75: Who Will Take Care of Me When I Get Old? With Jody Day

Jody Day is back for a second episode on the podcast!  Our first conversation was so eye-opening for me, I had to have her back after I had actually digested all of what she shared with me. 

 Jody is often referred to as the founder of the "childless movement" and is the founder of Gateway Women, a global advocacy and support network for childless women. She’s the author of what many professionals consider to be the ‘go-to’ book on the topic, "Living the Life Unexpected: How to Find Hope, Meaning and a Fulfilling Future Without Children" (link below). 

Jody was chosen as one of the BBC’s 100 Women in 2013 & a UK Digital Woman of the Year in 2021.  She’s a global thought leader on female involuntary childlessness, a psychotherapist, a 2017 and 2022 TEDx speaker, and she’s been an Ambassador for World Childless Week since its inception in 2017. 

Jody and I have a deep and eye-opening conversation about ageism and pronatalism in today's society and how they affect childless women's perception of their future.  We delve into the fears, challenges, societal and economic impacts associated with aging without children.  We explore body image and self-perception through midlife as well as purpose and potential of childless women. 

Listen to this episode to discover:

• how childless women can shift their mindset about midlife, ageing and who will take care of them when their old
• a powerful exercise for reconciling connection with your body - something that most women lose as early as their teen years
• the transformational power of community 

Where to find Jody:
Website: Gateway-women.com
Instagram: @gatewaywomen
                         @apprenticecrone
Jody's Book: Living the Life Unexpected: How to Find Hope, Meaning and a Fulfilling Future Without Children

Where to find Sheri:
Instagram @sherijohnsoncoaching
Website: sherijohnson.ca

Other References in Episode:

Podcast episode: Patriarchy and Pronatalism and Their Impact on Childless Women, with Jody Day

Webinar: Fireside Wisdom with Childless Elder Women (register here)

Book: The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd
Book: The Baby Matrix by Laura Carroll
Book: The Beauty Myth By Naomi Wolf
Book: The Wisdom of Menopause by Dr. Christiane Northrup

Transcript

Sheri Johnson: 0:02

Hi, I'm Sherri Johnson and you are about to discover how to embrace your life as a childless woman who wanted to have a family and never could. This is where we combine mindset shifting tools with practical tips so you can break free of outdated societal norms that condition us all to believe that women without kids just don't measure up to the moms. It's where we take action on processing grief and accelerating the healing journey so you can feel free. When childless women awaken their self-worth, they transform from hopeless and inadequate to worthy, accepting and purposeful. Think of this podcast as your weekly dose of light bulb moments that will shift your perspective as a childless woman about yourself, about your innate power to change yourself, your future and maybe even the world we live in. If that's what you want, then keep on listening. Welcome back to the Awakening Worth podcast.

Sheri Johnson: 1:01

I am really excited to have one of my previous guests back with me today, jodi Day. I interviewed her about just over a year ago and we had so much to talk about that I just had to have her back as I start my new season here. We're about six or seven episodes in here and I'm going to ask Jodi to do a quick introduction of her, but if you want the full recap, go back to the episode with her from about a year ago. I'm going to link that up in the show notes. I can't remember the number of it at the moment, but, jodi, I want to welcome you back to the show. I'm really excited. Our last conversation was so eye-opening for me that I can't wait to find out what's up on today's show.

Jody Day: 1:53

Thank you so much. I'm so happy for having me back and sharing this with your listeners again. It's a real pleasure to be back. It was a great conversation very well received by my audience as well, so I'm sure they'll be very happy to hear from you again.

Sheri Johnson: 2:09

Oh, thank you. Yes, it's also well received from my audience. It's a real pleasure to have you back. For those who didn't hear the first episode and may not know, you maybe start with a little bit about your story and then we'll dive into the deep stuff.

Jody Day: 2:28

Okay, well, so my name is Jodi Day. I'm the founder of Gateway Women, which is a global advocacy and support network for women who are childless not by choice. I'm a psychotherapist and the author of Living the Life Unexpected how to Find Hope, meaning and a Fulfilling Future Without Children. I live in rural Ireland and, yeah, I don't have any kids and I have a dog, and so that's kind of who I am, and I think one of the most important things now is I'm someone who's also aging without children. I will be 60 next year, in 2014,.

Jody Day: 3:04

I was one of four kind of campaigners who started something in the UK called Aging Without Children, which I'm no longer involved with but still very you know, very supportive of. That's gone on to become a charity in the UK and I think in COVID it became incredibly, incredibly clear how vulnerable people aging without children can be, not having familial support around them when things happen in life. An awful lot of people are also aging without partners as well as without children, and that isolation, you know, not only can it be difficult to deal with, it can also be quite dangerous, and our society is sleepwalking around the issue of people aging without children. So that's kind of where my attention is these days.

Sheri Johnson: 3:52

Yes, and it's also one of the things that I hear our community talk about the most who will take care of me when I get old? It's interesting.

Jody Day: 4:02

I think I was on a call earlier today because I'm leading a panel discussion on this later this month and so I was pre-meeting with the panel and I was saying that. I remember that when I realized I was definitely not going to be a mother, I was 44 and a half and literally almost next thought that I had having never had this thought ever in my entire life. Once I knew I was definitely not going to be having children, I thought who's going to be there for me when I'm old? It was like the next thought. And because I work with thousands of women through gateway women, I know it's really really common that that becomes suddenly a huge worry that just heaves into focus out of nowhere. It's like you've never thought about this before, but suddenly it's like, oh, my goodness, how am I going to cope with that?

Jody Day: 4:53

And it was really interesting because when I was involved with aging without children, I remember I would be talking to parents about this issue and they'd say but I didn't have my children so they could look after me when I'm old. And I went yeah, I'm sure you didn't. All the time I was trying to conceive. It's not a thought that ever came into my head I said so it's great that you don't want that. I just be really interested to know what plans you're putting into place so that that doesn't happen. Right, all I would get is crickets, because actually they weren't putting any plans into place, because unconsciously, they are relying on the fact that they have children and we can't do that. So it just comes right up in our face and then it's like, okay, I need to do something about this. And then it's like but what Right?

Sheri Johnson: 5:42

What do I?

Jody Day: 5:43

do and it's really challenging and it actually immobilizes a lot of people who become so scared of it that they do nothing.

Sheri Johnson: 5:51

Right.

Jody Day: 5:52

You know that's a big focus of the next decade of my work. It's like probably the worst thing you can do is nothing.

