A childless lady recently told me she has stopped going to church because all she heard about was “belief and trust”. She said that positivity has invaded the church and she no longer feels comfortable bearing her grief of childlessness there. My heart aches for her. It begs an important question: Can we be too […]
Survivng Childlessness
A Platter of Platitudes
I was irked the other day to hear that a fellow childless lady had her childlessness described as “God’s will.” I don’t know if it was meant as an encouragement, but it sounded like the result was all kinds of unhelpful. To me, “It’s God’s will” comes across as a platitude. We do this, don’t […]
Reflections on Otherhood
I recently watched a TED talk by Melanie Notkin, “Welcome to the Otherhood”[1]. Melanie spoke about the grief of being single without children. For Melanie, the grief was one of “circumstantial infertility,” that is, grief of not being able to have children because of her relationship status. One thing I liked about Melanie’s TED talk […]
Deliverance from Childlessness
During my recent visit to Koorong, I began talking to people about childlessness as the subject of my next book. One of the people I spoke with happened to be a Koorong staff member, and he helpfully did a search on childlessness. His search yielded one result, Deliverance from Childlessness¹. Besides further convincing me that […]
Surviving Sequeldom
Last weeks’ visit to Koorong afforded some interesting conversations with readers. One question that kept recurring was, “What are you going to write about next?” People seemed keen to know about the sequel for Surviving Singledom. I have had a number of requests for a book about marriage: Surviving Marriagedom or something similar. Let me […]