“Living the Life Unexpected”

LTLU 2nd Ed Cover Image (correct).jpg

My particular happiness in March is being part of a blog tour celebrating the release of the 2nd edition of Jody Day’s book, Living the Life Unexpected: How to Find Hope, Meaning, and a Fulfilling Future Without Children. The book will release on March 19th, and is available for preorder here.

Jody Day is the founder of Gateway Women, a global support network for childless women. When I was preparing for the release of my memoir, This Particular Happiness: A Childless Love Story, Jody was one of the first people I approached for an endorsement. I was thrilled when she said she would read my book, and even more so when I saw her response (which became the forward!). Jody is a fierce voice and a compassionate guide for people who are childless.

For many years Jody was one of the few who were speaking out and acknowledging the pain and sense of otherness experienced by women who are childless-not-by-chioce. The original edition of Living the Life Unexpected was chock full of information, exercises, and tools to guide people toward hope and meaning as they came to terms with infertility or other circumstances that meant they would not have children despite their desires. In the years since the first edition, Jody’s work with Gateway Women has grown and her interactions with childless women has expanded and deepened. She brings these years of experience and insight to this new edition (download a sample here).

The book is broken down into twelve chapters with specific exercises that explore the many issues that childless-not-by-choice women face. Loss of hope, struggle for identity and place in a pronatalist society, a teasing apart of expectations (our own and what we take on from the outside world), the search for purpose and meaning. This book goes deeply to the search for self when one avenue we had hung our identity on is closed off to us. This gets at the complexity of childlessness—it is not one way or the other. This book encourages us to be curious about our complexity.

“The room called childlessness has many doors,not just ones marked

‘didn’t want,’or ‘couldn’t have.’”

~Jody Day

This quote from the book acknowledges all the paths to childlessness. Grief about childlessness can sit side-by-side with the knowledge that it is also very nice to stay in bed on a Saturday morning or plan a spontaneous getaway, to recognize the moments of freedom that come from being childless. Jody helps the reader give space to the grief and also to the joys of living.

Jody shares her own journey of infertility. Now, as she is beyond the deep longing and the possibility of having a child, she is able to offer the wisdom of distance, while holding the compassion and memory of her longing close. If is from this view that she offers this book and Gateway Women as guide on the unexpected path.

Check out these other fabulous sites on Jody’s blog tour. It is inspiring to see this list of resources helping raise the voices of people who are childless.


Jackie Shannon Hollis#LTLU, #childless, blog tour, Book, gateway women