know why — and even though it’s rude as hell to ask, they will.

Maybe it just feels easier to preempt the invasive questions by carefully choosing the word we want to use to describe our non-parent status.

• This story, from The New York Times Magazine, is just WILD:  "She Was Ready to Have Her 15th Child. Then Came the Felony Charges."  Subhead:  "MaryBeth Lewis’s desire to be a new mom again, at 65 years old, led to a custody battle like no other."  Among other things, it touches on IVF, donor gametes, surrogacy and adoption. (Gift link.) 
• Related to the NYT Magazine article and the Lewis case, Jill Filipovic wrote a thoughtful post for her Substack, asking "Is it a Reproductive Right to Have Your 15th Child at 65?"  (Subhead:  "When women's desires and children's rights collide.")  
• Unfortunately, I believe it's paywalled for subscribers only -- but I can give you a taste of what's in it. The opening reads: 

Reproductive freedom is a core feminist principle. So are the rights of children. What happens, though, when those principles conflict? And in an era of incredible technological progress in assisted reproduction, should there be any limits to what women can choose?

• And, near the end, there's this: 
  
  

  To be clear, I am a big supporter of reproductive medicine and technological progress, including IVF and various forms of assisted reproduction (I have more misgivings about surrogacy, but still think it should be legal, if tightly regulated). And most people, when handed these new technologies, use them in ways that I find totally reasonable and largely ethical.

  
  

  But there are always outliers...

  
  
• (I thought Jill Filipovic was childless/free, but a recent Instagram post showed her husband wearing a baby carrier and the top of an infant's head peeking out in some photos. I can find nothing she's written about having a baby -- and a few of the photos show her doing some pretty crazy yoga poses, with a body that looks anything but post-partum -- unless they've adopted...??) 

A "new" approach? I think not...

Mel recently mentioned a post from Infertile Phoenix, in which Phoenix describes coming across her old basal temperature charts from her TTC days. She (Mel) was wondering if people still read Toni Weschler's book ("Taking Charge of Your Fertility"), which many in the TTC community regard as the "bible" -- or did, during my own TTC days -- and which promotes fertility awareness through natural methods such as charting your morning temperature with a basal thermometer. 

I told Mel in the comments that it's still out there! -- I've seen copies of the latest edition in bookstores recently -- and I remember reading an article not too long ago about it, and how it (like so many other things these days, unfortunately…) has become politicized, much to Weschler's dismay. This link is, unfortunately, behind a paywall (at least it was for me) -- and Pocket, which used to be my first stop in trying to get around paywalls, is now defunct -- but you can still read some paywalled articles via the archive.today website.  Try this link from there. 

I wrote about TCOYF and how I used it back in 2018. Obviously, it did not work for me! (nor did several subsequent rounds of clomid & IUIs) but I am still glad I read it and gained that better knowledge of my body and how it works. I would still highly recommend the book for all young women, whether or not they want children or are experiencing fertility issues. (Men should read it too!) 

I was reminded of these posts and articles when I saw another recent article from the New York Times about a "new" (new??) "natural" approach to infertility called "restorative reproductive medicine" (gift link), which is being promoted by both Christian conservatives and the Make America Healthy Again movement. TCOYF is not mentioned, but its methods would likely be included in such an approach. The concept proposes to address what proponents describe as the “root causes” of infertility, while leaving IVF as a last resort. 

"Physicians who specialize in the approach analyze patients’ diet and exercise habits, while helping them “chart” their menstrual cycles, a process that can help expose certain reproductive health conditions, like endometriosis, that may lead to infertility," the article says. "Practitioners treat reproductive health conditions but do not offer I.V.F." 

Although President Donald Trump has signalled his support for IVF and making it free of charge, Republicans at both the state and federal levels are now busy promoting measures to fund "restorative reproductive medicine," and to require insurance companies to cover it -- while continuing to downplay and dither over IVF.  

Of course, what they're promoting is far from "new" for anyone who has experienced infertility. Most of us who have ventured down the infertility treatment path have been there, done that, bought the T-shirt  -- charted, felt for the position of our cervix, noted our "ewcm" (and guzzled gallons of Robitussin cough syrup in an attempt to increase it), lay on our backs with our legs up in the air after sex, sworn off alcohol, changed and watched our diets (ate copious amounts of pineapple), taken extra vitamins, tried to lose weight,  tried yoga, meditation, acupuncture, essential oils, "natural supplements," crystals, and goodness knows what else -- and undergone umpteen ultrasounds, endometrial biopsies and sometimes laparoscopies and more invasive surgical procedures, before moving on to trying clomid and IUIs (with and without using fertility drugs) -- and only THEN moving on to more intensive (and costly) interventions like IVF. 

Leading medical organizations agree:  

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists called restorative reproductive medicine “unproven” and “not a medical term,” stressing that many patients have already tried to chart their cycles, treat underlying conditions and make lifestyle changes by the time they arrive at an infertility clinic. While those methods may work for some, several leading I.V.F. doctors said people experiencing infertility often required more help — and months or years spent on restorative reproductive medicine could delay the I.V.F. they would ultimately need in order to conceive. Because female fertility declines with age, doctors said those delays could jeopardize a woman’s ability to get pregnant.

“They’re underestimating how hard we try to avoid I.V.F.,” said Eve Feinberg, a medical director of fertility and reproductive medicine at Northwestern Medicine. “When people walk into my clinic, we don’t do I.V.F. tomorrow. We try to figure out other things.”

