NYMPHE: Childless, Childfree, Parent, Stepmom.

NO CHILDLESS FEMALE ASTRONAUTS...

...at least not in China. The Chinese space program plans to send its first women to space, but these women must already be mothers before they're eligible to take flight.

"The insistence that they should also be wives and mothers does not relate to their multi-tasking abilities. Officials are concerned that space flight might affect their fertility.

"It's out of the consideration of being responsible for the female pilots," Xu told the state news agency Xinhua. "Though there is little evidence on how the space experience will affect the female constitution, we have to be extra cautious. After all, it's unprecedented in China."

No word yet on why women's fertility is deemed more important than that of men, especially in a country with limited reproductive rights—nor what of women who'd like to be spacefarers but prefer to remain childfree. Read all about it in the Guardian UK.

VOTE: what should happen to this blog now that things have changed?

"I think you’re great.  Don’t stop blogging.  Please."

A reader named Renée just sent me that, and dang, was it nice to read. "In my search to find some sort of familiar voice online… I found nothing close," she said. And some other readers said similar: that I'd hit a weird niche that they couldn't find elsewhere, online or off.

I feel gratified that my torturous, whiny grieving-and-deciding process was useful to anybody. Really freakin' gratified. Now I just wonder what to do next. So you tell me: A, B, or C?

A) TOMBSTONE SITE
Should I stop posting to Nymphe and leave it here as a "tombstone" website? The point of that: some of these posts are linked from a lot of places, and people seeking information and balm for their wounds, they find 'em, they email me, they comment. So if the site stayed up, those posts would still be visible. And if that particular grieving person nosed around on the site, they would not be confronted by a bunch of new posts featuring Me the Pregnant Lady or Me the One with a Kid... which could be traumatic.

B) I-CHANGED-MY-MIND SITE
Leave Nymphe here. Leave the old posts. Leave the resources. But just keep telling my story as it unfolds. The new posts might sometimes refer to the eternal battle between defensive moms, defensive childless, and defensive childfrees, but they might also be about how I make the transition from my "No I won't give in to the biological clock" stance to the "Oh please I give up, can I have a baby now?" part of my life.

C) NUKE!
End the site, close it down, move on with my life. Main advantage to this is that I pay for my hosting on this site.

Any suggestions? Comment here, comment on Facebook, or email me at magdalen23 at le Gmail.