Sheri Johnson: 5:58

Yeah, and it's. I mean, I think aging is such a scary thing anyway. For people. It's the fear of death, the fear of becoming sick, the fear of becoming irrelevant. There's so many fears associated with becoming older and aging. Already. We don't want to talk about wills. For me, as a child of aging parents, we haven't had a discussion about what do they want, where do I find your passwords to things? And then there's so many simple things about how are we going to care for you when you can't take care of yourself, and then, after you have left this earth, they don't want to talk about it. I think it's quite an epidemic in our society that it's not just childless people that are afraid of what happens when we get older. It's also the people who have children. They're just it's just unconscious for them.

Jody Day: 6:56

Well, I mean, we live in a profoundly ageist society that focuses on youth as being the kind of the peak of life, that the aging is nothing but decline, that there is absolutely nothing to look forward to, nothing special about it. You just become irrelevant, invisible, maybe even incontinent. It's like there is nothing to look forward to about it, and that is absolutely not true. I think probably the biggest challenge about thinking about elderhood is that none of us know what our health is going to be like. It's a really, really hard thing to plan for because we don't know what our needs might be. But, once again, making no plan. The thing is there are some things we have agency around and those are the things we need to be thinking about and, as you say, like with your parents talking about, and it's I mean, 50% of people in the UK and the USA do not have a will. That is how many people are convinced they're not going to die. And yet it leaves the most incredibly painful mess for those people who are tasked with kind of dealing with the admin, or rather what we call the sadmin that goes after they die, because we don't know what their wishes are and, as you say, we don't know where the passports are, we don't know where the passwords are. We have no legal right to sort out the financial affairs. So at a time when we are perhaps dealing with the emotional and psychological issues around that person's death, we're also faced with huge legal bills and a lot of uncertainty and a lot of extra stress that doesn't need to be there, because the thing about making a will and I, you know I have, I do have a will. It is confronting to do it, but it was very relieving to have done it. I did it when I was 50, a bit late, but I got there is that someone told me. Something really useful is that a will only has to cover what would happen if you died tomorrow. It doesn't have to cover every possible eventuality that might happen between now and death, just tomorrow, right. And it doesn't have to list everything that has to do with you know your books, your possessions, your vases, your dog, none of that. You know that can all go in a separate letter, like in the UK. It's called a letter of wishes. It's called something different in different countries and you can keep updating that. You know it can be a document like a Google doc on your computer and you can just keep updating that so as things change. You know you can. You can change that, as long as your executors know how to get hold of that letter. You know they need the password to that document.

Jody Day: 9:38

There's a lot of really straightforward things you can do, but this overwhelming fear and it is a fear of death in the human consciousness really really gets in the way. Now there is something fascinating called terror management theory. Now terror management theory is a psychological mechanism which describes how human beings manage, being, as far as we know, the only sentient species that knows it's going to die. Now, if we were aware of that every minute of our waking life, it would immobilize us. So actually we have all of these really, really clever mechanisms to make sure we're not thinking about it. You add ageism to that and sexism and pronatalism and all kinds of other things and you just get this enormous disincentive to think about death and to think about your own death. And actually most childless women that I talk to are not actually afraid of death. I mean not that anyone's really looking forward to it. They're actually afraid of vulnerability and dependency and not having someone trusted to help during that period that they already know who it's going to be. That's the bit that scares them.

Sheri Johnson: 10:52

You're so right. I don't feel afraid of death. I've talked about this a lot through the last three years why I felt so differently than some of the people around me about the pandemic. So I don't actually think I am afraid of death. I'm afraid of pain leading up to it. I'm afraid of that vulnerability. But I also am in this position where I spend a lot. I'm a nutritionist, I spend a lot of time taking care of my health and maybe this is unconsciously driven by that need to not be vulnerable when I'm older. But I never even thought about that until this moment. But I spend a lot of time taking care of myself and I know that I am not going to get sick anytime soon, unless it's something completely out of nowhere. But my body, my emotional, my spiritual health are in a really good place. So that's really fascinating.

Jody Day: 11:48

Well, that's something we can do. As you say, illnesses that are not lifestyle related can still happen. We can't predict those, and I think it's not even the illness itself. It's the management of that illness and the management of any vulnerabilities that may come out of it that can be really challenging to think through, particularly if you're also single or living alone. It's a simple thing like having a hospital appointment and then saying, well, who's going to come and collect you, or you can't go home on your own, or you need someone to monitor your meds, or something like that. And it's like, well, there is no one. And what I'm hearing from people is that hospitals still think that's an aberration when in actual fact, we've got.

Jody Day: 12:28

Currently, one in five people don't have kids, about one in four men, one in five women that's going to go up massively with the next generation we could be looking at one in four or even one in three, and so the idea that is already an awful lot of people older than us as well, people in their 60s and 70s. There are a lot of people aging without children, whether they chose to be childless or childlessness chose them, and also people who are estranged from their children, whose children live on the other side of the world, whose children have predeceased them or have care needs of their own. There are many reasons why someone might be vulnerable in older age and not have that absolute plug and play family situation to sort it out, but the medical profession and the governments of our countries are absolutely sticking their fingers in their ears around this.

Sheri Johnson: 13:21

Yes, you're absolutely right. There is nothing in place, nothing to help that. And if it leads to another discussion, which is around financial health, right, because the position that we're left in as childless women is, and especially if you're single, is you need to be financially stable and even more so to be able to pay for care if you don't have children.

Jody Day: 13:44

I think it's been shown that single, older, childless women are actually some of the least financially resourced women. So actually there's very, very few of them are going to be in a good financial position and less and less of them will have property or savings because the cost of living has gone through the roof, the wages have not kept pace with that and so very few people have savings. And I think the millennial generation coming up very few of them all have been able to afford property. So the idea that somehow we're going to have to fund care, the money just isn't there.

Sheri Johnson: 14:21

No, and I think that's also. You know, this is a little bit of a different topic, but there's this big myth out there that people who don't have children have all of this disposable income, and I just don't think that that's the case.

Jody Day: 14:37

I've been doing this for 15 years and I haven't met them.

Sheri Johnson: 14:40

No, no, and I had somebody write me an email about this when I started talking about the pronatalist policies of our government. You know baby bonuses and all of the. You know the fact that almost 20% of my finance is my income tax goes to funding education for other people's children. And as soon as I start talking about those things, then I have mothers come back to me and start talking about well, we are so hard done by, it's so expensive to raise children. You must have so much more money than I do, so stop your complaining.

Jody Day: 15:14

I don't think there's a very helpful response. I think parents do have it. I think it is really tough for them and if they want to have a competition with me about how tough it is and they think theirs is tougher than mine, I'll say maybe it is. I don't want to take away from your situation, but that doesn't mean that there aren't other people struggling in different ways. Exactly, it is incredibly expensive to do anything, and raising children is one of them.

