Useful links and additional advice as a continuation of the webinar “Taking Control - planning your later life when you are ageing without children”.

My name is Vera and I’m scared.

I’m scared that I’m sitting here in your care home or lying in your hospital bed and you don’t know who I am. So I thought I’d tell you, whilst I’m still young (67) and compos mentis.

When we went into pandemic lockdown, I became much more active on social media that I had been in the past so I could better stay connected to friends and loved ones. I’m grateful for how easy these programs and apps make it for us to stay in touch and have a small window into one another’s lives. But as my “feeds” fill up with pictures of parents with their kids and grandkids, I’ve been hit with some emotions I wasn’t expecting.

I was 27 when I met my husband. I’m now 41, childless and on the verge of a marriage breakdown. When my husband said he didn’t want children, I should have believed him.

I was scared that all this time in lockdown and the way it brought me to focus on my loneliness, it emphasised my singleness and my childlessness – surely this was not a good thing?

In this episode, we were joined by Kirsty Woodard, a leading figure in raising awareness in ageing without children and founder of Ageing Well Without Children, Ming Ho, a screenwriter who writes, speaks, and campaigns on dementia and carer issues at Dementia Just Ain’t Sexy and Denise Jackson, a experienced carer and only child.

40 years ago I was getting ready to marry my first husband. We had such dreams, children, houses and of course grandchildren. Sadly children never materialised.

I had always thought that having children would happen to me as it happened to all my long term friends. Getting married, buying a house and then having a baby: I somehow thought that would all happen to me.

It didn’t happen. Fertility specialists couldn’t find any reason why I wasn’t conceiving.

Hi, I’m Janet, now aged 71 unbelievably, how time has flown. I am childless through circumstance. I always thought I would have a husband and children.

Terror.

Abject terror.

Breath-stealing three-a.m. shadows

That create dark visions

Of neglect and demented solitude.

Holygoodlord, the terror.

Once upon a time, I had a LOT of common life plans: college, career, marriage, house, kids — in that order. I assumed I controlled the outcomes in my life, and I would follow the same path millions of others had trod before me.

I will have 5 children, I said

(Kennedy Grace, Christina Elizabeth, Shea, Declan, McKenna)

Legacy is defined in the dictionary as: “something passed on by someone”

I completed a counselling programme and largely accepted involuntary childlessness. I still couldn’t handle the word “legacy” and perhaps this is the hardest part of the journey.

How can we apply the nature of the forest to our own human nature? We seem stuck in a harangue about why everyone needs to have kids, how those of us without them are problematic.

I was born in 1945, I am 75. My mother was born in 1913 and World War II prevented many women of her generation from becoming mothers, just as the First World War had reduced the number of young men and the chance of marriage for the women of the previous generation.

The problem is that I have grandchildren.

My husband of 20 years had been married before and so I have two (now grown-up) step-children, both of whom now have families of their own.

One of the largest pieces of my childlessness grief is the loss of legacy.

Thank you to World Childless Week for adding this to this year's list of topics. This is a topic that I have given a lot of thought to as mentioned in my #RedefiningmyPlanA post earlier this year.

I shouldn’t be writing this. Involuntary childlessness is not what I signed up for. I had a plan you see. My plan involved a husband and children.

You never spoke but I heard you

We never met but I held you

You never ate but I fed you

You never walked but I led you.

From the 1980’s when I began on the journey along this less travelled road -it seems to me that much has stayed the same.

Homeshare organisations bring together people with spare rooms with people who are happy to chat and lend a hand around the house in return for affordable, sociable accommodation.