Awakening Worth in Childless Women

Are you making this mistake that could be stopping you from experiencing your best life? Many people walk around on autopilot, thinking about the past or the future instead of being present. They make the mistake of operating on autopilot and following routines, without asking themselves what they really want to experience or how they want to feel. If this is you, you're not manifesting your...

Do you have a pet that feels like a child to you?  Even if you don't, stay tuned, because this episode is going to blow the lid off of the "you don't know love until you have a child" sentiment that we hear from parents.  I have a really special guest on this episode who is going to take us through her childless journey as someone who self-identifies as a fence-sitter when it c...

Something I hear all the time from childless women is, "I feel like I don't belong", or "I don't fit in".  One of the biggest mistakes I see among these women making is AVOIDING kid-centred events in order to avoid the feeling that they don't belong.  I felt this too, so I get it. I used to avoid anything to do with Santa, the Christmas parades, or any community...

This might be one of the most "triggering" remarks that parents make to people who don't have kids.  If you wanted kids, you sure don't feel very lucky, right?  In fact, you might feel pretty unlucky.  Have you had this scenario come up before?  I have and I'm going to walk through the steps I used to handle it with love and kindness.  This is the last solo episode in my s...

So many childless and childfree women hate this question.  A simple "no" answer often leads to awkward silences or the other party trying to back track or fill the space.  But what if you could answer this question with ease and grace and both you and the person asking the question could walk away from the conversation feeling good? That's what today's episode is all about.  It...

If you are anything like me, you're probably tired of hearing about JD Vance and the comments he made publicly about childless women being miserable cat ladies and having no stake in America's future.   I'm not even American, and yet angry reactions to this have been filling my feed these days. The thing is, the majority of them have been simply reactions to his comments.  And my qu...

If you want to be able to answer questions like “do you have kids” with authenticity instead of awkwardness, you must shift your mindset.  It's not enough to just rehearse how you'll respond.  And if you're anything like I used to be, what you're rehearsing might feel more defensive and hurt than empowering.  When I first realized that I wasn't going to have kids, I just w...

"Time heals all wounds" is the biggest lie we've been told about grief.  I used to believe this lie, myself.  After any sort of big emotion, I thought time would eventually clear it away.   This is a super-short solo episode where I break down why this common, widely-held belief is actually a myth, and what you can do about it.   This is the second episode in my summer series on how...

Do you have kids?  Who's going to take care of you when you're old?  What's your purpose then?  You can borrow my kids anytime! You've probably heard them all, or at least some of the questions and comments that bother us women without kids.  Maybe you've thought to yourself, or maybe even out loud, "I wish people would just stop asking questions or saying insensitive...

Childless?  Childfree?  Woman Without Kids? Take your pick!  I've been really curious about how women who don't have kids and wanted them identify themselves.  Some appear to be really attached to the Childless Not By Choice term, and yet my own experience and in the multiple discussions we've had in my group program, childless seems to make us FEEL less. In this solo episode, I unp...

Feeling lonely is one of the most common complaints I hear from childless women so if you're feeling lonely, you are definitely not the only one! I felt lonely too when I first started down the path to permanently childless, especially once my husband seemed to have moved forward without me and didn't seem to understand what I was going through.  So I thought it was high time to talk mor...

There was a time when I didn't quite feel like I had found a place within the childless community and the reason was that I had not done IVF.  It seemed as though so many of the women there had tried IVF and they had this common language and terms that I wasn't familiar with.   Then I realized that there are SO many different paths that all converge on leading a life without children and...

Harrison Butker's commencement speech at Benedictine College ruffled a LOT of feathers, especially within the childfree community.  There were a lot of insults thrown at him, arguments started on social media comment sections, even calls to cancel his NFL contract.  Were they justified?  In my opinion, it doesn't really matter.  What matters is this: how do YOU feel when you hear words l...

Download your free guide to Finding Purpose Beyond Parenthood: Getting Through Grief and Triggers to a Life of Meaning and Joy ! Last week I talked about how purpose is not something you "find".  It's also not a singular mission.  It's not a destination.  And it doesn't have to be big.   Once you begin to practice all the things that I outlined that will bring you a sense...

Download your free guide to Finding Purpose Beyond Parenthood: Getting Through Grief and Triggers to a Life of Meaning and Joy ! Purpose is not some concept that you find.  It's not a destination. It's not singular. And it doesn't come from having kids.  I understand why you believe it does.  I did too.  It's because society tells us that when you have kids, you'll be floo...

It is so clear to me that Ruby Warrington is a thought leader in the childfree/childless space!  She has authored, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood, and in my view, the whole book was revolutionary.   She discusses concepts that were swirling around vaguely in my head and my mind was blown when I saw them so well articulated on the pages of her book. We get into s...

Many childless people don't even realize they are grieving.  Who would have known you can grieve the loss of an imagined future?   What I find is that many women without kids, even those who choose not to have them, feel some sort of grief and it's not always the loss of that future.  Identifying what specifically you're grieving is key to processing it. In this solo episode, I&apos...

These are 5 steps you haven't heard before.  You've probably heard people talk about staying off social media and opting out of Mother's Day emails.  Maybe doing something nice for yourself and saying "no" to the celebrations.   These are all valid things you can do to avoid feeling the pain of Mother's Day as a childless woman who wanted to be a mother. And yet, they...

Menopause is a huge transformational time for women and another topic that we don’t talk about enough.  Women may joke about their memory, or hot flashes or complain about heavy periods.  But they don’t talk about the deep stuff.  The vulnerable stuff.  Or the scary stuff.  There is SO much going on for women during perimenopause and midlife, and childless women experience it, quite often, right a...

It's hard to fit in when you are in the minority.  Childless women over 40 make up roughly 20% of the population (depending on what country you live in).   Sometimes I wonder how many of them are living in the larger cities because it sure feels like everyone around me in my little town are parents.  But what if we embraced this unchosen nonconformity?  What if we unleashed the inner rebel wi...

In our current society, women without kids make up anywhere between 15 and 25% of the adult female population, depending on the country.  Recently, I started to wonder what life would look like - what grief would look like - if that were reversed.  If mothers were in the minority, would childless women feel so much FOMO, inadequacy or lack of belonging?  Would the grief run as deep?  Would we stil...

Have you ever come away from a conversation thinking "gosh, "people just don't get it"?  Either they say something insensitive or simply can't empathize with your childless circumstances.   It's definitely happened to me.  Even recently.  But the mistake I see in the childless space is the assumption that there is nothing you can do about it.  You just have to deal wi...

Anger is an emotion that comes up a lot with my childless clients who wanted kids.  Anger can be a really complicated emotion because it's not only an emotion in and of itself, but it can also disguise other emotions.  What makes it even tougher to manage is that most little girls are taught not to express the tough emotions.  Anger is something boys are allowed to show, but not girls.  Yes,...

As I embark on the next 100 episodes on the Awakening Worth Podcast, I spend this session reflecting on the deeper reason I keep hitting record and why you should keep hitting the play button.  I've come to realize that so many of us are stuck in this pronatalist ideology and it's impacting, well...really, all of humanity.  It's us, the childless women, who feel it the most, but it&...

Celebrating 100 episodes today!   My husband, Mike Johnson, and I mark this special occasion together on the podcast with a conversation that makes its way through life without children from HIS perspective.  As we share the narrative of our journey, from the heartbreak of miscarriage to the multitude of decisions along the fertility treatment path, we peel back the layers of our different perspec...