Jody Day: 15:37

I mean, it might be that someone who you know has spent a lot of money on fertility treatments that haven't worked. It might be that they've had to take extended career breaks, you know, to cope with grief and their life falling apart in their 40s. There might be many reasons why they may not be as financially resourced as someone might imagine. And also, you know, they just may not have ever worked in a profession that provided the opportunity to build those kinds of resources. And particularly if you're also single, you know being single over the lifetime, and it was an article in the Atlantic. I quote it in my book. It's a bit out of date now, but they worked. You know you can check the numbers on this and it's in my book that over the course of a lifetime. You know, being single, as in unmarried, is a million dollars, a million American dollars, more expensive to be single than to be married. You know, so it's people, don't? People sometimes don't really stop to reflect on how different it might be to be single and childless, or even to be a childless couple, compared to a married couple in terms of tax breaks.

Jody Day: 16:38

And, as you say, those of us who don't have children pay a lot of our taxes towards those things that people with families rely on, like schools and hospitals, and we do so willingly as part of our role of citizens in a civic society.

Jody Day: 16:51

I have no problem with that, but what I do have a problem with it is that at the end of our life, when perhaps we don't have family to care for us, there's nothing and we're seen as somehow a drain on the system, as if we've never contributed anything. That is pronatilism, speaking by the way, because pronatilism says you are a worthless human being. In reality, because you haven't had children, you haven't contributed children to the system, so you haven't contributed anything. And I have to push back about that very, very hard, because actually childless people, particularly single child's people, and child free have been shown to be the biggest contributors to charities and to political campaigns, and they're the ones that do the most amount of voluntary work. We do a lot to keep things going and we do so willingly, and we do so without anyone noticing or saying, wow, well done.

Sheri Johnson: 17:40

That's so true. And when you talk about willingly, it wasn't until women mothers started pushing back on me on the pronatilist policies of our government. That was when I actually started to look into it. I didn't even care. I had no clue how much of my taxes were going towards education or childcare bonuses and all of these other things. It didn't even cross my mind. And it was only when I was being challenged that I started to look into it and I thought why am I even doing this? It doesn't matter, I never cared before, I don't care now. It's just. It is what it is and how my taxes contribute to a functioning society.

Jody Day: 18:25

But is it a functioning society if it doesn't care for its elders?

Sheri Johnson: 18:29

Well, no, it's not. You're absolutely right.

Jody Day: 18:32

It's a functioning society for some people for some people and barely functioning for them. But there are so many people for whom our societies are not working, those who've been systemically disadvantaged for a long time. There are an awful lot of people that it's not working for?

Sheri Johnson: 18:49

No, it's so true. I heard you talking about the. I think it was on a recent podcast and you were quoting something about the Finnish government who are actually doing something about it. I think it was on Spinster. How do you imagine?

Jody Day: 19:08

I think they are. I mean they're trying to bring in kind of making it easier for students to have children, to really basically try and make it easier for kind of grownups to have children when they're younger, to kind of rejig education and starting your career and things like that, which is something I mentioned in my book, because one of the difficulties of having children can often be that by the time you've got all of your sort of Western capitalist ducks in a row, maybe it's too late to find a partner, or it's too late with that partner to have children easily. That's one thing I mean as part of me thinks. If we're all going to be living till we're 90, 100, if retirement is going to become as quaint an idea as sort of the Victorian idea of sending children up chimneys to clean them, there will be no pensions, there will be no retirement. We'll all be working till we drop.

Jody Day: 19:54

Why do we have to try and get everything done in the first 30 years or the first 35 years? Why can't we kind of work with our biology better? I mean, I don't think those thoughts are welcome. They also in a way that in themselves they're actually slightly pronateless, because it presumes that that's what everyone should be doing is having kids, which actually it isn't the case. I don't think it is something everyone should be doing. I think there are quite a lot of people out there who probably should have swerved and didn't, although, the economy may need us all to be having children, because the economy is a Ponzi scheme.

Jody Day: 20:32

Basically, it's like the taxation system. The pension systems rely on more and more 20 year old people joining the workforce to pay for those people who are older. Now I naively used to think that the taxes I were paying was going into some kind of pot somewhere. When I was an old person and perhaps I needed long term care, there was a sort of a pot of money. But no, what I came to understand is all of my taxes have been spent.

Jody Day: 21:00

They have been spent on supporting people who are older than me. They have paid for the long term care and healthcare and other things for people older than me and also for children and people around me. So my long term care, should I need it, needs to be paid for by the taxes of people just joining the workforce now. Now, as there are many less of them and with many less people having children for a wide variety of reasons, that means the next generation has less people to have children. So the population will shrink over the next few generations, which means those young people coming into the workforce are faced with a really difficult situation. So everything's more expensive. They're going to be expected to pay even higher taxes to pay for the kind of the older people that need support, but there are less of them to pay it, and into an economy with no stability.

Sheri Johnson: 21:57

Yeah, you just said so much there. That was a real eye opening moment for me because intellectually I knew that my taxes were being spent on all of these other things, but the metaphor you use it's not even a metaphor, it's a Ponzi scheme. I had never thought of it as a Ponzi scheme and that is so true. And we have the Elon Musk's of the world, the conservatives, who want us to keep having more children because it's part of a healthy economy and it's more taxpayers and more consumers.

Jody Day: 22:32

More taxpayers.

Sheri Johnson: 22:33

Yeah, and it just I see why. But I also see that there must be other solutions to that.

Jody Day: 22:43

There are other solutions. They are less comfortable ones. I mean, whether we like it or not and mostly we don't like it we're going to be moving into a period of economic degrowth, because the capitalist model is one that is based on endless growth, but we have now exceeded the resources of the planet, so the planet has put the brakes on. So we're going to be entering a period of degrowth. So, shrinking economies, shrinking populations, shrinking living standards, shrinking tax base these things are politically very, very difficult to manage. They often lead to revolutions. So it's going to be, yes, in a way it is going to be a difficult time, but we're actually not going to be presented with a choice because of the climate.

Jody Day: 23:31

So in a way, whether we like it or not, we are entering a period of degrowth, and that degrowth may bring us back to something which is much more in balance with what the planet can manage, but it's going to be a bumpy hundred years.

Sheri Johnson: 23:48

I think so too, and it all gosh what you're saying. It starts to oh, it's like every time we talk, jody, I have all these I talked about this the last time like these ideas all are floating around in my head and they're like little pieces. And then suddenly you've created the web that weaves them all together, and then they start to make sense All of the interconnections between capitalism and colonialism and patriarchy and pro natalism. They all are part of the same web.