Many readers agreed in the comments. "Only someone who has never gone through any fertility treatment would think the techniques described here are something new," the top-rated comment points out. "They are just the first steps in fertility treatment. If they worked for everyone, we wouldn't have IVF." 

Another highly rated comment (and there are lots of others in the same vein):  "I don't see any "restorative" treatments discussed in this article that focus on the MALE half of infertility..." 

Senator Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois, is blunt: 

“They want to delay and delay and delay and essentially come up with fake science and ways to delay so that people can never actually get to the I.V.F. solution,” said Ms. Duckworth, who has had two children through I.V.F.

I'm all for better educating people about their bodies and how they work, and for more comprehensive fertility investigations at a younger age. (While I adored my longtime family doctor -- who recently passed away -- when I was 36 and expressed concern that I wasn't getting pregnant after more than a year of trying, he basically patted me on the head, and said, "Don't worry it will happen.  It actually did happen when I was 37 -- but we all know how that played out...! And I never got pregnant again, with or without assistance.)  

However, my suspicion is the powers that be will promote this "new" concept -- which might help some people, but certainly not anyone with serious fertility issues -- while de-funding more effective (albeit more expensive -- and more politically contentious) treatments such as IVF, and making them harder to access. 

A "new" approach? I think not. 

Odds & ends

On the personal front: 

• Plans are underway for Little Great-Nephew #2's baptism. Date still TBD -- but we got a call from BIL a few days ago:  "Don't get mad," he said, when dh answered the phone.  Apparently, we are not invited. :(  They are having a party/meal at a restaurant after the service -- and if they invite us, they would have to invite all their other aunts & uncles too, and they can't afford that. BIL said he was calling because Older Nephew (who is OUR godson) felt so bad he couldn't bring himself to do it. 
• Dh called up Older Nephew after he got off the call with BIL, and told him to relax, we are NOT mad!  He apologized profusely, and said "You guys do so much for us." Awww... it's nice that he recognizes that...! 
• Of course we're disappointed -- but we understand. Fair is fair. 
• We weren't invited to Little Great-Niece's baptism celebration either, for the same reason. (We did go to the church to see the ceremony, since it was just a short drive away, and it's a public event.)  
• We didn't get to go to Little Great-Nephew #1's baptism either -- but that's because it was during the summer of 2020 -- i.e., pandemic restrictions. Obviously, no big party after the service. (We did get to watch the service, though, on the church's live YouTube feed!)  It was just the parents, godparents (Younger Nephew & his wife) and the priest. And SIL -- she knew the priest well, and he bent the rules by calling her up just before the ceremony and said, "Come see your grandson get baptized." She got there just in time! (Not sure where BIL was!) 
• Depending on when the baptism is scheduled, we might not be able to go anyway (if it's during the time we're out west visiting my family -- I'm almost hoping that will be the case!).
• Meanwhile, LGNephew #2's older brother, LGNephew #1, graduated from senior kindergarten this week!  :)  Parents only at the graduation ceremony/party, and Older Nephew took a rare day off work to attend. His wife posted a photo of the entire family on Instagram, with LGN #1 wearing a graduation cap, and a "boomerang" video of him in what appears to be a graduation procession, wearing his cap and carrying a little tealight in his hands, a huge grin on his face.  Awww....  Grade One in September!! (How??!)  
• Annoying thing:  dentist visit this morning. 
• Related annoying thing:  It was at 9 AM -- which meant getting up at the ungodly hour of 5:30 AM, and driving through the city in morning rush hour traffic to get there.  We left at 7:30 AM -- an hour is usually sufficient -- and we only JUST made it there on time!   (There's a reason why Toronto traffic is among the worst in the world...!)   
• Even more annoying:  I have to go back on June 30th for a filling -- possibly two. Sigh.  (I made sure that appointment was later in the morning!  lol)  
• Annoying thing #2:  I went to a certain very large, very well-known site to leave a product/book review this week. Imagine my surprise when a message popped up informing me that I can no longer contribute reviews or other content on that site (!)  -- and all my previous reviews have been removed (!!) -- because of "unusual reviewing activity on this account." (!!!)  
• I'm at a loss here. I don't contribute a lot of reviews to this site. I had a look at their community guidelines. The only thing I can think of is many of my reviews have been of books written by friends, and I may or may not have disclosed that in the reviews.  But it's kind of hard to figure out what I might have done wrong if I can't see what exactly I wrote.  I would have appreciated being notified at the time that the review was being removed and why (because then I might have done better the next time around).  
• This is the same site that suspended my account for almost six months while it wrangled with my bank/credit card company over payment after I was scammed two years ago (and reported the fraud to my bank within minutes). (The conclusion of that saga, with links to previous posts on the incident, here.) 
• I am wondering whether this latest hitch is connected to that one in some way??  
• I'm debating whether it would be worth it to contact the company about this?? 
• Has anyone else had a similar experience?  What do you think? 

