The real purpose of tennis is not cardiovascular health, hand-eye coordination, maintaining bone density, or finally developing a backhand that does not look like a startled reflex. The real purpose of tennis is trash talk.

I did not understand this when I started playing. I thought the point was to get better, which is an earnest and exhausting way to approach almost anything in middle age. I assumed I was there to learn the rules, improve my serve, and eventually look like someone who had some idea of what she was doing. And I do want to get better. I am competitive enough that I cannot pretend otherwise. But somewhere along the way, I realized that the tennis itself was only part of why I kept coming back. Mostly, I was there because I laughed so much.

The women I play with range in age from forty to seventy-four, and we behave like unsupervised twelve-year-olds. We curse constantly. We make fun of one another and ourselves. We celebrate deeply mediocre shots as though we have just won Wimbledon and respond to genuinely good ones with immediate allegations of cheating. We try to hit our coach, which I realize sounds hostile, but is actually one of our purest expressions of affection. Sometimes he deserves it. Sometimes he is standing in an inconvenient location. Sometimes the opportunity simply presents itself and you have to take the shot.

It is all so incredibly silly. We are grown women with jobs, children, grandchildren, mortgages, relationships, aging parents, hormones, and lives that require us to make approximately six thousand decisions a day. Then we walk onto a tennis court and become consumed by whether a fuzzy yellow ball landed two inches inside a painted white line. We dispute calls with total confidence despite the fact that none of us could possibly have seen the ball clearly. We yell “OUT” when what we really mean is, “I did not want that to be in.” We become furious with ourselves for missing a shot and then forget about it thirty seconds later because someone else has done something even more embarrassing.

I laugh more on the tennis court than I do almost anywhere else, and not polite laughter. I mean the kind where you have to stop playing because you cannot breathe, usually over something that would not be remotely funny if you tried to explain it afterward. This is one of the things I love about it. Tennis has its own tiny culture and running jokes and shared language. Half the humor is probably incomprehensible to anyone who was not there, which somehow makes it better.

Adults do not play enough. We exercise. We network. We attend organized social events. We have dinners where we discuss our children and our work and the complicated state of the world. Even the things we do for pleasure now seem to require a secondary justification. Tennis is good for my heart. It keeps me active. It is important for women to preserve muscle mass as we age. All of this is true, and none of it is why I am laughing while attempting to drill my coach with a forehand.

Children never need to explain why they are playing. They do not require a wellness benefit or a meaningful takeaway. They invent a game, become completely hysterical, change the rules halfway through, accuse one another of cheating, recover from the ensuing argument, and keep going. Adults have somehow convinced ourselves that enjoyment alone is a slightly frivolous use of time. We have to be improving ourselves, caring for someone else, accomplishing something, or at least closing a ring on our watch.

But maybe laughing for an hour is enough. Maybe spending time with people who let you be ridiculous is not an indulgence that needs to be defended. Maybe play is one of the ways we remember that we are still people underneath all the responsibilities we have accumulated.

Tennis is particularly good for this because it makes dignity almost impossible. You can hit the most beautiful shot of your life and then completely miss a ball floating toward you at the speed of a balloon. You can feel athletic and powerful for perhaps forty-five seconds before serving directly into the bottom of the net. You can spend an entire lesson working on one small technical adjustment, finally get it right, and then appear to have no memory of it the next time you play. There is no way to maintain the illusion that you have everything under control, which I find increasingly refreshing.

The trash talk is part of the intimacy of it. You cannot make fun of everyone. You have to know that someone understands the spirit in which it is being offered and will happily return it. It is a kind of affection that would sound mildly abusive if transcribed. We notice one another’s habits, weaknesses, ridiculous excuses, and wildly selective interpretations of the rules. We give each other a hard time because we are paying attention. There is something comforting about being known well enough to be mocked accurately.

For a few hours, none of us has to perform adulthood particularly well. We are not trying to be productive, impressive, composed, nurturing, desirable, or wise. We are yelling across the net, disputing obviously correct calls, threatening our coach, laughing at our own incompetence, and becoming absurdly invested in games that will have absolutely no bearing on the course of our lives.