Jody Day: 24:23

Yeah, and it's tightening. You know that that web is. It is both tightening but it is also breaking. You know, and that's why I think so. You know, ruby, ruby Warrington's work is so important.

Jody Day: 24:34

You know, she's really brought a feminist and a political lens to what it means to be a non parent. You know, ruby is childless by choice. She's child free. We had such an interesting chat she and I because I didn't have a word for it, but I was child free in my 20s. I was pretty sure I didn't want to have children. After a very traumatic childhood and once I was part of my first husband's loving family for a few years, I kind of changed my mind because I had a new idea of what family could mean. And you know, ruby said something to me. She said, you know, if I had had that experience maybe I would have gone the other way. You know, she's just so brilliantly honest, ruby, but she's you know, she's child free. I'm childless.

Jody Day: 25:17

But in many ways our thinking is very aligned about what a political statement it is to be a woman without children and how politicized we are. Because I do believe that as that degrowth happens and the you know, the impact of population sort of you know shrinking has on demographics, like you know. In Japan, for example, you know many, many primary schools and schools are closing because of the change in the population structure. You know these are very emotive issues and people look for a scapegoat and I have to say they're going to come after childless women. I think women without children are really going to have to wake up to what a political statement we represent to the status quo and whether we chose childlessness or childlessness chose up. I think you know, I'm sorry people like Elon Musk and other, you know other big voices and big heads are going to blame us for the ills of the world, because everyone loves a scapegoat.

Sheri Johnson: 26:18

Yes, and they already do. I mean, they're already. There's the women who are speaking out and being trustized for it. There's the Chelsea handlers and the Ruby Warringtons. They're all like get back down in your box, because you're saying stuff that we don't like.

Jody Day: 26:37

Yeah, and I think I still have a role to play. Just, you know, I may not have children but I still think, in particular as I move into my elder years. I think, you know, I still have a lot to contribute. You know, maybe it's not someone who in you know, if I had had children at 29, they would be in the workforce now and they'd be taxpayers. I haven't provided any taxpayers, but I do have other things to offer.

Sheri Johnson: 27:00

Yes, well, and maybe things that our patriarchal leaders don't like. And you know, I'm glad you brought up Ruby Warrington because I love her work and I listened to your interview with her on her podcast. Yeah, and one of these days I'm going to get her over here on my podcast, because it's now a year into my own. You know you were okay. Let me step back for a second. You and probably Therese Schecter I'm not sure if you know Therese. She's a documentary filmmaker and she was a guest on my podcast and she talked about pronatalism. I interviewed her just before you and I didn't even I had never even heard that word before Between you and her. You opened up this whole can of worms, really Sorry about that.

Sheri Johnson: 27:50

Well, and I had never thought of myself as a feminist for many reasons, that women don't want to be known as a feminist, because we're taught as young women that feminists are man haters and I don't want to be one of those, so I never thought of myself as a feminist until I really had that conversation with you and Therese and I started reading about it and I read the Dance of the Dissident Daughter, which is a memoir by Sue Munk Kidd.

Sheri Johnson: 28:15

It's fantastic. That's about her journey of awakening to the patriarchy within the church, and I grew up in a religious home and was also influenced by those same things and what we were talking about before. We hit record that my childlessness became this catalyst to opening up my eyes and my heart to the patriarchy and its influences on me pronatalism, which is a piece of that, and how that impacted me. And it's only now, after that journey. I think that's why I found Ruby, because I was using those hashtags child-free, patriarchy, pronatalism. I wanted to find people who were talking about it, and now it's like this voracious appetite that I have for learning more and wanting to open up more hearts and eyes to what we are so influenced by.

Jody Day: 29:11

Another book I would really recommend is and it's the one that really opened my eyes to pronatalism back in 2012 and it's called the Baby Matrix and it's by Laura Carroll and she uses the metaphor of the red pill from the matrix and it really is like that because when you have your eyes opened to patriarchy I mean to pronatalism you can't unsee it.

Jody Day: 29:36

It's like you realize how incredibly insidious it is and how it influences so much about our beliefs about ourselves as women and, when we are women without children, our negative beliefs about ourselves as women. And that book was a very, very powerful awakening for me. And I would agree that actually I was single and childless for most of my 40s after my marriage broke down at the end of my 30s and it was a reawakening for me. I had been a very feminist teenager but I kind of went to sleep in my marriage. I think I made a deal with myself quite early on before we got married that if this was going to work I had to sort of toe the line. I really loved him, I really wanted to be with him. We were always fighting about things.

Jody Day: 30:28

I was a very, very feisty young woman and I just I was up against someone who was a higher class than me, who came from a kind of a really privileged British sort of upper class background you know from, with a big, solid family and a big, solid story about his history and portraits on the wall and all of this.

Jody Day: 30:49

I was kind of this scrappy little dog that kind of got in through the back door and I just realized that my fierceness, my sense of independence, my sense of wanting my own voice and my own identity in everything and believing that that was right was somehow something I was going to have to give up if this relationship was going to work.

Jody Day: 31:10

And you know, I made an unconscious deal with myself just to park that side of myself and the moment I did that, the relationship worked, you know, and we and it wasn't until I had my nervous breakdown at 38, which kind of led 37, which led to, you know, led to the end of my marriage, along with my unexplained infatility and his own issues that I kind of came out of this trance. And as I kind of picked myself up in my 40s and I think my singleness was the thing that really really showed me my feminism back, my singleness was like I was persona non grata, you know, as a kind of single, childless woman in my 40s, I swear the only invitation that I would get would be to a dental checkup. It was like I dropped off the planet.

Jody Day: 31:55

You know, once I was no longer part of a couple and we've been together for 16 years. We were like the first couple in our group to kind of get married. We were like a foundational couple in our sort of social group and you know, people were very I mean, I was having a really hard time in the marriage. He had a lot of issues. People were saying you know you shouldn't be putting up with this. You know blah, blah, you should leave him, you should do this. And actually when I did, everyone forgot about me and you know to see how little, because I always thought that my social status belonged to me. And I got divorced and found that my social status belonged to us and actually to him and as a single woman I had no social status at all. It was devastating and, yes, it was an awakening for me. And then that, with my childlessness together and how people saw me as a lesser woman because I didn't have children, it just fired me up completely, you know.

Sheri Johnson: 32:53

and I'm very grateful.

Jody Day: 32:55

I'm very grateful to you know, to my single and childless forties, for bringing me back to the person I was before. And then also thank you menopause, which kind of took me back even further, because menopause, I think, has returned me to the kind of feisty, questioning, fierce, brave little girl I was before puberty. I'm just like but why is it like that, right you?