Recent reading to share: 

• This Q&A with Gateway Women's Jody Day, posted on the Substack "[B]OLD AGE with Debbie Weil," is well worth a read -- not only for Jody's answers (always worth reading!), but also for Debbie (a parent)'s frank admission of her personal discomfort with childless and childfree people.  We need more honest conversations like this one!  (I don't always recommend reading comments, lol, but the ones on this post are worth a read too!) 
• Jody recommended this Substack post by Poorna Bell, "On not being 'that' type of aunt (or uncle)." 
• (I'm very lucky that I had some pretty fabulous aunts & uncles... MOST of them!  lol)  
• Sara Petersen, who writes on "In Pursuit of Clean Countertops" about momfluencers (and has children herself), recently asked: "Do Kids Ruin Friendships? (And what are we asking with such a question?)"  
• Unfortunately, it's behind a paywall, but she does make some great observations. A couple of sample quotes:  
• "...ultimately, I don’t think it’s particularly hard to see eye-to-eye with my friends who don’t have kids if we’re both operating from an understanding that womanhood as a construct is fucked."
• "The problem is a lack of structural support for caregivers AND the toxic expectation that motherhood is every woman’s “natural” destiny. Women without children have every reason to feel a certain level of alienation and resentment towards a culture which still views them as selfish aberrations, and mothers have every reason to feel a certain level of alienation and resentment towards a culture which tells them they’re doing the most important job in the world without providing them any structural support for that job."  [Boldfaced emphasis Sara's.]
• I see that Carly Marie (and her beautiful beach photos of remembrance) is back on Facebook & Instagram, after several years' absence! 
• In the "IT'S ABOUT TIME" category: the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada issued new compassionate care guidelines for miscarriage patients this week. (Gift link -- **beware the comments!**) The Globe & Mail says "the recommendations include a call for more early pregnancy assessment clinics to be established across the country, similar to the ones in Britain that improve care and reduce waiting times."  They also recommend that loss patients receive mental health screening and offers of support if needed.
• The Toronto Star published a critical article about the lack of transparency in success rates at Ontario fertility clinics (and Canadian clinics generally).  (Gift link.) 
• This Globe & Mail article about co-housing for seniors, while focused on the LGBTQ community, is highly relevant to childless seniors too. (Co-housing of some kind is a topic of much conversation in some of the childless communities I belong to.) 
• (Unfortunately, I used up my quota of gift links for this month, so you might run into a paywall -- sorry!)  
• I was fascinated by this Globe & Mail article on "immersive reading," and the differences in how we absorb books in text form vs audio. (Gift link.)  

Voldemort Day odds & ends

It's been a while, and a pile of odds & ends have been accumulating in my drafts folder!  

• There was an extensive article in the Toronto Star recently on communal living -- a subject of interest for many CNBCers (especially those without partners) -- with a particular focus on the "Golden Girls" model, profiling four senior women living together in London (Ontario).  It discusses the pros & cons of such arrangements, and the move to enact legislation to support them. 
• I was tickled that the article actually mentions that "By 2036, nearly a quarter of Canadians are expected to be 65 or older. Many do not have children to support them in their senior years..." 
• Within that article, there's a link to another story from a few weeks ago that I hadn't seen, about a new documentary about solo aging. (The video is embedded in the story.) There are also links to some resources, including a mention of Ageing Without Children in the UK! 
• I haven't watched the documentary yet, and I don't know if it's viewable outside Canada, but here's a link to the story, fyi. (For some reason, gift links were not offered?? -- hopefully this will work regardless...)  
• Also from the Toronto Star: the stuff of nightmares for fertility patients: "Disturbing errors at Ontario fertility clinics destroy couples’ baby dreams years after province abandoned oversight plans." 
• Sample quote:  "...the person cleaning your teeth or giving you a massage is more highly regulated than the person looking after your embryos."
• Not a new subject, but well written: from Life Without Children, Nadia Huq observes "If I Was in a Hollywood Movie, I’d Be Dead." (Subhead: "Where are the happy endings for single women without kids?")   

Suddenly, everyone is talking about pronatalism (and pushing back on it too)(albeit not necessarily from a childless perspective). Just a couple of relevant articles: 

• From the New York Times: "White House Assesses Ways to Persuade Women to Have More Children." (Pronatalism much?) 
• Beware the comments:  the ones I scanned contained a lot of childless/free-bashing by parents (and vice versa). Not good. :( 
• An excellent piece on this topic from Jill Filipovic (unfortunately, I think it's paywalled for subscribers). "Yes, America Should Make It Easier to Have Children." 
• The kicker is in the subhead:  "But the Trump administration doesn't want to help families. It wants to punish single women and childless people."  Yup. 
• Also related (and very much worth reading -- with an irresistible headline to boot...!), from Jessica Valenti at Abortion Every Day: "Bro-Natalists Are Ruining America." 
• Also related, from the Washington Post:  "You can’t bribe and shame your way to more babies." (Gift link.) 

And, a few for Voldemort Day (my pet name -- i.e., "The Day That Shall Not Be Named," lol):  

• Lisa Sibbett at The Auntie Bulletin and Ryan Rose Weaver of InTending talk about THAT day (both video & transcript available):  "There's No Card for This." Well worth a read!  
• From Y.L. Wolfe at On the Outside:  "A Tribute to the Childless Women Who Feel Invisible on Mother's Day." (Subhead:  "Your feelings and experiences matter, too.")  
• Mild rant:  I was at the bookstore recently and picked up a new title by Uzma Jalaluddin, with the promising title of "Detective Aunty." Always happy to see books about aunties! :)  
• Nevertheless -- while the cover description asks "who better to pry answers from unwilling suspects than a meddlesome aunty?" the title character, in fact, is not an "aunty" but a mother and grandmother, whose daughter is accused of murder. Maybe I'm missing something here, but why then isn't the title "Detective Grandma"??  
• And -- like mothers proclaiming themselves "childless" when they've dropped the kids off at Grandma's for the weekend, or "childless cat ladies" just because they own a cat and their kids are now all at college, why must mothers appropriate yet another title that doesn't quite describe their personal situation?? (I recognize that one can be a mother/grandmother AND an auntie, but still...!) 
• (I may still read the book, but still...!)  
• If you are interested in current events & U.S. politics with a historical perspective, Heather Cox Richardson's Substack, "Letters from an American" is an absolute must-read that I cannot recommend highly enough. On weekends, however, she often switches gears and posts about something else, sometimes just a gorgeous scenic photo. 
• Last night (in advance of That Day), she wrote about an older childfree friend who's influenced her life. It's a delight. :) May we all have a Mrs. A., in our life, and perhaps be that Mrs. A. for someone else!  
• This was written before Easter, not today -- and it has absolutely nothing to do with childlessness, pregnancy loss or infertility -- but it sure made me laugh!  Connie Schulz is such a fabulous writer!  If, like me, you grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, you will certainly enjoy "For Easter: A Tribute to Mom's Beehives." :)  

