Felix pulls toward a blowing leaf and my friend says it without lowering her voice. She is unhappy. She has been for a while. The house is paid off, the children are launched, the account is full, and she is standing on her own lawn wondering whether she wants to keep living the life she built.
I have heard a version of this from four women this year.
All four, my peers. We were handed an arc in the 2000s and told it was fate. Study hard. Take the job that pays. Marry a man who can provide. Buy the house in the good district. Climb. Raise children inside a structure built to hold aging parents and rest on a husband’s salary. Retire in peace once the nest empties.
Not do you love the man? Is your soul being fed by what you pour yourself into, week after week, year after year? What lies at the end of toiling: peace, or the absence of noise?
So we did it. We cared for the parents, then the in-laws, the children, the husband, the calendar, the medicines, the flights, the festivals. We learned everyone’s dosage and forgot our own prescription went unfilled. The engine kept running.
The things we don’t say out loud? These are the lives we prayed for. Lit lamps for. Fasted for. We wanted the marriage, the children, the house. So in our fifties, when the question finally comes, it wears a muzzle. Who am I to complain? I asked for this. I breathed it into being. The wanting feels like a betrayal of every woman who got less.
That is the gag order. We architected the life we have now. Do we dare complain?
The cracks come anyway. A layoff stops being a lost job and becomes a lost identity. The body that would not hold a pregnancy becomes a silent cross, carried alone, for years. The in-laws you cannot please become proof you are self-centered. The child who struggles in school, the child whose brain is wired differently, becomes a verdict on your mothering. You enabled it. You caused it. You should have seen it coming.
Notice who carries the blame in every one of those sentences. Not the structure. Her.
One crack, then a dozen. Somewhere in the fifties, with the body cratering through perimenopause and the mind worn to exhaustion, she stops and asks what she was never given room to ask.
Why am I doing this?
For whom?
Why am I the only one?
And under all of it, the question she has spent three decades avoiding. Who the heck am I?
It would be easy to name this patriarchy and leave the men holding the blame. The structure was held by women too. The mothers who raised sons to be served and daughters to serve. The society that measured a girl by her wedding and a wife by her acquiescence. The friends who heard restlessness and called it ingratitude. We were the bricks and the masons both. We held each other inside the lines and called it love, and some of it was love.
Felix and I are back by our mailbox. We say it out loud to each other, my friend and I. Two women, fifty, financially fine, saying it in daylight.
Our mothers asked it too, I think. Just never where anyone could hear.
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