Sheri Johnson: 33:22

know Well, and the more that I read about midlife and menopause, the more I believe that it is that there is a reason why the majority of divorces happen in their forties, to women in their forties. This is when we you know a lot of women, their children are going off to school, or if they are childless or child free, they're speaking up. They start to find the fire again. And Christian Northrop Dr Christian Northrop another great book. She's written many.

Jody Day: 33:55

I don't know how she does it.

Sheri Johnson: 33:57

I really don't, oh, my goodness. Yeah, she talks about how there's actually a hormonal change. You know, the nurturing hormones, the oxytocin, those start to wane. Like there's actually a scientific, like a physiological thing behind women waking up and becoming more feisty and finding their voices and they stop caring about what people think and find themselves. It's called testosterone.

Jody Day: 34:24

I mean, we all have testosterone. But as the estrogen and progesterone start to wane, which are our kind, of you know, really particularly estrogen is the data.

Jody Day: 34:33

That's fine, darling, don't worry. You know it's our nurturing, protective one. It's the one that makes us put up with shit in order to keep the family unit together, even if that family unit is, is is a couple unit, and to kind of not really mind so much about, you know, being seen as the second fiddle and all kinds of things. And as that starts to wane, you're like hang on a minute, what about me? You know, and that effort, possibly you have sleep disturbances, you have less energy, you're having hot flashes, you know you're having a tolerance for bullshit really, really drops. Yes, exactly, and you know that can be an incredible shock in a relationship.

Jody Day: 35:14

I mean, if I had been, you know, with a partner during that period, I can imagine it could have been very confusing for them seeing me change. You know I'm partnered again now with someone that I met when I was 52. When I was, in a way, for me, because my menopause was reasonably young, I was, I was kind of through it. So you know we've been together, you know, seven years and I haven't substantially changed my personality in that time. You kind of. You know, what you see is what you get, but I can imagine it could be really challenging to navigate that.

Sheri Johnson: 35:45

Yeah Well, and coming back to the childless conversation, and when you're 40s, if it's perimenopause, when your body starts to change I don't know this sounds woo-woo, but I'm a spiritual person and I think that there is our self-worth sits in the womb space and so can shame, and so we have a.

Sheri Johnson: 36:09

It's like a perfect storm of shame as childless women in a single childless woman that it impacts our self-worth, and all of that is getting mixed up with all the stuff that is physiologically going on in the womb space during midlife. So it's like this, this big perfect storm of stuff that comes up for us, particularly as childless women, because of the shame that is invoked on us, and I want to get into that a little bit because you talked about it in your book and I think talking about it is what allows us to shed a lot of it.

Jody Day: 36:51

Yeah, okay, well, brené Brown, or Saint Brené, as I think of her is, you know she says that empathy dissolves shame. You know, shame cannot survive the presence of empathy, and this is so true, and that also includes kind of giving ourselves empathy and speaking out. You know, sharing our stories with other women and having them received, having them not find our stories shameful, you know, that absolutely transforms things, which is why, you know, podcasts like yours are so important, because you know there will be a woman listening to this, perhaps feeling deep shame about her aging female body, because the aging female body is a site of such shame in our culture. There is nothing to celebrate about it. You know, a man, when he gets older, becomes distinguished. A woman, when she gets older, this becomes shameful. You know.

Jody Day: 37:53

And now, with this idea that there's this kind of pro-aging that you know, actually you can do aging in a really positive way, which actually means thin, white and rich. You know, let's be honest, and that's kind of like well, that's like 90% of the planet, you know, written off. It gives us the idea that our body is a project and that we're famous If you go to your anywhere in the world, even, you know, down to your local shopping center or anything and you see such a variety of bodies and yet we are fed this, this one idea you know of this, I'm sorry this thin, white yoga body and now perfect gray hair. Even you've even got to do like beautiful silver hair, and it's you know, these ideas, that there's always something wrong with your body, you've always something you've got to do about it. And something that really transformed my relationship with my body was when and I'm someone who had a lot of eating disorders and body issues, you know, through my life, and I write about it in my book when I stopped seeing my body as a project and I started to see it as something to be incredibly grateful for.

Jody Day: 39:07

And I would do this exercise, which I write about my book, which is called saying thank you and I teach it in my work and it's amazingly powerful and quite confronting which is to get some body cream or just soap in the shower, whatever works for you and go over each part of your body, touching it, maybe sopping it or putting some cream on saying thank you, and find something to say thank you to each part for. So it might be starting at your toes, I say to my feet. Thank you for enabling me to stand up and walk in the world. You know I move up to my knees, you know. Thank you for still enabling me to sit cross legged and I'm nearly 60, not as long as I used to, but you're still doing it, you know. Thank you to my bottom. You know I have big hips and I have a generous bottom is always been my area of kind of like, my least sort of, the area I'm least happy with. And instead of thinking about it as something to be happy with or proud of, to be grateful for, thank you for being so comfortable to sit on.

Jody Day: 40:02

You know, and every as you do this exercise, you move right up through your body and instead of thinking about what's not how it looks to someone else, really feeling how it feels to inhabit it, and if you have difficulty with a part of your body and many of us do, imagine what it'd be like not to have that part, or how difficult it must be for you know to have injuries and disabilities if you're lucky enough not to have those right now. And it's a way of kind of coming home to ourselves and going. My body is not a capitalist project. It is not there to entertain the world by looking a certain way, it is the vehicle for my soul in this lifetime. I am so grateful to have a body. I could not be here without my darling body. And it's like how do we come home with love and with empathy for the body we have? And that starts to transform our relationship with our body. And I have to say it's actually a very radical exercise Because once you are in contact and in relationship with your body in a loving way, you discover the parts are really difficult for you to love.

Jody Day: 41:12

So that's helpful to, but also it frees up an awful lot of energy so that you can do other things with that energy. You can start changing your life, you can start changing your relationships, you can start changing the world. You know Naomi Wolfe. She's you know she's not the world's most popular person anymore, but her book. I just read the beauty myth, you know, back in the 90s. It's really interesting how, as Westernization and capitalism reaches communities around the world, women start dieting and start getting, you know, eating disorders, because actually one of the best ways to limit women's autonomy that they have, you know, if they have political freedoms of any kind, if you can keep women worrying about the size of their ass, they're not going to worry about patriarchy and they're not going to change the world.

Sheri Johnson: 42:03

It's so true. And do you know what else I'm thinking about as you described that exercise? Jodi is our sexuality.

Jody Day: 42:13

And how? Oh goodness, yes.