Odds & ends

• I've been following (on social media) the progress of a friend (a fellow loss mom whom we met through our pregnancy loss support group, 25-ish years ago), who has experienced some big health issues in recent years, and recently had a major medical procedure. Her story is not really mine to tell, but suffice to say this family has had a ton of crap to deal with in the years since we met them, and sadly, her prognosis is not looking good at the moment. Please keep her and her family in your thoughts & prayers. 
• A couple of interesting new blogs/Substacks of note: 
• I never heard of Cyndie Spiegel before, but a friend flagged one of the blog posts she'd highlighted on Instagram:  "Not Exactly ‘Emily in Paris’: Child-Free and the Awkwardness of Belonging in the ‘Burbs." I consider myself childless, not childfree, but otherwise, I can definitely relate...! 
• Sample passage:  "As a social child-free couple, it feels like trying to find a way in through closed doors, each interaction a reminder that where we live is designed with a different life in mind. And not ours, one where we chose not to have kids but still want to socialize, travel, host movie nights and enjoy culture with friends and strangers alike." 
• Other posts to date are also worth reading! 
• Katie Dunn walked away from fertility treatments earlier this year. Now she's living in what she calls the Afterglow:  "...the glow, the satisfaction, the happiness and the delight that can come after. After not getting what you thought you wanted. After learning that your life path will involve ‘otherhood’, and not motherhood. After finding yourself on a path you are not really sure about. After experiencing something that turned your life upside down. I write about the success story that is IVF not working out. Because that is also a success story." 
• The above passage is from the "About" page of her Substack. There are already several essays posted, all of them worth a read. Check them out! 
• At the Life Without Children Substack, Nadia Huq pays tribute to the childless people who have had an impact on her life. A beautiful post! 
• Jody Day calls it "the friendship apocalypse:"  what happens when your friends start having babies, while you remain childless.  From The Guardian: "They were best mates. Then one had a baby, while the other struggled. Two brutally honest takes on what happens when motherhood affects friendship."  
• In her weekly Sunday roundup of links for paid subscribers, Anne Helen Petersen described this article -- "Embryos Out of Reach" in The Cut -- as a "harrowing piece by Culture Study reader Rae Hudson on what happens when your IVF clinic effectively ghosts you." (I would add "infuriating." Also, beware the ubiquitous traditional happy ending.) 
• A paywall popped up when I tried to read this, but I was able to read it when I opened the link in Pocket. 
• Also clinic-related, from the New York Times Magazine (gift link):  "An I.V.F. Mix-Up, a Shocking Discovery and an Unbearable Choice." 
• Also in the New York Times (also gift linked):  Sarah Wildman asks the uncomfortable question:  "If My Dying Daughter Could Face Her Mortality, Why Couldn’t the Rest of Us?"  
• There's a lot of interest in communal living arrangements, in the various childless communities I frequent. Anne Helen Petersen's links this week also included this story from Bon Appetit, about several such arrangements. (Note:  one of the groups featured includes an 8-month-old baby. There are photos.)  
• Also paywalled but accessible (only in part, it seems?) via Pocket:  "The crushing truth about being childless at 64," featuring Robin Hadley, providing "the elusive male perspective."  (Subhead: "As someone who had always dreamed of being a dad, there’s a unique grief that comes with unintentional childlessness.") 

#MicroblogMondays: A few odds & ends

• 
  Something happened today that most Canadians generally don't have to deal with or think about, most of the time:  I got a medical-related bill, via my MyChart app (where you can sign up to receive your medical test results, etc., online) related to my recent emergency trip to the hospital. 
• It was a bill for the ambulance:  $45.  Not bad, eh?  (Same as the bill I got after my first ambulance trip, two years ago.)  
• I paid it (online, with my credit card). And I can probably get some if not all of that back via the supplementary medical insurance dh & I have as pensioners through our previous employer. 
• Glad to be Canadian (not for the first nor the last time, I am sure...!).  
• I saw my first back to school post on social media recently -- last week, on August 5th (!). (Someone's grandkids from the American South.)  Here in Ontario, first day generally isn't until the day after Labour Day (and some kindergarten classes and college programs start a week or so later than that). Which means I have at least six or seven weeks of photos and posts trickling (and then gushing) into my social media to (not??) look forward to. Sigh... 
• As a Canadian, I don't get a vote in the upcoming U.S. presidential election -- but I was tickled to see Kamala Harris chose the governor of Minnesota (my mom's home state, and still home to many of my relatives), Tim Walz, as her running mate. (I'm old enough to remember seeing former MN governor/former VP Hubert Humphrey speaking at the county fair in the early 1970s -- during the 1972 election, possibly? -- when I was a pre-teen -- but, I digress...!) 
• The best part, though, was Walz's frank declaration that he became a dad only after several years of IVF treatments -- and named his daughter Hope because of that. I think this guy gets it (certainly more so than a certain former president and his own VP pick...).   
• There's been some great coverage about that, and I will try to round up a few links to include in a future post...  
• Despite the alarmist/doom-laden headline (eyeroll), I appreciated the thoughtful overall tone of this article from the Guardian by Gaby Hinsliff:  "The shrunken state expects families to fill the voids in health and social care. Woe betide those without children." (Subheading: "As fewer Britons have children, more will be left to navigate our threadbare social care system and overstretched hospitals alone." -- it focuses on the British health care and social services system, but I don't think North America is any better...!)  Key paragraph (boldfaced emphasis mine): 

