WHY I CREATED A COMMUNITY FOR WOMEN WITHOUT CHILDREN
LOOKING FOR A SPACE THAT DIDN’T Exist
The inspiration for Our Sister•Ship started with a longing for an ease to build new friendships and space that honored women whose lives don’t include children in all the many and complex ways that path can unfold.
THE UNCOMFORTABLE MIDDLE
For most of my life, I sat somewhere uncomfortably in between when it came to motherhood. I never strongly imagined myself as a mother, but I didn’t rule it out either. Like many women, I bought into the cultural myth that one day I’d just know! That a deep maternal instinct would wash over me, and I’d feel an undeniable, biological, gravitational pull toward motherhood.
In my 30s, single and dating, I felt what many women experience as a familiar pressure: find the right partner so the option to have children stays available. Eventually, I did. But the maternal urge was elusive. I waited for the shift, the “aha” moment that never arrived. And as time passed into years, my ambivalence became more and more uncomfortable. Even painful.
the anguish of clarity
Getting clear that I didn’t want to have children, at least not in the way I watched many of my close friends yearn for them, was neither instant nor easy. It stirred self-doubt, fear, anxiety, internalized shame, and a lingering question: Is something wrong with me for not wanting what so many women seem to desire so deeply?
Yet, my longing pointed elsewhere. Toward freedom. Spontaneous late-night dinners. Quiet, unstructured Sundays. The ability to plan long weekends getaways or big adventures with relative ease and few constraints. Through my own personal therapy, couples therapy, and intuitive inquiry practices, my partner and I ultimately settled into our choice: to live a full, rich adult life without becoming parents.
Yet, even as I write this, now many years past that time, I hold a deep awareness of the privilege embedded my choice. I had agency. I honor the countless women who arrive at a life without children through a complex host of unwanted circumstances: infertility, health complications, relationship status, financial limitations, religious or cultural expectations, or the layered intersections of queer identity and institutional systems that dismantle human rights.
I bow to the many paths.
THE QUIET RELATIONAL SHIFTS
By my late 30s, I felt mostly at peace with that decision, but something else began to slowly surface. I started to notice subtle ways I felt like I was quietly orbiting outside the worlds of my closest friends - women who were now raising babies or young children, their identities rightfully shifting as they became mothers.
Our spontaneous meetups gave way to tightly packed calendars filled with playdates, bedtimes, and new social circles they’d built around parenting. The ache I felt wasn’t for a child; it was for the everyday intimacy of female friendships, and the ease of making new connections in midlife.
THE UNExpectED gRIEF
Then came another layer. As I entered my 40s and began experiencing the early stirrings of perimenopause, I felt a grief I hadn’t expected - something almost cellular. I wasn’t mourning a child I never had. I was mourning the feeling of being separate from a lineage of women whose bodies had done something mine hadn’t, and never would.
It was a quiet, sacred, sadness I didn’t know how to name.
In between the labels: childfree or childless
Even though I made the choice not to have children, personally, I’ve never fully identified with the “childfree by choice” communities I came across. They often felt too binary or celebratory, overlooking the grey zones I lived in. But I didn’t quite fit within the “childless not by choice” narrative either.
My story, like so many others, lived somewhere in between.
A PLACE TO HOLD IT ALL
Our Sister•Ship was metaphorically born from that in-between - a longing for a community that could hold the full complexity and messy truth: the freedom and the ache, the beauty and the loss, the joy and the vulnerability.
I wanted to bring together women living rich, full lives that don’t revolve around raising children, not as a rejection of motherhood itself, but as a quiet act of reclamation. A defiance of outdated, patriarchal narratives that paint women without children as less than or invisible, or worse yet “childless cat ladies”.
This is a space that affirms life without children is not less whole, less meaningful or less worthy of celebration. Most importantly, it’s a space that uses travel intentionally to make space for more play, more joy, more abundance, and new friendships rooted in a shared understanding.
And for women whose path to living without children wasn’t chosen; who’ve carried the deep grief of an unmet longing, Our Sister•Ship might feel like an invitation for a new kind of belonging. When, or if, the time feels right, this space exists. Not to replace what was hoped for, but to honor what’s still possible: joy, adventure, connection, and the warm welcome of a circle of women living fully. 🧡 🌿 💫