"The Bullet That Missed" by Richard Osman

"The Bullet That Missed" by Richard Osman is the third/latest installment of The Thursday Murder Club mysteries, featuring a loveable quartet of aging amateur detectives who, instead of playing golf or knitting, are spending their golden years trying to solve cold cases. There's former union leader/tough guy Ron; gentle, well-mannered psychiatrist Ibrahim; tough-as-nails MI5 agent Elizabeth; and slightly batty nurse and diarist Joyce (and her new puppy, Alan!), all residents of an upscale British retirement village. Also returning: handsome Polish construction worker/handyman Bogdan, local police officers Chris & Donna, and local crime boss Connie Johnston, who has sworn vengeance against Ron for putting her in jail (one of the outcomes of Book #2).  

The story picks up shortly after the last one ("The Man Who Died Twice") left off. In this installment, the gang is looking at the unsolved case of a local TV anchor whose car went off a cliff and whose body was never found. At the same time, Elizabeth is being threatened by a mysterious new adversary who is pressuring/blackmailing her to commit a murder of her own. 

In addition to the main and supporting characters we've come to know and love from the previous two books, there are a few new characters thrown into the mix who may or may not become regulars in the future. (I'm hoping they will.)  And like the other books, there's wit, humour, plot twists and red herrings galore. Quite simply, it's a whole huge lot of fun. (The chapter where Ron's new girlfriend takes him to a spa had me in absolute stitches -- as did the chapter where the club confronts a would-be assassin en masse.)

I can't wait for TMC #4.  :)  (Currently due in September 2023... a whole year away!!  :(   )  

I've rated the previous two books 5 stars each. I'm giving this one 5 stars too -- but in some ways, I think it's my favourite TMC book yet.  :)  (My reviews of "The Thursday Murder Club" and "The Man Who Died Twice," here and here.)  

I would recommend reading these books in order, as each one so far has picked up where the others left off, and there are certain storylines that continue from one volume to the next. 

This was Book #38 read to date in 2022 (and Book #2 finished in September), bringing me to 84% of my 2022 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 45 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 6 books ahead of schedule. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2022 tagged as "2022 books."  