The last thing I want to do in raising this is add to a mean-spirited moral panic about what Donald Trump’s new right-hand man, JD Vance, so dismissively called “childless cat ladies”. Making people feel guilty – or worse still, frightened – about not having had the children some of them desperately wanted to have but couldn’t, is cruel and futile, since for the average older person finding themselves in need of care it’s about 30 years too late for regrets. Instead, what we need are services shaped for the way families are now, not the way that proponents of a smaller state would like them to be.

• I loved this Substack post from Jennifer Louden at "It's Not Too Late:"  "your yet to be lived lives are calling." Sample passage (boldfaced emphasis hers):  

To live is to whittle away possibilities. To choose one fork in the road over another. And to never know what you might have experienced, who you might have become, if you chose the other way.

Learning to make some kind of peace with your unlived life is part of growing down into the life you did choose. Of course, many of us didn’t get to choose — a host of factors outside our control choose for us, sometimes brutally. This too we have to metabolize if we are to continue to live more than a shadow existence.

We all possess unlived unexpressed potential. Missed opportunities. Stolen opportunities. Parts of ourselves we didn’t develop, roads we could not or did not venture down.

Yes, it is too late for those avenues, those options, those opportunities.

But there are lives ahead of you that are yearning to be explored. It is not too late for that.

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

Odds & ends

A couple of personal notes:  

• It's been overcast, grey, occasionally rainy, and cool to chilly, more often than not lately. Where is my summer??  :(  
• Younger Nephew invited us over for lunch last Saturday, along with his parents (BIL & SIL). They live close enough to us that we could walk there & back. Little Great-Niece entertained us royally  :)  and we left with enough leftovers for lunch for the next several days.  :)  A very nice afternoon! 
• Dh recently remarked on the number of books showing up in his e-book sales emails related to fathers & kids -- and dads and daughters in particular (in advance of Father's Day this weekend).  He usually doesn't say much in this vein, so I'm guessing it was bothering him more than usual...!  :(  

And now, a few good recent reads on my radar lately:  

• A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a thought-provoking piece I'd read by Ruby Warrington in her email newsletter, which (together with a Substack piece from another writer) got me thinking about "information overload versus creativity." 
• Ruby received such a big response to that email that she decided to post the text on her website and to point to it on her social media accounts. I had to do a bit of hunting to find it (it's kind of buried in there!), but here's the link, in case you'd like to read the whole thing:  "Creativity in the The Era of 'Peak Content'."
• Says Ruby, introducing her essay: "I realize the irony of me putting the following into a blog post that I also plan to share on social media. In fact, I hesitated before writing this piece, which I originally shared on my newsletter. Wouldn’t I just be adding to the problem? But the response was overwhelming; clearly, I am not alone in these reflections. Which makes me think a new way of doing things is ready to emerge."
• The New York Times interviewed 10 prominent artists on the subject of grief and how it's changed them. 
• Alison Motluk has a thought-provoking essay about the implications of sperm donation on her Hey Reprotech Substack:  "Anonymous Father's Day." 
• Is U.S. First Lady Jill Biden Hunter Biden's mom? Monica Hesse of the Washington Post weighs in. (I know everyone's story is different, but may step- and adoptive mothers will relate...!)
• As someone whose daughter was stillborn at least in part because of placental issues, I was glad to see this article in the Atlantic:  "A Breakthrough in Preventing Stillbirth." (Subhead: "Half of pregnancy losses have unidentified causes. The placenta could provide answers.")(Gift link, good for 14 days after this post is published.) 
• https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/06/placenta-stillbirths-research/678570/ 
• "You Decided to Become a Mother. What Happened Next?" The New York Times wants to know! (Gift link.)  There's a form you can fill out. (You may be contacted by a reporter for more information.)  It would be nice if they got the message that the journey to motherhood is not always smooth, does not always end happily ever after and, for some of us, motherhood ultimately never happens at all.  
• Jake Tapper mentioned on CNN today that many of the 20 children who were murdered at Sandy Hook school in Connecticut 12 (!!) years ago would be graduating high school right about now. !!!  
• Hearing that was a gut punch that brought tears to my eyes. I remember how incredibly hard it was, watching the parents of Katie's peers proudly posting photos of their child's graduation in June 2016, and then taking them to university that fall (and mourning their "empty nests" -- when mine had never been occupied to begin with...)  My heart goes out to the parents of those precious children who never got the chance to grow up and graduate. 
• At the time Sandy Hook happened, Mel wrote about focusing on remembering just one of the young lives among the many snuffed out prematurely on that terrible day. As I wrote in a blog post at the time, I chose Ana Marquez-Greene, whose family had ties to my home province of Manitoba.  I still think about her whenever Sandy Hook comes up. 

