By Denise Donahue, MEd
I came across a post today, and it hit me like a punch in the throat. The kind that knocks the wind out of you. The kind that makes your stomach turn. The kind that makes you swallow hard because you can feel the tears coming before you even know why.
The question was simple: “What’s the hardest truth you’ve accepted as a woman?”
As I was getting ready to comment, I paused, and I started reading the comments.
One woman wrote, “I wonder who I could have become if I had chosen me.”
Another said, “No one notices everything I do unless it isn’t done.”
One woman admitted, “I have a husband and two grown sons. I wave goodbye from the kitchen window every single time they leave. No one has ever waved goodbye to me.”
Another simply wrote, “I’m so tired of being strong.”
And one comment absolutely broke me. “I give more than I receive. I’ve convinced myself I have to sacrifice parts of who I am just to make a relationship work.”
I started to write and I was halfway through typing my own answer when I stopped. Because every one of those women was telling my story.
I’ve stood on the porch waving goodbye as everyone I love pulled out of the driveway. No one has ever stood there waving goodbye to me.
I’ve turned on the porch light so the people I love could find their way home. No one has ever thought to turn it on for me.
I love hard.
I love loudly.
I love completely.
And somewhere along the way I started believing that if I just loved people enough, eventually someone would love me back the same way. Maybe that’s what so many of us are doing. We’re not overgiving because we’re weak. We’re overgiving because somewhere deep inside we hope the love we pour into everyone else will finally come back to us.
When I thought about answering the question, my response was going to be this: No matter how many times I think I’ve shattered the glass ceiling, someone quietly raises it another few inches.
But then another question hit me.
How did we get here? How did generations of women become so good at disappearing inside their own lives? And, why did it take me fifty-five years to finally decide maybe… just maybe… I deserve to matter too?
Then came the uncomfortable truth. I’m still not choosing myself. Yesterday I went to a bar, by myself, to watch the World Cup.
I had a great time. But my twenty-year-old daughter was home. She couldn’t come because she isn’t twenty-one, and there isn’t another place around here showing the game where minors can go.The entire time I sat there, I felt guilty. Not because I was doing anything wrong. But because I wasn’t home.
She goes out with her friends.
She laughs.
She lives her life.
Yet somehow I felt selfish for doing exactly the same thing. Why?
Who taught me that my joy should always come second? I also thought about the relationship I ended after seven months. I was told I loved too hard. That I expressed my feelings too much.
Imagine that.
Being criticized for telling someone you love them.
I wasn’t asking for perfection.
I wasn’t asking for forever.
I was asking for my love to be met somewhere in the middle.
Maybe that’s why those comments hurt so much. They weren’t written by broken women. They were written by women who had spent years believing their worth was measured by how much of themselves they could give away. And I could’ve written every single one of them.
And somewhere along the way these beautiful women forgot to ask one very important question.
What do I need?
I’m not telling women to leave their marriages. I’m not telling mothers to abandon their children. I’m not saying stop loving the people in your life. Or even to stop looking for love altogether. I’m saying something much harder.
Choose yourself, too. Because our daughters are watching us and they don’t learn self-worth from what we tell them. They learn it from what we tolerate. They learn it from watching whether their mother believes she deserves joy, rest, adventure, boundaries, and love without guilt.
Maybe that’s the hardest truth I’ve accepted as a woman. No one else was ever going to choose me first. That job was always mine.
And at fifty-five years old…
I’m still learning how.
