The Woman I Forgot to Mention

On becoming absent from your own life

If I asked you to make a list of all the things you love, how long would it take you to name yourself — if you ever did?

You may have heard that question, or some version of it, along the way. We nod our heads because intellectually we get it. But most of us still can’t quite embody the idea. We have become absent from our own lives.

We introduce ourselves as mothers, daughters, grandmothers, sisters, accountants, nurses, business women, healers — a list of roles we’ve assumed, parts we play in this game of life. But those roles don’t come close to describing the essence of you. Or me.

What I often find difficult to witness is the woman who is absent from the telling of her own story. Perhaps that pain comes from having been her. When she describes herself, she speaks of the people in her life, the roles she plays, the needs she tends. She is everywhere — caretaker, gardener, lover, partner, parent, teacher, planner, the one who remembers everything for everyone — and nowhere simultaneously. She is the narrator who forgot to include herself as a character.

Often, when I ask women what they want, they tell me what they want for someone else. For their children, their partners, their parents, their friends. Rarely does a woman in midlife truly know what she wants for herself. She simply stopped existing in her own life.

Erasure doesn’t happen in an instant. It’s gradual. The slow accumulation of small accommodations, each one reasonable in the moment, each one loving, each one barely noticeable on its own.

Like looking up into the night sky and noticing a single star. Then another. Perhaps a third. But when you pull back your gaze and see all the stars together, they form a constellation. A pattern. The gradual erosion of a self who learned to lead with usefulness rather than presence. Who became fluent in everyone else’s story while her own went untold.

This is where patriarchal conditioning threads its way into our lives. Not all at once, and without announcing itself.

I didn’t disappear all at once. I disappeared one reasonable decision at a time.

How many times I told myself — not again. And yet there I was, feeling wrong for wanting to say anything at all.

Until one day you realize you’re standing at the edge of your own life tending to everyone else’s yet no one is tending to yours, including you. This is the slow erasure that leaves you wondering why you feel so disenchanted with everything you thought you ever wanted, or were told you should want.

I don’t say this lightly. I have felt this erasure in my own life and continue to bump up against those old patterns in new ways. This is the practice. Slowly stripping away everyone else’s needs and finally exposing my own. Discovering the woman who was here before all the conditioning began.

Who was she before the omissions started?

Not some idealized version of me. The real me.

What did she love before she learned to love carefully, and without regard for herself? What did she want before she learned to want appropriately? What did she know before she learned to doubt her own knowing?

I have always loved learning and experimenting. As a young girl I always had a project going — handmade cards and gifts, a backyard fundraiser with friends, gathering my siblings to sing for family at the holidays, biking to the library for another book to read. Creating experiences for people brings me great joy. Gathering friends around a table for a meal and deep conversation. When I travel abroad, I plan a cooking class, then bring the experience home and recreate the meal for friends. I’ve had friends gather to make homemade pasta and share it together around my table.

This is who I was. This is who I am.

And then there was the Thanksgiving I made for my in-laws. I was a young mother and wife at the time. The table was beautifully set. China. Cloth napkins. Wine glasses. Little note cards at each place. It felt wonderful to be creating something for family.

As everyone took their seats, the grumbling began. It was too fancy. Cloth napkins were for other people, not us.

I felt completely deflated. But the worst part — my husband said nothing. No compliment. No quiet word of appreciation. No gentle suggestion that they might be grateful for the meal. Nothing at all.

And neither did I. Ever.

I let it go. And once I did, the next thing was harder to stand up for. So, I didn’t stand up for that either. Slowly, I let what they felt, what he didn’t say, erase what mattered most to me. I began to leave myself out of my own life.

Until years later. As a woman in her forties whose children were leaving home. I had everything I should have wanted by traditional standards, and never felt emptier. The house void of the comings and goings of children, the gap between us had become cavernous — too wide for me to cross any longer. As I looked into that void I could finally begin to see it. The constellation of erasure I had allowed to form. And underneath it, the hunger that had been waiting underground all along.

I want to be clear about something before we go further. I am not here to blame anyone including myself. This is conditioning. The water we are all swimming in. Patriarchy hurts women and men alike. The insensitivity of everyone at that Thanksgiving table was the expression of their own conditioning. I couldn’t see that until I began to see my own patterns. My own complicity in the silence. My own hand in the erasure.

Once I did, I began to understand something that changed everything.

That woman was never gone. She was just omitted. She didn’t choose this exactly. She learned that compliance equaled safety. And she was very, very good at keeping herself safe.

The erasure is real, and what has been omitted can be restored.

It began slowly. One evening my husband was speaking with one of our children, who had asked if they could do something together that night. My husband said — no, your mother is having people over.

Not we’re having friends over. Your mother is having people over.

As much as that stung in the moment, he was right. It wasn’t something that mattered to him. I was having friends over. I was creating an experience for my friends, and for myself, as much as for them. Because this is what I love to do. And goddamnit I am finally going to do what the fuck I want to do.

This is what coming home feels like. There’s no big announcement, and sometimes it arrives wrapped in irritation before it reveals itself as freedom. What he said, what he thought, whether this was his thing or not — it was mine. It mattered to me.

I mattered.

What about you?

If you were to tell the story of your life and include yourself as a full character in it — not the narrator, not the one holding everything together, but a woman with her own hunger, her own knowing, and her own place at the center of her own story — what would you have to admit that you’ve been leaving out?

Let yourself sit with that.

With love and tenderness,