Odds & ends

• Creepy or what?? -- I got a cold sore on my lower left lip/corner recently (ugh). I did not type ONE WORD about it on my laptop or phone (until now!) -- and yet!! I suddenly had ads for Blistex popping up all over my Instagram feed a day or two later!!  I swear these things are LISTENING to us... (I am NOT amused...!) 
• Annoying thing:  I was reading a NYT story, about the growing threat of violence against public figures :(  -- and then the comments. This one raised my hackles (albeit not for political reasons !) -- it said (in part):  "The 60s were 80 years ago and multiple generations ago… "  
• HEY!!!  I was born in 1961... I am NOT 80 years old!! (Yet!!)  (The writer must have flunked math class, lol.)  
• The comments are closed, or I would have definitely shot off a reply...!  
• Richard Osman announced last week that Celia Imrie has been cast as Joyce in the movie adaptation of "The Thursday Murder Club" -- the fourth and final member of the club to be cast. 
• I have to admit -- I know the name, I know I've seen her in movies & TV shows, but I could not picture her at all. I had to look her up. She's not someone I would have thought of for Joyce -- my first pick was Penelope Wilton, followed by Julie Walters. 
• Any guesses/suggestions for who should play the secondary characters??  (Chris, Donna, Bogdan, Stephen...?) 
• The New York Times asks "When Did Everything Become a ‘Journey’?"  (Gift link.)  Good question!  (I'm sure I am guilty of overusing that phrase myself...!) 
• Glynnis MacNicol, unapologetically childfree by choice, who wrote the wonderful memoir "No One Tells You This" (reviewed here), about coming to terms with being single and childless around her 40th birthday, has a new book coming out as she turns 50 ("I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself"). In the New York Times this weekend, she declares "Men Fear Me, Society Shames Me, and I Love My Life." (Gift link.) Excerpt:  

Saying so should not be radical in 2024, and yet, somehow it feels that way. We live in a world whose power structures continue to benefit from women staying in place. In fact, we’re currently experiencing the latest backlash against the meager feminist gains of the past half-century. My story — and those of the other women in similar shoes — shows that there are other, fulfilling ways to live.

It is disconcerting to enjoy oneself so much when there is so much to assure you to expect the opposite, just as it is strange to feel so good against a backdrop of so much terribleness in the world. But with age (hopefully) comes clarity...

Forget about the horror of being alone and middle-aged — there is nothing more terrifying to a patriarchal society than a woman who is free. That she might be having a better time without permission or supervision is downright insufferable. 

• A Globe & Mail opinion piece called for a national sperm donor registry, after a recently released documentary revealed that three donors -- all from the same family in Quebec -- are the biological fathers of hundreds of children across the province. (Gift link.)  
• I don't know if this Toronto Star article (essentially a cautionary tale about aging solo without children) is paywalled, but it's worth a read if you can access it. It's a sobering tale and may be difficult reading for some (it certainly gave me pause), but I believe knowledge/awareness is power. I just wish there was more information included about how such situations could be avoided. "When Antonietta vanished." 
• I appreciated Ryan Rose Weaver's Substack interview with Hayley Manning (who is originally from Toronto/Markham!) of the podcast and Instagram account "Time to Talk TFMR" (termination for medical reasons), on "finding alternative rainbows," when your "rainbow baby" doesn't materialize. (Manning has one child but after several losses, including a TFMR, decided to stop trying to conceive another). There's a lot here that CNBCers will relate to, even if you never experienced pregnancy loss or TFMR.  
• Says Weaver:  "If we want to have better, more trauma-informed conversations with loved ones and clients who have experienced birth and medical trauma, then we need to acknowledge that there are many possible “right” choices to make about how best to heal. Including this one."
• Weaver asks Manning: "There are so many valid reasons for deciding not to pursue subsequent pregnancies after a late loss like ours. I think this surprises people and is not well understood. What made you decide not to pursue a subsequent pregnancy yourself?" 
• Manning responds (and boy, I can relate...!): 

After my last miscarriage, I didn’t know if I could put myself, my husband, or son through more anxious waiting and more loss. I was worried about what it was doing to all of us. I didn’t want to feel sad and anxious anymore, or at least not so constantly. I was tired of tracking my cycle, tired of sex for conceiving, tired of worrying about how old I was (I was about to turn 40). I felt like a husk of my former self. And after every loss, it took more from me, it took longer to emotionally recover. This wasn’t living.

• I really liked what Weaver says here, too: 

What I fear for myself and others is what you’ve described: falling into the same old capitalist-patriarchy trap instead, with a different set of bars. Instead of being sold just one more face serum or sparkly dress or engagement ring, now we’re being sold one more expensive fertility tea, restrictive special diet, or painful medical procedure. Just one more, and we’ll be able to cross what Amelia and Emily Nagoski call The Chasm in their book on burnout — that is, the gap between who we are and what we are culturally expected to be.

In our case, those of us who have “just one,” or no living child at all, will finally be “enough” in the eyes of everyone around us.

What we seem to be talking about is exploring what happens if we stop seeking that. If, as Mary Oliver says, we stop crawling through the desert on our knees, and begin to just let the soft animals of our bodies love what they already love.

Odds & ends on THAT weekend...