Odds & ends & funerals for the weekend

• Last Friday, dh's aunt (his mom's sister) died at the age of 89. (I mentioned it in my #MicroblogMondays post earlier this week.) 
• I was still dealing with my cold (I'm doing better, but not 100 per cent yet), and of course I don't want to come down with anything worse before we head west to see my family in two weeks' time... so we took our own car to the afternoon visitation on Tuesday (even though we often go to these things together with BIL & SIL), and I kept my N-95 mask on almost the entire time. (I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who also wore masks... nowhere near all who came, of course, but more than I had anticipated.)  
• There was an evening session as well, and many of the cousins who came to the afternoon session stayed on for that -- heading over to a nearby restaurant to eat in between. They invited us to come along, and if these were normal times, we would have gladly said yes. I miss getting together with them. But we still haven't eaten in a restaurant since March 2020, and as I said, I'm trying to be extra-cautious right now before our trip west -- so we sent our regrets and headed home. We saw them all again (plus the cousins who came to the evening visitation) the next morning at the funeral mass & committal. (We wore masks then too.) 
• SIL called us from their car as we were driving home from the funeral -- she & BIL, their aunt, her daughter and son-in-law were all going out for lunch at a restaurant near our condo building, and did we want to come? Again, regretfully, we said thanks  no thanks. It was nice to be asked, even though I'm pretty sure they knew we'd say no...! 
• Dh's cousin gave a lovely eulogy... which of course made me wonder: who (if anyone) will eulogize me when I'm gone? (And what will they say??  lol)  
• And now, we get to do it all over again...!  :(  This morning, we had a text (not unexpected) from dh's cousin:  HER mother died, age 91. We are just waiting to hear about the arrangements. 
• This aunt was dh's mother's sister-in-law (married to her oldest brother), and had been living at the same seniors residence as the other aunt for the past several years. She was in good health until just recently, and spent the last few weeks in hospice/palliative care, where she was still asking for Tim Hortons "iced caps" (iced cappucinos) almost to the very end. Her daughter texted another cousin while we were all at the funeral home for the other aunt, saying the priest had been called to give last rites, so we knew the end was near. This aunt said she hoped she & the other aunt would "go hand in hand," and she pretty much got her wish. 
• Dh lived at their house for the first few years of his life, before his dad bought their own house, a few blocks away, in the Greektown area of Toronto. All the relatives lived near each other in those days, but this family was the closest to them, geographically, and he & BIL were particularly close to the two kids -- the daughter is two years older than dh, and the son is the same age as BIL. (He's referred to elsewhere in this blog as "Cousin/Neighbour" -- he lived (and still lives) a few blocks from us in our old community.)  
• I was able to wear my dressy capris and sandals to the first aunt's funeral... but I think this one will have to be long pants, shoes & socks! Right on cue on the first day of fall, the weather turned cooler, and since then, it's gotten even chillier! 
• I know a lot of people who are positively giddy over the advent of fall this week. I like fall too -- the end of the extreme heat & humidity, the beautiful fall colours (Ontario is one of the best places in the world to see them, I think!) -- but it's a hard/sad time of year for me too. Essentially, it's a season when everything starts to die -- plants, tree leaves, the old year, the light (darkness is already coming way too early for my liking). And way too many people I love have died at this time of year too. 
• Case in point: see above. :(  
• Last year at this time, dh's cousin's brother-in-law died in early October -- followed by his brother/her husband, a day later (!!) and then their mother/her MIL, with a month after them. Yikes!!  
• My grandparents both died in October, almost a year to the day apart from each other -- Grandpa in 1998, Grandma in 1999. And Grandpa died just a few days after I had returned to work after Katie's stillbirth. 
• (*CLUNK!!*) -- That was me, keeling over in shock (lol), after Infertile Phoenix recently pointed her readers to an article on CNN with the message that it's OK to quit doing things -- AND!! quitting infertility treatment is used as one of the examples!!!  
• I've read articles before with the same message (and they're tagged on this blog as "the Q word," lol), but I don't think I have EVER seen a mainstream media article supporting the idea that it's OK to quit infertility treatments. Wow!!     
• (*CLUNK!!* -- again! lol) I have Bloglovin' on my opening set of tabs, even though (apart from one brief blip) it hasn't been working/up for a full month -- since Aug. 23rd (!). Lo and behold, there it was when I turned on my laptop this afternoon!!  I'm enjoying it while it lasts....! 

#MicroblogMondays: Odds & ends from a busy week

This past week or two has been one huge blur. I am floundering, trying to keep up with email and blog posts and notifications and everything else coming at me, all at once...! 

