In anticipation of World Childless Week (September 14th-20th), we connect with with its Founder, Stephanie Joy Phillips in Worcestershire, England. 

Steph started World Childless Week ten years ago, after discovering there was no representation for the CNBC community anywhere she looked in the world. 

She opens up about her own childless experience and the many lessons that came from that. With invisibility often at the core of the CNBC experience, she found that being seen and heard by people in online support groups was immensely transformative. 

Online and through World Childless Week, she gathers many people together to share similar and different struggles, and to remember their value in a community of people who care. 

She keeps an open and non-judgmental policy for creative expression in World Childless Week submissions, providing an outlet for genuine connection. We talk about the courage of speaking up and also how nervous it can make a person feel, but how it gets a bit easier - and rewarding - with practice. 

She promotes the idea of employers recognizing childless employees, to include them in policies, as one way of creating more equity for CNBC people. She also believes that teaching children that it’s normal to grow up and not have kids would take away the fear behind it.  

We expand on the symbolism and language of the Forget-Me-Not flower, emblem for World Childless Week. 

Artist, Death Worker and Founder of Nine Keys School of Death Arts, Narinder Bazen, tells the whole story from the very beginning, for the first time on the mic, on how she came to be Childless Not By Choice. 

"Where's the people like me, the artist, the neurodivergent person, the queer folk who go through this?" 

By telling her CNBC story, she invites the next person to share theirs. "When one woman tells her story she frees up the next woman to tell hers, and so on and so on." 

She's calling on culture to change the way society interacts with CNBC people and claims that the grief in Childlessness can be a loss so deep and traumatic that it can also be life threatening. 

She also asks: "Did I really want to be a Mother? Or did I want to be a Creator?" Her death midwifery apprenticeship program was recently renamed a Death School of the Arts, and nurtures death workers into their own unique creativity.

Learn more about Narinder and what she offers here:  https://www.narinderbazen.com/

Introduction to 'Do you have kids? Short answer: No." 

I give you the Who, What, Where, When and How behind this concept.

Then I have a conversation alone with the Omniscient to kick things off. I expand on my own personal answer to 'the question' and tell you a bit about my devastating and course-altering experience with Thoracic / Diaphragmatic Endometriosis, and how I do and don't have kids, and how it became impossible for me to have a baby in this broken but enduring body. My life continues and so do new dreams that continue to unfold everyday, I offer gratitude with the lesson. 

This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. With you, the listeners and future contributors.