• What are you all up to?  We're having a quiet weekend. (Not that most of our weekends aren't quiet...!)  Catching up on reading emails and books.  
• I'll be hanging out at the Childless Collective private online community tomorrow, where there are several Zoom events and an online (text) chat planned. :)  
• From the New York Times on MDay weekend: "An Ode to Those Who Mother Us." (Gift link.)  "Those who love and care for us are not always our parents. For Mother’s Day, The Times asked readers to tell us about the mother figures in their lives."  (Some of the examples cited, albeit not all of them, are childless.)  
• Marsha Lederman in The Globe & Mail had an opinion piece this weekend with a headline that gladdened my heart: "A Mother’s Day plea: Be mindful of those around you." (Gift link.) 
• It starts out very promisingly, citing many of the reasons why Mother's Day can be difficult for so many people. ("I hate to be a bummer, but we should be mindful that this is not a day of brunches and roses for all families.")  
• Then it shifts to the story of Anna Jarvis, who created Mother's Day -- and lived to regret it. 
• Alas, the ending undercuts the message, with a shoutout to the power of mothers. Sigh...
• Jennie Agg at Life, Almost, interviews Jenni Calcraft, a physiotherapist (based in Liverpool, England) who helps women in their physical recovery, postpartum, after pregnancy loss.  Check out the interview, and Jenni's website, the PABL Project. Hopefully this is something that will catch on more widely!  
•  I wish I'd seen this article in time to include in my last "odds & ends" roundup, since there were several (other) articles there that were critical of the fertility industry. This one is from The Atlantic: "America’s IVF Failure." (Gift link, available for 14 days from today.)  Subheader: "One out of every 50 babies born in the U.S. was conceived via IVF. Why is the industry so poorly regulated?" 
• (I don't think Canada is a whole lot better...! -- the legislation regulating the fertility industry is 20 years old -- the result of a royal commission on reproductive technologies created in 1989 (!!) -- and was already considered out of date when it was finally enacted in 2004.) 
• Annoying thing:  My (relatively new) Kobo e-reader has not been synching or downloading new books for almost two months now (AGAIN -- it's been doing this almost since I bought it last fall...!).  I haven't especially needed or wanted a book that's not already been downloaded for a while, but I will soon, and it's annoying. 
• Signing in & out of my account has worked as a fix in the past (and I've usually been able to sync regularly for a while afterwards)  -- but it's like setting up my e-reader all over again from scratch:  I can see all the titles I've purchased, and it keeps my collections intact -- but anything I've downloaded from outside sources gets wiped (I keep all those on my old reader);  all my bookmarks and highlights, etc., disappear;  and it only downloads the most recent 5 books I've purchased -- I have to re-download all the other titles I want to keep ready to go. (Right now, I have more than 600 downloaded.)  Sigh....  
• I created a new blog label/tag, "e-readers," so that I (if not you! lol) can find relevant posts faster! 
• (Very) annoying thing:  I just saw a TV ad for Ragu pasta sauce with the tagline "Cook like a Mother."  ARGGGHHH...  (Apparently it's been around for a few years now.)  
• I Googled "Ragu" and the tagline, and it looks like I'm not the only one who finds it offensive...! (for a variety of reasons that I never would have guessed...!).  
• Non-ALI related:  I've enjoyed reading several of Nick Hornby's novels (and the movies adapted from them), and recently learned he has a Substack newsletter (who doesn't these days??). In a recent post,  he wrote about a new television adaptation of Tom Wolfe's 1998 novel "A Man in Full." (Disclaimer:  I have neither read the book nor seen the TV show.) The show is set in present day, but Hornby points out that Charlie is still very much a man of the time when he was created, and the times he would have lived through to that point:      

He belongs exactly where and when we first met him, at the end of the 1990s. If you start to fiddle around with him so that he at least pretends to understand what’s going on now, he falls apart. The novel was written to reflect that kind of ‘90s man; that was Wolfe’s schtick, the journalistic eye. Wall Street. Property. No women in any boardroom. Swinging dicks. There are assholes running big business now, of course, but it’s a different kind of asshole, one that reflects the times they have lived through.

Moreover, Hornby explains (and I love, love, loved this paragraph -- maybe because he's not that much older than I am....! -- and because he offers some sound advice to writers and others, along with a plug for the importance of considering history):  

No character can exist outside of history; history is a part of what makes us who we are. Working out what has happened during a character’s lifetime is an important step on the way to that character becoming real. Young writers attempting to imagine someone of my age, 67, often tend to attribute a cliched version of ‘elderliness’ to them: retired, walking the dog, doing the crossword, voting for Trump and Brexit, shouting at the television. Well, kid: I was nineteen when the Sex Pistols released their first single, and twenty-five when I heard hip-hop - ‘The Message’ by Grandmaster Flash - for the first time. (And I voted Remain twice, in 1975 and 2016.) Haight-Asbury was pop-culture history to me, something I learned about from my elders. The drugs were mostly the same, although you couldn’t order them from your phone. People had a lot of pre-marital sex. I’m not saying that I’m not ageing. I’m just saying that it’s happening differently for my generation. No pipes, not so many slippers. (Lots of dogs, and probably even more shouting at the TV.) We’re living longer, and we are fitter. Old age doesn’t have a permanent character.