• First, being sick -- for more than a week now. :p  It started with a very sore throat, and proceeded to sneezing, a full head and loose cough (which is still hanging in there...). I am feeling better overall, but definitely not 100% yet. I have not been out of the house in more than a week. :p  I was so looking forward to getting out a bit, now that my surgeries are over and I'm recovered from those. No such luck...! 
• I took another rapid test for covid this morning -- which, like the previous two, earlier on, was negative. But I'm still obviously sick. :p  Bah humbug. :( 
• Last week, I had to switch my follow-up appointment with the surgeon who did my gallbladder removal surgery from in-office to over the phone. I was supposed to see my optometrist tomorrow as a follow-up to my eye surgery (and possibly get some new glasses), but I called this morning to let them know I'm not well, and now that's been postponed until late October. Sigh. 
• Second, it was World Childless Week. (You can find all my related posts for this year's WCW tagged "WCW 2022".)  I have waded through about three of the seven days' worth of amazing submissions on the WCW site so far, managed to catch several of the webinars live and watch a few more after the fact. All WCW content from every year since it began is archived on the WCW site. 
• Third, of course, the Queen. I was up at 5 a.m. this morning to watch the funeral, and barely budged from my chair for the next seven hours until the last royal disappeared through the gate into the castle after the service of committal at Windsor. Adding to the fun, I spent several hours live texting with my penpal of the past 45 years (!!) from New Zealand (where it was late at night), as we have done for the last several royal events (plus an Oscar ceremony or two, lol). My cousin in Manitoba -- half Scottish on his dad's side, and a retired police officer -- also texted me when he realized I was up -- he was watching too. 
• NOBODY does pomp and ceremony better than the Brits!! 
• I teared up a few times. I got the chills when the Westminster Abbey choir started singing "I am the Resurrection and the Life..."  But I didn't lose it until the long walk up to the chapel at Windsor, when the BBC announcer helpfully pointed out the Queen's pony Emma, patiently waiting near the gates for the coffin to pass by. And then the two corgis, which totally finished me off. ;) 
• Did anyone else notice the Google logo on the search page was totally black today in honour of the Queen?? 
• Every now & then over the past few days, I clicked over to YouTube to watch a few minutes of the live feed of the Queen lying in state and the people who waited hours and hours (and hours!) in "the Queue of all Queues," filing past (and also to check out the live updates on how long the queue was). Many people paused to bow/nod their heads -- but I saw others doing full from-the-waist bows and curtsies. One man dropped to one knee and crossed himself. I saw one middle-aged woman bow her head & then, with a sad smile on her face, blow a kiss at the casket. That one got me teary.  
• Fourth, dh's aunt (his mother's sister) passed away on Friday. She was 89. It was one of those deaths that was kind of a blessing, in a way -- her quality of life has not been good the last few years, especially since the pandemic began -- and we haven't been able to see her in quite some time, because of that (although dh & his brother got to see her one last time in the hospital last weekend, before she died). 
• (His mother's youngest sister lives near us. She's 77, and is the last of her siblings.) 
• Visitation is tomorrow (two hours in the afternoon and then two in the evening, with a two-hour break in between), and the funeral is Wednesday. I've been debating whether I should go, because of my cold. As I said, I've tested negative for covid, but it's still been a bad cold.... but not going at all seems unthinkable. Dh thinks we should go for the afternoon tomorrow, pay our respects and say hi to everyone, and then we'll just go home. I will certainly wear a mask -- I would even if I didn't have a cold (but I am willing to bet I'll be one of the very few people wearing one). (Most of the cousins will likely be staying for the whole six hours -- the daughters have ordered food for the family for in between the sessions, to be served in the funeral home's reception centre.)
• When dh's mother died, 40 years ago, both sides of the family rallied round dh, his younger brother and their dad -- none of whom knew anything about cooking or keeping house. This aunt had them over for dinner just about every single night (and she was an excellent cook! -- dh said that out of all his aunts, her cooking was the closest to his mom's), did their laundry and cleaned the house regularly, on top of her own. They all adored her. I did too, once I met her -- 39 years ago, in the summer of 1983. 
• I'm sure I wasn't exactly what she had in mind for a wife for dh -- I wasn't Italian! -- but she never made me feel anything less than welcomed and loved. Dh's dad asked her to help set things up in our apartment while we were on our honeymoon -- I hadn't been there since we signed the rental agreement a few months earlier, and we did NOT have much stuff!  He gave her some money and she bought sheets & a bedspread and had the bed all made up, and stocked our kitchen cupboards and refrigerator with some staples. 
• I remember her visiting for the first time after we got back, and exclaiming over how clean and neat everything was. "She's obviously not looking too hard...!"  I muttered to dh. 
• We had many meals at her house over the years, especially in the early years of our marriage -- always leaving with leftovers or baking or a jar of tomato sauce. 
• We will sure miss her. 
• On a related note: it's been quite a while since we've had to dress up for anything (pre-pandemic, certainly! -- and we certainly don't dress up very often at all since we both left work in 2013-14) -- so we pulled a few things out of our closet yesterday to try on before dh's aunt's funeral events -- to make sure they still FIT, for one thing! (lol).  
• Yes, they fit -- BUT! OMG... the DUST!!  lol  When I took my pants off the hanger, you could clearly see a line where the dust had settled! And dh's dress shirt -- one of the few he has left -- was slightly (but not too noticeably -- I hope...!) yellowed on the collar.
• Needless to say, everything went into the washing machine. I got out the ironing board and pressed it all this afternoon while watching highlights from the Queen's funeral all over again. 
• Time is zooming along. A week from Friday is our cottage weekend with BIL, SIL & dh's cousins, and then the weekend after that, we'll be heading "home" for (Canadian) Thanksgiving to see my family. And we have a LOT of things that need to get done before then...!  