Sheri Johnson: 42:14

Shame. I mean, I can just imagine doing that exercise as a younger woman and I don't know that I would have been able to do that without feeling some sort of shame about touching myself and touching my body and that is like gosh. I bet you there's women out there who won't be able to do it for that reason that it will take them a lot of practice to stop with your feet to cover it and be grateful for your feet.

Jody Day: 42:43

Don't have to do the whole thing, Just massage your feet and be grateful for your feet. And you know there's no rush to complete this exercise. There's no one right way to do it, there's just your way to do it.

Sheri Johnson: 42:56

Yeah, Well, and you know, I actually, because it's summertime and I'm out in my bare feet all the time, I always wash my feet before I go to bed and I've started to almost ritualize it and without really thinking about it, I just there was just one day when I noticed how good it felt to wash my own feet and how nice it felt in bed afterwards. And it really changes something about you when you begin to notice what it feels like to be in your body and to cherish that. Yes.

Jody Day: 43:31

It also releases. If you massage any part of your body with the intention of love and compassion, it releases a lot of oxytocin, so actually releases a feel good relaxation hormone that is released after orgasm. It's also released during breastfeeding, during birth and also when cuddling a safe person. So it's a really, really powerful hormone and you don't have to have a partner to access it. You can just massage your feet with the intention of, like you know, really good feelings towards your feet and your body and you will feel it. It will start after about two minutes. You will feel it in your nervous system.

Sheri Johnson: 44:09

This is an area that I never even expected to go and, by the way, I massage my feet every night before bed. Oh yeah, I do too. I mean, I also use essential oils. I'm such a I have a bit of an obsession with them, so that's something I rub oils into my feet after I wash them and it just feels so good and it yeah it because it releases that oxytocin.

Sheri Johnson: 44:33

So, changing the subject a little bit, because there's something I have in my notes here that I really wanted to talk to you about and it's related. It's you've talked in your book on other podcasts and I really want to bring more attention to it the evolution of needing to fit in.

Sheri Johnson: 44:51

I think that as childless women, and particularly as we age, we start to feel invisible and we feel like we're excluded from the mom club. We're excluded, you know, as we age, from the young club. There's all kinds of ways that we begin to feel like we don't fit in, and you've talked about why it is so important for us to fit in and the evolution of that, and I want childless women to understand that it's not moms who make you feel excluded.

Jody Day: 45:23

There's actually an evolution behind that, so can you talk a bit about that and also well, okay, let me stop there and let you answer the question first, I mean fitting in is, you know, it's kind of a core need of human beings. You know, we are social animals, we are tribal, we are a tribal species, we operate in groups and it is within groups that we find our safety. So you know, we're not the dominant species on the planet because we can run the fastest or because we have the biggest claws. It's because we know how to cooperate in groups. You know, that is how we've become what we've become.

Jody Day: 46:01

When we realize we are not part of the in group, we're actually part of the out group, that is an intensely vulnerable feeling, particularly if you're also lonely. I mean, one of the reasons being lonely is so psychologically profoundly distressing is because our psyche makes it distressing for us in order that we will do something to find connection, because it is within connection that we find safety. And we've been talking about, you know, growing older without children. Begin to see how, if you do not have a group, a family group or a close social group around you, as you age, you are more vulnerable than someone who has those intergenerational things in place. So it is, you know, we are programmed to find groups. Yet we're also living in a culture which is hyper individualistic and, as childless women, many of us have also become hyper independent in order to cope and to survive.

Sheri Johnson: 47:03

So it can be really hard.

Jody Day: 47:05

We may have lost the muscle in a way of how to find groups and be part of groups, how to maintain those connections. We may have lost the social skills, the give and take, the investment, the kind of the flow of energy that goes around a group and it's absolutely crucial that it's kind of like a skill you have to learn. And, even more importantly, as we age, we need to find I call it all took in phrase. I created when I was part of a walk that's aging without children in the UK and it stands for alternative kinship network. We need to find our all took in as our sort of LGBTQ.

Jody Day: 47:46

You know brothers and sisters have been doing for many, many years. You have to find your own family, you have to create a family, you have to create a network. This is not something passive, this is something active. You know you have to put the work in to create a group of people who will be around you as you age and actually at all points in your life, because our need for groups never goes away, but the kind of group that we need often changes over time.

Sheri Johnson: 48:14

Yeah, that's really quite profound actually that there's this evolutionary drive, a psychological drive for the tribe, but it also gosh. It makes me think of the last few years and the level of isolation that we have felt as a world community around the world.

Jody Day: 48:39

And I think we're seeing some of the impact of that. I mean, people's ability to cooperate has really, really changed. I mean, I don't think people are talking yet and perhaps we don't have enough distance on it yet to look at how profoundly human relationships have been impacted by what's happened.

Sheri Johnson: 48:59

Oh yes, especially amongst the children and teenagers, and it has also highlighted how technology is wonderful and to some degree, kept us connected, but it is not the same as being in person or being you know. You know, I both had to turn our videos off here and I already feel like we are not as connected because we can't see each other. Yeah, it's not the same as having an in-person, face-to-face connection.

Jody Day: 49:29

It's not as nourishing. No, I mean I was working on Zoom before the pandemic, before the world crashed, my party.

Jody Day: 49:36

I've been working quite a few years, you know, doing private sessions with clients and running groups, and I realized that actually, for example, like when I used to do I'm not in private practice at the moment, but I used to do therapy on Zoom and I realized that the sessions were much, much more tiring for me than working face-to-face with a client.

Jody Day: 49:57

And after a while I decided that what it was is that my eyes could see the person and hear them, but all of the unconscious communication, you know, their body language, their movement, their spatial position in the room, their smell, everything about them, and also the unconscious communications that the kind of my unconscious to their unconscious, all of that kind of stuff wasn't happening, but my brain, rather like the mobile phone that is looking for a tower, just kept sending that signal. It kept sending that signal trying to connect to all those other levels of information, and it kept bouncing back empty. I was getting a lot from the work, and so were my clients, but I realized I had to work so much harder because they weren't in the room with me and our unconsciouses weren't together in the room. And it's very, very interesting what we gain as.

Jody Day: 50:47

I say, but what we lose as well? And I have to say I think people have become quite nervous about face-to-face connection and quite not just because of you know they're possibly getting infected, but sort of getting de-skilled and also intolerant. Because you know, in Zoom everyone takes their turn, you know there's a sense of kind of politeness, and then you get a kind of a live group of people in a room and they're all on different agendas and people, five conversations are going on or what have you. And, as you say, with you know, young people who maybe haven't had a chance to be socialized in the rough and tumble of real-time conversation because they've lost a few years of schooling. It can be really tough to work out how to operate in that, because it's a skill.