Saturday night odds & ends

• It's still more than a month away, but the onslaught has begun...!  I remember thinking, while out shopping during the week before Easter that, come Monday, all the Easter displays and paraphernalia would be replaced by Mother's Day stuff.  
• I was right. On Tuesday, we were at our local mega-bookstore -- which, these days, has as many tchotchkes for sale as books, it seems...! -- and, even though I had predicted it, it was kind of like a slap in the face to see... 
• Sara Petersen unpacks the fine art of "momfluencing" in her Substack "In Pursuit of Clean Countertops."  In a recent entry, "Who do these jeans think I am? A Very Serious Investigation,"  she dissects an Instagram ad for "mom jeans." The top-rated comment asks "why any adult woman would willing buy a pair of jeans called Mom Jeans," (and -- naturally! -- pointed to the infamous Saturday Night Live sketch...!) 
• My response to that comment:  
  

Especially when something like 20% of adult women are not mothers and never will be (and that number is growing). The ones who chose that life will likely not be happy to have the "Mom" label slapped on their jeans; the ones who wanted to be mothers and couldn't (for whatever reasons -- and that includes me!) don't need that reminder of what they wanted and didn't get. 20% and growing is a big chunk of your market, jean manufacturers...

• I was pleasantly surprised to see it's been "liked" half a dozen times to date, including by Sara herself, who also commented (in all caps!), "GREAT POINT."  Thank you, Sara!   
• I'm about 80% of the way through Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, following the "slow readalong" at Foonotes and Tangents. (We'll finish by the end of the month -- then move on to the next book in the series!)  In Chapter 14, "Devil's Spit," Lady Jane Rochford (married to Queen Anne Boleyn's brother George) comments to Thomas Cromwell (the main character of the book):  

"Have you ever observed that when a man gets a son he takes all the credit, and when he gets a daughter he blames his wife? And if they do not breed at all, we say it is because her womb is barren. We do not say it is because his seed is bad."  

(Of course, these words were written in 2009, when we know the truth of Lady Rochford's words.  Yet the stigma still persists, doesn't it?) 

The passage goes on. Cromwell speaks: 

'It's the same in the gospels. The stony ground gets the blame.' 

The stony places, the thorny unprofitable waste. Jane Rochford is childless after seven years of marriage. 'I believe my husband wishes I would die.'  She says it lightly. He does not know how to answer. He has not asked for her confidence. 'If I do die,' she says, in the same bright tone, 'have my body opened. I ask you this in friendship. I am afraid of poison...'

(!!) 

(Mantel -- as I've pointed out previously -- was childless herself.)    

• There was an interesting article in the Globe and Mail recently about a new chain of fertility clinics, backed by venture capitalists, with offices in Vancouver and Toronto (so far), that focuses on "improving the patient's experience while driving superior outcomes... The ultimate goal is to ensure it takes less time to have a baby, and it costs less to build your family.” Gift link:  "Twig Fertility aims to close the gaps in care for Canadians trying to conceive." Excerpt:  

Twig’s approach includes using technology, as well as staff recruited from complementary industries, such as the hospitality sector, to minimize wait times for patients, while allowing doctors to focus on procedures rather than paperwork. The company is using AI technology, including software designed by an Israeli company, to support decision-making and operational efficiency.

Twig takes a luxury hotel-style approach to treatment, with soft touches such as robes and slippers to slip into when a patient arrives at the clinic.

(No word on whether their success rates to date are any better than at other clinics...!)  

• Also in the Globe & Mail this weekend:  an interesting article titled "No kids? No problem:  How Canada’s childfree and cash-rich couples are spending their time and money." (Gift link.) Some interesting points raised (and nice to see an article with Canadian references, including RRSPs, TFSAs and the like!).  
• Note: All the couples (and it's all couples, all male/female) are childFREE vs childLESS, all from cities, none retired yet.  And (as usual!) beware the comments!   
• Sue Fagalde Lack, who blogs at Childless by Marriage and Unleashed in Oregon, has started a new Substack, focused on living and aging alone as an "elder orphan." Check it out, and subscribe!:  "Can I Do It Alone?" 
• Jennie Agg at Life, Almost, writes about the complex dilemma of "'Sharenting' after loss:  Once you have a living child - to post or not to post?" (Not something I will ever have to grapple with, of course, but I'm sure some of you will relate..!) 
• I wanted to stand up and cheer when I read this article from the Guardian by Kathryn Bromwich:  "What is it about us dinks (dual income, no kids) that so many people dislike?"  Excerpt:  

In 2024, it should not be seen as an affront if people lead a slightly different life from the narrow confines of what is expected: other people’s choices are not a judgment on your own. Reproducing is one of the biggest, life-altering decisions we can make, with a profound impact on our time, freedom, career and finances. We should all be thinking carefully about whether it is right for us on an individual level. Even among those who do want to start a family, the costs are prohibitive: more and more young people are being priced out of parenthood. Last month, the birthrate fell to a record low.

Yet having children is so societally ingrained that non-parents continue to face stigma and are expected to justify their lifestyles in a way that parents are not. The main objections to dinks appear to be that they post smug social media updates, and that they travel too much. But do parents not post proudly about their bundles of joy? And isn’t having children the worst possible thing you can do in terms of CO2 emissions?

At the heart of this judgment is an insulting insinuation that some lives are worth more than others (commenting on tragedies “as a mother” does not make your viewpoint more valuable, as writer Amy Key has pointed out). Being a parent, or not being a parent, is not intrinsically more or less moral. This is not a battle of parents versus non-parents, childless versus childfree. Instead of entrenching ourselves further into camps, we should be moving towards a future where all choices are seen as equally valid – with highs and lows, regrets and joy – and that it is simply not up to other people to judge.

• Also from the Guardian recently:  "‘It’s money’: the Britons who want children but feel they can’t."  Fertility issues, climate change and reluctant male partners (or lack of a suitable one) were among the other reasons mentioned why people did not have the children they wanted.