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

World Childless Week 2022, Day Seven: Moving Forwards

Day Seven of World Childless Week  -- the final day -- is focused on "Moving Forwards." (This has been the theme of the final day of WCW for its entire six-year existence.) 

We don’t need a big Plan B, C or D; we don’t need any plans at all. All we need is the courage to make small changes, the time to notice the positive differences and the acceptance that moving forwards can also include stopping points, roundabouts and u-turns. It doesn’t matter how we get to the final destination, or how long it takes. We just need to love ourselves at each point and celebrate each milestone. 

How have you moved forwards? 

The passage of time and looking back on certain milestones will often bring a shock of recognition of how things have changed, how far I've come and how differently I feel now than I did then. (One advantage of getting older is that fewer and fewer people ask and hint and prod you about pregnancy plans... although eventually, you start getting questions about how many grandchildren you have instead...!)

I think back to one particular incident, at Christmastime, a few years after we had thrown in the towel on infertility treatments, which showed me that perhaps I was further down the road of acceptance than I had realized.  I wrote about it here. 

Another measure of progress would be my increasing ability/willingness to enter a Baby Gap store. Once, it was a source of pain, to be avoided. I eventually did get to the point where I could go in to buy a baby shower gift (even if was often just a gift card...!). These days, I love to go there (and other children's wear stores) to shop for Little Great-Nephew -- albeit the little girls' racks still have the power to give me occasional pangs... 

There are probably other markers of progress that I've written about over the years, although I can't recall any other specific posts to share here with you right now. 

One thing I remember from our pregnancy loss support group days is that you never realized just how far you'd come down this road less travelled until someone new arrived, fresh and raw in their own grief. I still see that to some extent today when I read social media posts and responses from younger women who are new to the stunning realization that they will not have the children they assumed they would have. 

Check out today's content on the WCW site, including community members' contributions (new ones being added every 15 minutes throughout the day) and FIVE free, live webinars and workshops:  

• 5 a.m. ET:  "Meditation: Using Gentle Self-Care to Move You Forwards," a workshop with Bindi Shah. 
• 7 a.m. ET:  "Hello You: Online Body Connection," a workshop with Victoria Robinson. 
• 9 a.m. ET:  "Is it Possible to Move Forward?" -- a workshop with Helen Segal, focusing on creativity and the healing arts. 
• 11 a.m. ET:  "The Chanting Circle: Let Flow" with Helen Louise Jones. 
• 2 p.m. ET:  "Accepting the New Me," a webinar hosted by Stephanie Joy Phillips, with Victoria Firth, Kat Brown, Lana Brown and Lucy North. 

All webinars will be recorded and uploaded to the Day Seven page for anyone who cannot make the live events.

World Childless Week 2022, Day Six: "We Are Worthy"

The Day Six theme of World Childless Week -- as it has been for the past four years -- is "We Are Worthy."  

Someone recently said to me, “A peacock is most vulnerable when it shows its beauty.” It made me think of the beauty we all hold within us that can be diminished and feel tainted by the pronatalism surrounding us every day. We need to speak up and speak out until every childless person feels equal and confident to shine whilst showing their vulnerability. 

Today, let’s share and celebrate, why we are worthy and beautiful.

Four years ago, there was an online summit for childless people during National Infertility Awareness Week on the theme of "We Are Worthy," and I wrote about it and my thoughts on the subject of worthiness here. I can't think of any other posts I've written about worth/worthiness in particular, but I have pointed out plenty of examples of pronatalism and how the childless/free experience has been marginalized, when I've found them. I didn't know the term "pronatalism" when I first started this blog, so I started using the tag "mommy mania" -- the best I could come up with at the time. I've gradually been re-tagging them as "pronatalism." 

