Walking a Not Kidding Fine Line

There's been so much written this week (and spoken) through World Childless Week. I'm still making my way through it all, both to see what people I know have written, and to find new writers and stories. It has been wonderful to see it grow, and to hear all the different stories. I do hope you have been looking, and reading, and listening. I submitted two pieces, one on Legacy (surprise, surprise), and the other, interestingly, was the piece I posted here last Monday for Our Stories. It was selected for the Moving Forwards theme of the week, appropriately the very last theme of the week. The one that shows people who are in pain that it is possible to move forwards, that life can still be good, that there's much more to life than whether or not we have children. It finishes the week on such a positive note, as it should.

I felt torn a lot of last week. I didn't publicise my writings on personal social media accounts. But I did write this on A Separate Life, where I neither hide my childlessness nor highlight it. You see, I was torn because whilst I want to educate people about the way they view, judge, talk to and think about childless people, I also don't want to make it see as if I want pity. Navigating that fine line isn't always easy. There are the intolerant people who role their eyes whenever I mention a difference in my life because I don't have kids, when all I'm trying to do is participate in a conversation. There are the ones who judge or condescend to me, and I don't want to give them any more ammunition. But it does get easier as I get older, because I both say more of what I think, and I'm not as sensitive as I might have been when things were very raw. And it's important to let people know that life for us is a little different than they might ever have considered. As I said in the piece,

"The more we understand about all our differences, the kinder we can be to both groups, and the more we will ALL benefit."

So I'll finish with World Childless Week 2021 by including my #Iamme pic. If you look carefully, you can see my shadow as I took the pic on our drive through the South Island in May. And if you read the words, I deliberately didn't label myself as "childless." Because as I've written so many times before, I don't like that label, though I use it out of necessity. I much prefer to say that I am not kidding. It's the truth, it doesn't judge, and the play on words pleases me. I am Mali, and I am not kidding. 

 

World Childless Week related thoughts

I spent the weekend writing a couple of posts for World Childless Week 2021 (13-19 September) and submitted them just before the deadline (and I have scheduled them for posting here too), so writing a decent Microblog Mondays post has been a bit much, and I apologies in advance. 

However, I did (and do) feel inspired by the World Childless Week topics, and may write one or two new pieces here too over the next few weeks. But of course in my last ten years of blogging I have covered all of these topics, sometimes many times. So today I’m just going to link to my library of previous writings, but encourage you to look at the topics (listed below) and think about writing your own pieces.

World Childless Week Topic:

Our Stories -This whole blog is my No Kidding story, but the key message here is that my story is more than my childlessness. Reading this in concert with A Separate Life gives a better picture, but it is still really only what I want to share, of course. I’ll post an update to my story in World Childless Week, but My Story and Who I am feature both the No Kidding aspects of my life, and my life in totality.

Childlessness and Sexual Intimacy – The one topic I’ve written little about, though I touched on it briefly in S*x and Infertility, and in Accepting My Body. I may write a new post on this soon, as it is an issue rarely covered, and I applaud Stephanie for including it in the WCW 21 topics.

Leaving a Legacy – As any regular reader knows, I’ve written about this quite a lot. I have a new post coming on it in WCW, so I will just reference If we are childless, what is our legacy?, and even Recipes as Legacy. And perhaps notably, in one of the Gifts of Infertility I referred to letting go of our legacy as a gift.

Men Matter Too – Of course they do, but they don’t often tell their stories. I’ve talked about this in What About the Men? and Men are from Mars…

Have You Considered Adoption? – I may also touch on this again soon, but in the meantime link back to Why We Didn’t Adopt, written way back in 2015, when a number of bloggers addressed the topic. Other posts mentioning adoption include Infertility’s Waiting Room, and Hear Me, That’s All I Ask.

We are Worthy – It’s always worth giving ourselves (and our friends) a reminder that though we might not have children, we are worthy. So I needed to read Who We See When We Look in the Mirror, and a previous WCW effort from 2018, We Are Worthy, for my own benefit too. I’ll have to think about whether I have anything new to add.

Moving Forwards – This entire topic is, as I wrote for last year’s WCW post, the topic of my No Kidding blog. It’s about how I moved forward, and what I needed to do to be able to do that, and what I keep doing to ensure that I am not stuck where I don’t want to be. It was the focus of the 2020 Healing Project series in which I wrote 20 posts about moving forwards. Ultimately, I think moving forwards is simply living.