Sheri Johnson: 51:34

Oh yeah, well, and for me and maybe many others feel this way too but it's almost like there's an energy thing that I want, like I want that energetic connection of being in person.

Sheri Johnson: 51:48

And yet when I go into the city I live in a rural area and when I go into the city and I get on the subway, the number of people and the energy around me it's just almost overpowering for me, it's overwhelming. And I don't know whether it's just that I'm noticing, because I used to live in the city and I take the subway to work every single day and I did, I mean, on the weekends I felt like I needed to get out of the city. But when I go in a few times, I go in now, just being around that sheer number of people. I hadn't, I mean to me, I thought it was more of a. I'm more attuned to the energy of all of these people around me. But maybe there is an element of what you say in this de-skilling of my social skills and just being in that energy and that number of people and not knowing how to handle myself anymore.

Jody Day: 52:45

I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I lived in London for 34 years. I was born there, but I grew up in the countryside and moved back when I was 19. And then I moved to rural Ireland and now my local town, which is 4,000 people. That's urban enough for me, but when I do go to London to see friends or for work or to family, you feel what an extraordinary thing a big city is and what it takes to thrive amongst that many people and to live and flow amongst that people. And it brings out a different part of me and I think, like you, I think my energy has changed, living very rural and very quiet, so I think it would take me a bit of time to adjust to being back in the city.

Sheri Johnson: 53:31

Yeah, and there's probably part of that too, and I think that's also happened with a lot of people who we've become more introverted as a culture. Oh, totally. It's not just a de-skilling. Our energy has changed as a result of being isolated.

Jody Day: 53:48

And it's going to be really interesting to see how that plays out in the culture.

Sheri Johnson: 53:52

Yeah.

Jody Day: 53:53

I mean Canada, I know has a more introverted culture than the United States, but it's been really interesting living in England over the last you know my life, because England went from rather the Britain but I specifically lived in England went from being a quite introverted culture to being very influenced by American culture and getting more and more extroverted. And I think a little bit of introversion is a good balance, I agree.

Jody Day: 54:22

I think we need all of them. You know you need the introverts in the room who are maybe processing things differently to the extroverts. When only the extroverts point of view is welcome in an organization or a country or a culture, things don't go well yeah.

Sheri Johnson: 54:39

Yes, so bringing us back around. I'm just looking at my notes, because there were a couple of other things I wanted to get your thoughts on, and one of them was and I just read this in your book this was around letting go of the wounds and I've been talking.

Sheri Johnson: 55:00

In fact, I think just my last podcast episode that I published, or two episodes ago, was on this topic letting go of the wounds, the poor me I couldn't have children and the safety of that sentiment in our pronatalist world. The fact that we try to stay in that because it keeps us safe and yet embracing a joyful life as a childless woman requires giving that up. Can you talk more about that?

Jody Day: 55:34

Yeah, it's a really bumpy transition. I remember very recently I was talking about this with a member of the online community who was kind of feeling kind of really ambivalent about starting to feel okay again. And I remember when that was happening to me, when I got the first glimmers of joy coming back and I thought, oh, I wasn't expecting to ever kind of feel okay again about my childlessness and about my life and I felt really ambivalent about it because it's like, well, who will I be without my childless grief? I felt that it was the most important thing anyone needed to know about me.

Jody Day: 56:12

It's like hello, jody, I'm childless. It felt like such a felt like not just part of my identity, it felt like my identity and I thought, well, if I can kind of come to terms with my childlessness and be at peace with it, does that mean I didn't really want children?

Jody Day: 56:30

It felt like a betrayal kind of of my longing for motherhood as well, and then I thought but who will I be without it? Because I was becoming a new version of myself. I was someone who had made her peace with something that she never, ever thought she would be able to make her peace with. So that was like a different person, and I didn't know who she was or what she would do with the rest of her life. One of the things I talk about is kind of is like using an analogy of pebbles as we move into acceptance around our childlessness. It's not like a Disney acceptance, it's like oh great, I feel fine.

Jody Day: 57:09

It's like you don't wake up one day and like I'm childless and it's great, like life's not like that. But if you imagine two piles of pebbles and then on the left hand side of pebbles there's a kind of the parts of your childless experience you're really not okay with and on the right hand side is the pile, you've kind of accepted that that's how it is and gradually over time things will move from the not okay to the acceptance pile and sometimes they'll actually move back. You know they don't necessarily move over there and stay over there, but gradually over time the pile of your kind of internal realities and conundrums and situations that is in acceptance on the acceptance pile gets significantly bigger than the parts that you're not accepting of and you start to feel a big shift happening in yourself. And I say to people that that place of acceptance doesn't mean that your childlessness is okay. It doesn't mean that it's always you're kind of happy about it or that it never happened. It just starts to be. It is what it is. You know the energy of kind of fighting against it, of being angry about it, being sad about it, of being furious about it, needing to talk about it all the time that energy starts to settle and then that energy becomes available to your psyche to actually invest in new and different things going forward.

Jody Day: 58:34

And one of the really challenging things is you actually don't know what those are going to be. And women have said to me look, can you just tell me what my plan B is and I'll just go and get on with it. Well, you know, a lovely idea. Wish I had a crystal ball, would have used it on myself first. But the fact is that you know, no one else can know, and we can barely know ourselves what that will be, because the process of grief is a process of identity transformation and we are becoming a different version of ourselves, maybe as different as from when we were 12, as to when we were 18, you know, it's a huge, massive transformation of our internal world. So we can't predict what that version of us is really going to, what's going to light her fire. So it's really being patient, which is really hard for the ego. The ego, just I want the answers. I want them now. I want to know what training course I've got to go on. I want to know what I've got. It really wants to jump to the solutions, but actually it's kind of going through that grief process.

Jody Day: 59:40

Which grief is such a people just think it's a terrible. It's not all about sadness, it's about rediscovering what lights your fire when the thing that you thought would be the only thing that would light your fire has gone. It's such a big thing to do and when we get to the point where we're starting to move into that new version of ourselves, there will be a wobbly time when we might want to take comfort in the idea that life done us wrong and it's not fair. And you know what? Yeah, that's true, that's true and it's okay that that's true.

Jody Day: 1:00:15

We can still, you know, move forward as well, and moving forward doesn't mean that we leave. I mean those children that live only in my heart. They're still in there. They there is a precious place right at the core of my heart. There is a jewel in there and they live in that jewel. And if I touch that place, which I'm touching now, it is very tender, but that is not all of who I am anymore. I don't want to lose that feeling inside me, because it's pure love, and love and grief are made of the same stuff.