The "bible" on pronatalism from a childfree (by choice) perspective would be "The Baby Matrix" by Laura Carroll (which I reviewed here).  A real eye-opener, and highly recommended!  

On the flip side, I suppose, would be the posts I've written about or touching on feminism, tagged as "the f word." I was brought up thoroughly steeped in the second-wave feminist messages of the 1970s (for good and for bad);  I have always believed and often said that I am more than my uterus. Unfortunately, that's still not the message that society tends to send us or the people around us....!  

Check out today's content on the WCW site, including community members' contributions (new ones being added every 15 minutes throughout the day) and (count 'em!) FOUR free webinars and workshops! 

• 4 a.m Eastern Time: "Childlessness and Pets," with Judy Graham, Narelle Hudson, Anne Xavier Altamore, Rochelle Trimnell-Ritchard and Sarah Roberts, all from Australia. 
• 11 a.m. ET:  "Pronatalism May Be Getting Louder, But So Are the Childless," with Stephanie Phillips, Jessica Hepburn and Annie Kirby from England, and Hilary Fennell from Ireland.  
• 12:30 p.m. ET: "Mindful Yoga Practice," with Sarah Jane Smith from British Columbia, Canada. 
• 2 p.m. ET:  "We Are Worthy of Your Support," with six childless women from around the world. 

These will all be recorded and uploaded to the Day Six page for anyone who cannot make the live events. 

(On the subject of pets -- dh & I do not and never have had them during our married life -- although I had a puppy and a turtle when I was growing up, and we're constantly being told that we "need" to get a dog. (eyeroll)  I wrote posts in 2013 and 2017 explaining why we choose to remain petless. We do adore & dote on Older Nephew's miniature dachshund. :)  You can find all my pet-related posts here.) 

World Childless Week, Day Five: "It's All in God's Plan"

It's Day Five of World Childless Week, and today's theme tackles the thorny issue of religion. 

Comments referring to religion easily fall off the tongues of strangers, friends and family without consideration of who they are addressing or how their comments may be received. Have you been upset, shocked or angered by the ignorance and cruelty of a religious based comment and how did you deal with the conversation? 

Why do you feel remarks touching on religion are inappropriate? 

Some personal religious background:  I was brought up Anglican/Episcopal, although we attended the United Church of Canada during the five years when we lived in a town with no Anglican congregation, and I attended Catechism classes with my best friend there, who was Catholic. As an adult, my church attendance has been sporadic. We joined an Anglican congregation when we were hoping to start a family, because we agreed that our children should learn something about God and faith and the Bible -- if only because the Bible is the basis for so much of our literature and other cultural touchstones. You miss out on an awful lot if you don't know your Bible stories and verses...!  

The parish we attended was lovely and supportive in the aftermath of our daughter's stillbirth -- we held a small family funeral service there -- but as time went on, and the women in the pews who had been pregnant at the same time as me returned with their babies to baptize -- and then a second, and a third -- it got harder and harder to remain. At the same time, encouraged by the then-minister, the congregation began taking on a more American-style fundamentalist/evangelical flavour, which made both of us increasingly uncomfortable, and we gradually drifted away and stopped going. We have yet to attend a service locally since we moved here six years ago. 

These days, I'm mostly ambivalent about church attendance, and religion generally. I believe Jesus (who, by the way, had no children...!) had the right ideas about how people should treat each other, and think it's sad that so many churches and so-called Christians have strayed so far from those core messages. I take some comfort in the ritual and liturgy and hymns of my youth (some of which I can still sing by heart) -- but I do not believe it's necessary to attend church regularly to be a good Christian, or a good human being. I don't believe any one religion or denomination (and certainly no one person) has all the answers. 

The pronatalism inherent in so many religions and denominations is an obvious and painful problem for many childless/free people.  "Be fruitful and multiply," we are told. The stories of Sarah and Hannah and Elizabeth are hammered into our heads -- barren women whose faith was ultimately rewarded with a child. 

I don't know why some people get babies they don't want and others desperately want babies they never get. I don't know why my daughter didn't get to stay with me. I don't know why I was never able to have another child. "God needed an angel," some would tell me. "It's all in God's plan." (Like that's supposed to make me feel better??) "She's in a better place." (Better than being with me & her dad??)  "Everything happens for a reason... we'll find out, someday." 

Well, vague promises of "someday" aren't good enough for me. What reason could possibly be good enough to justify taking my child from me??  The God I believe in (to the extent that I believe in God) would never deliberately do that, to me or any other parent. 

As I've often said: if there is a God and a heaven, and I get there someday, He & I are going to have a very lonnnnnnggggggg talk....!   

After our daughter was stillborn, someone recommended the book "When Bad Things Happen to Good People" to me -- by Harold Kushner, a Jewish rabbi who lost his son. It's been a long time since I read it, but I do remember I found it tremendously comforting. 

Most of my posts on this subject have been tagged "religion/faith" -- although you might find a couple under "WTF?" and "people are idiots," lol. 

Check out today's content on the WCW site, including community members' contributions (new ones being added every 15 minutes throughout the day) and a free, live webinar at 2 p.m. Eastern Time hosted by Stephanie Phillips and featuring four childless women with diverse religious backgrounds. This webinar will be recorded and uploaded to the Day Five page for anyone who cannot make the live event. 

World Childless Week 2022, Day Four: Childlessness in the Workplace

Day Four of World Childless Week is focused on the topic of "Childlessness in the Workplace."  

Have you been bombarded with mum talk during a Zoom chat, swamped with pregnancy announcements in emails, trapped in a maternity leave office party, expected to work late, denied flexi-time, fallen to the bottom of the list for holidays or just felt embarrassed to approach your line manager or personnel department because you are childless? Perhaps you’ve spoken out and instigated changes or helped to create inclusive policies? Have you run to the loo for sanity and to shed a few tears or decided enough is enough and spoken out for change? 

Let’s talk about the problems we face and what we can do to create positive changes in the workplace. 

I'm retired now -- downsized out of my job, eight years ago at the age of 53 -- but before that, I worked in communications for the same large Canadian bank for 28 years. Most of my work-related posts on this blog are tagged "work/office." I didn't have time to go through all of them in anticipation of this topic, but there are a couple of posts and anecdotes that I remembered and wanted to share with you here. 

I never thought much about it at the time but later realized that, for more than 15 years, my closest co-workers were a core group of older women, most of whom did not have children. I knew that several of them had thought they'd be mothers someday, but it didn't happen for them, for various reasons. They rallied around me and supported me when my only baby was stillborn in 1998. 

And I needed their support: in the first year or so alone after my loss, I had to endure TEN office pregnancy announcements/maternity leaves -- and there were many more to come in the years after that. Over time, those supportive close co-workers all left or retired, and I was left to find my way among new (and increasingly younger) colleagues, most of whom hadn't been around at the time of my loss and knew nothing about it, and who were getting married and starting to have kids of their own. I was fortunate that I never once had to work over Christmas and was able to go west to be with my family over the holidays -- but I still endured umpteen baby showers and office visits, mat leaves (and the additional work they entailed for the rest of us, even when the position was covered), excited chatter about ultrasounds and bragging about grandchildren. Sometimes it was harder/easier than others (and I've written here about some of those times). Whenever it got to be a bit too much, I would quietly slip  out the back door near my cubicle for a tea break or early lunch and/or go browse the magazine stand in the concourse downstairs for half an hour (even if I'd just been for a tea a while earlier). 

Canada's Employment Equity Act came into effect in 1986, just as I joined the company, and it was one of the first things I remember writing about for the staff magazine. "Employment equity" gave way to "diversity" to "diversity and inclusion," and I wrote extensively about these issues over the next 28 years.  There was lots about the four groups designated under the Employment Equity Act (which the bank, as a federally regulated institution, had to track and provide progress reports about) -- women, visible minorities, natives and people with disabilities (some of the terminology may have been updated since I left work!).