Sheri Johnson: 1:00:51

And to bring it back around to a self-worth. Part of that acceptance is being okay with your path, accepting this new version of yourself. You need to build that self-worth, like to know that that new version of yourself is worthy in this world as well, that you know in our world that tells us that it's not that it's okay to love your childless life again.

Jody Day: 1:01:22

Yes, it's okay to love your childless life Absolutely. In a way, we have to disconnect our sense of worth from what society thinks, because we were born we were born childless and worthy.

Jody Day: 1:01:36

You know, we get to keep that. Just because we didn't have children, by choice or not, that does not mean we lose our sense of worthiness Just because we're aging in a female body, we do not lose our sense of worthiness. It is only through the eyes of the culture the pronatalist, patriarchal, sexist culture that we have less value. We have to stop listening to them and we have to listen to ourselves and we have to find people around us who reflect our worthiness back to us. And we have to really, really, you know, choose who we spend our time with, what we do on social media, what we read, who we follow, you know who gets to live in our head rent-free and if they are not doing a good job, kick them out.

Sheri Johnson: 1:02:19

I love that saying who gets to live in their rent-free. We've got all kinds of people in there really. Yeah, kick them out saying sorry your tenancy is over, I love it so, and I would also add, going back to what you just said, our ageist culture, to bring back around that conversation.

Jody Day: 1:02:38

Absolutely.

Sheri Johnson: 1:02:40

To be worthy, as not just women who are croning, as you say or aging, as women who don't have children who are aging. You know we have a place in society and we are worthy, no matter what our ageist, pronatalist, patriarchal society tells us.

Jody Day: 1:03:02

Absolutely, and those of us who have stepped out of that paradigm have incredible gifts of wisdom to offer younger women without children as well, to help, you know, lead the path to them, to what I call it conscious, childless elderhood. I don't think the world has ever been so in need of elders. I mean, we've had an explosion of older people. We have not had an explosion of elders. Youngers need elders as much as elders need youngers. And one of the things I'm really hoping I can do in the next sort of 10 years of my work is to really look about how we can create intergenerational connections to support younger people who are facing the most humongous challenges on the planet. Someone said you know, older people without children have no skin in the game. You know someone even Elon Musk said that recently.

Jody Day: 1:03:56

I think that, as someone who doesn't have children, my care for future generations is kind of for all of the future generations. I'm not trying to naturally take care of my children and my grandchildren's future. I'm not trying to protect anything. I can take risks, I can be bold, I can I'm sorry, I can get out on the barricades and I can help organize. I have wisdom. I have ways to be of service to the world and to the next generation that are different to the ones that I'm the priorities I might have had you know, had I been a mother and grandmother. They are just as valuable and I can be just as much of service and I think I can do it differently. And I love that there are so many of us now aging without children women I think we could become a force to be reckoned with. I think watch out, petriarchy. I think there's a reason there's so many of us. We got your number and we're here.

Sheri Johnson: 1:04:53

It's so true and I love that. I think that is a wonderful place to end Before we do. Where can people find you and what do you want them to do next?

Jody Day: 1:05:07

So everything could be found on my website, which is gateway-womencom. If you're on Instagram, I'm at Gateway Women and for the work around my elderhood work, you'll find me at Apprentice Crone, and that's very much connected to my Gateway Elder Women project, which is still kind of quite nascent. I'm very busy finishing a novel and building a house at the moment, so I haven't really had a chance to lean into that too much just yet. But you know, the next part of my work, other than my novel, will be really starting to look at how to build a house, how to build local community, local intergenerational alter-kin, alternative kinship networks in our local communities as you were saying, sherri, it's actually about face-to-face. Online can take us a long way, but as we age and actually throughout our life, we need local friends who get us as well and who will be there for us when we need each other.

Sheri Johnson: 1:06:05

We do and one thing that I want to draw my listeners' attention to. I didn't know about this until I listened to your podcast with Ruby Warrington and you said I forget what it's called, but your monthly meetings with the elder women yes, it's called Fireside Wisdom with Childless Elder Women.

Jody Day: 1:06:25

It happens quarterly. We do it on the solstices and the equinoxes, so we have one coming up. I don't know when this episode is going out, but we have one coming up on September the 15th, which we're doing for World Childless Week, and then we will have another one at the December equinox, and I bring together a group of older women without children from around the world in their 50s, 60s, 70s, even 80s, and we chew over a topic each time. They are such good fun, I have to say. They take my facilitation skills right to the edge, managing sometimes a quite rowdy, rumbustuous crowd of like nine opinionated, brilliant, confident older women.

Jody Day: 1:07:08

Younger women really really appreciate being in the company of these women, as do I, and older women finally can see themselves older women without children. But yeah, I'm sorry, we're not these sad sacks sitting at home worrying about everything. You know we're. We're interesting women who've had interesting lives and are doing interesting things as we age and are managing parents and their you know elderly parents and their issues, and a managing health issues of our own and a dealing with aging, you know, as widows or single women as well as you know, partners. It's like, aging is a rich mix and, I have to say, older women without children. I've got so much to say and so much to offer. You'll find the details for those on my website Just click. Go to gateway hyphen women dot com and click on Gateway Elder Women. You'll find all of the past episodes of fireside wisdom and you can sign up for any future ones.

Sheri Johnson: 1:08:05

And something that you said to Ruby that I took to heart was you don't have to be an elder to sit at the feet of your elders. Absolutely, and I loved that because that just invited me in, even though I'm now 50. But at the time that I listened to that I was 49. So I think I was. Maybe I was already 50. But I still didn't think of myself as an elder.

Jody Day: 1:08:27

And also they are public, they are open, they're welcome. I mean, anyone could come along. You can come along. If you have children, you can come along. You know, whatever your gender expression, whatever your age they are, they are open, they are free. And I just think what it would have been like for me, as a young woman and as a middle aged woman, to have met women like that, to have heard them speaking frankly about the challenges and excitements and issues of growing older. I would have thought, okay, I want to be like that. I would have had something to look forward to.

Sheri Johnson: 1:09:00

Yes, I love it. Well, I hope that my listeners will take you up on that because I think it's a wonderful opportunity and thank you so much. I will link everything that we've talked about up in the show notes, all the books, the podcast episodes and your information, your contact information, jodi, and thank you so much for another inspiring conversation, oh.

Jody Day: 1:09:25

Sherry, thank you so much. We covered so much, but I still think we only scratched the surface. We might have to write a book together, or something We've got so much to talk about.

Sheri Johnson: 1:09:33

Yes, I know I feel like we could just go on and on. Thank you.