In later years, employee resource groups (ERGs) were formed for women, natives/aboriginals, people with disabilities, employees from the Caribbean and Asia, Spanish-speaking employees, LGBTQ+ employees, GenNext (younger employees). These groups were formed for the purposes of networking, education and to advise the company on policy issues. I heard lots and lots about the challenges of working parents and how to accommodate them, but nowhere did I ever hear anything mentioned about employees without children and how to better accommodate their particular issues and interests. Jody Day of Gateway Women has called it "the biggest diversity issue HR has never heard of." 

By the mid-1990s, "flexibility" was the watchword -- flexible benefits and flexible working arrangements (such as working from home/remotely, compressed work weeks, flexible hours and job sharing). Early on in this blog, I wrote a post about work that mentioned an interview I did -- with a childless/free person -- for a story in our staff magazine when the bank first adopted flexible working arrangements. This was some years before I realized I was going to wind up without kids myself. and I've often thought about her and what she had to say in the years since then.  

In 2011, toward the end of my career, I attended a workshop on diversity and inclusion that had a huge impact on my understanding of these issues and how they connected to infertility, loss and childlessness. Here's an excerpt, and here's a link to the whole thing, if you'd like to read it: 

Part of the presentation was to open us up to the idea that diversity is more than just the four groups designated under Canada's Employment Equity Act -- women, Aboriginals, persons with disabilities and visible minorities -- that diversity encompasses all sorts of things about us. Our religion, political views, education, age, education, socio-economic background -- and lots of other, more subtle things about us, too. 

The part of the presentation that really hit home for me (& got me taking notes) was the idea of privilege, of insiders and outsiders....  Life is easy when you're an insider, isn't it? 

...As you can imagine, throughout the presentation, I was thinking about my own particular frames of reference -- bereavement, infertility, childlessness -- and the challenges they present to the majority worldview. About how so much of the world is built with families in mind -- not childless couples (or single people, for that matter). How so many people just assume that they WILL get married, get pregnant within a reasonable timeframe, bring home a live, healthy baby nine months later (and then perhaps another one or two after that)? 

Until they don't. 

And how, when the way we try to build our families falls outside the "norm" -- dead children who are nevertheless talked about openly and treated like the important family members they are -- adoption, IVF, donor eggs, surrogates -- families of two (without children), families with two dads or two moms -- then people who have never had to think about building their own family in any way except the "norm" somehow feel threatened. Their assumptions about their cozy, easy, privileged world have been challenged. They find it difficult to relate to us in the same way they did when they assumed that we were just like them. 

I wonder how many fertile people would think of themselves as privileged or an "insider" because of their fertility? 

And how many of us who have had difficulty achieving what most consider to be a "normal" family structure perpetually feel like left-handers in a right-handed world?

Thankfully, things are beginning to change (even if I'm not going to benefit). The pandemic, while exacerbating the parent/childless divide in the workplace, also seemed to bring about a new awareness in some quarters that non-parents have separate and legitimate interests that need attention too. The Brits, as usual, seem to be leading the way on this front. The University of Bristol, for example, has an entire section on its website dealing with childlessness as a diversity & inclusion issue, and how childless/free colleagues can be supported. Within the Lighthouse Women private community (formerly part of Gateway Women), there's a sub-group for Workplace Changemakers involved in creating systemic change around childlessness in the workplace.

Check out today's content on the WCW site, including community members' contributions (new ones being added every 15 minutes throughout the day) and three free, live webinars: 

• The first, at 4 a.m. Eastern Time (!), looks at being childless in the workplace "Down Under," with Penny Rabarts and Liz Campbell in Australia. 
• At 7 a.m. ET, explore "Navigating Networking" with Berenice Smith, Karin Enfield de Vries and Sarah Lawrence. 
• And at 2 p.m. ET, a conversation about how to advocate for our community in the workplace: "Employers and Policies: How to Bring Childlessness into the Conversation," with Christine Erickson, Julia Forminova, Vita Stige-Skuskovnika and Dr. Fiona McRonald. 

These sessions will be recorded and uploaded to the Day Four page for anyone who cannot make the live event.