I may eventually improve my backhand. I may even learn where I am supposed to stand during doubles. But those are secondary benefits. I play tennis because adult life is serious enough, because I love these women, and because sometimes we need a place where the only reasonable response to dumping a volley directly into the net is, “Fuck me.”

A few years ago I called my children’s school and asked them to move Steve to the top of the emergency contact list.

Not to take myself off it. Just to put him first.

It was a small thing. One phone call, three minutes, a perfectly nice woman in the front office who said of course and did it while I was still on the line. And yet I remember feeling faintly ridiculous the entire time, the way you feel when you are making a fuss about something that is not supposed to require a fuss.

Here is why I made the call. I see patients in back to back sessions. When I am with someone I am with them, which means my phone is away, I am not stepping into the hallway, and I am not taking a call from the school about a scratch. Not an injury. A scratch, the kind where nobody is sending my child home, where someone simply felt that a parent should be informed. Steve’s day has more give in it. Structurally, factually, he was the better first call.

The school called me anyway. Every time. For years.

For a while I assumed this was a story about my particular school, or possibly about me, and then a few economists went and ran the experiment.

Somebody Actually Tested This

Kristy Buzard, Laura Gee and Olga Stoddard emailed something like eighty thousand American schools, essentially the entire universe of them, posing as fictional two parent families with a question about enrollment. Each email listed both parents and both phone numbers and asked the school to call one of them back.

Schools called the mother fifty nine percent of the time. Overall, mothers were 1.4 times more likely to be contacted than fathers.

That part I would have guessed. It is the next part that stopped me.

When the email explicitly signaled that the father was the more available parent, schools still called the mother twenty six percent of the time. When the email signaled that the mother was more available, schools called her ninety percent of the time.

Look at the asymmetry there. An instruction pointing toward Dad gets partially ignored. An instruction pointing toward Mom gets followed almost perfectly.

Which means the phone call I made was not paranoid, and it also was not entirely sufficient. I was not imagining the pattern, and I was not going to fully escape it by filling out a form correctly. The study ran in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2025, which I mention only because it is a fairly serious place for a finding that every mother I know could have told them for free.

The authors note, drily, that this is probably the tip of the iceberg. Their scenario was a routine enrollment question, about as low stakes as a call from a school can get. They suspect the gap widens when the call actually matters.

The Default Admin Problem

I have started thinking of this as the default admin problem, and once you notice it, it is difficult to stop.

Ask any group who ends up taking notes in a meeting. It is almost always a woman. Ask who organizes the office birthday, who remembers the new hire is vegetarian, who notices halfway through the morning that nobody has booked the room. It is often the most senior woman in the room, doing it anyway, because the silence got uncomfortable and she filled it.

Here too, someone has done the work. Linda Babcock and her colleagues ran a series of experiments on what they call non promotable tasks, the necessary and thankless work that has to get done and that nobody gets rewarded for doing. In mixed sex groups, women volunteered for it far more often than men, about a third of the time versus roughly a quarter. Women were also asked to do it more often, thirty nine percent of the time versus twenty seven percent for men. And when asked, women said yes at a rate of seventy six percent, while men said yes at fifty one percent.

More likely to be asked. Much more likely to agree.

But here is the finding I keep returning to. When they ran the same experiment with single sex groups, the gender difference vanished completely. Women in all female groups volunteered at essentially the same rate men in all male groups did.

Which tells you something quite specific. It is not that women are constitutionally more willing to do unglamorous work. Put in a room where somebody has to take the notes and everybody is a woman, a woman takes the notes at exactly the rate a man does when everybody is a man. The behavior is not coming from inside us. It is coming from the room.

What This Looks Like at Home

At home it is more granular and much harder to name, because it does not look like labor. It looks like your mother in law asking you what the kids want for Christmas, which is a perfectly friendly question that has somehow only ever been asked of you. It looks like a class group chat with thirty women in it and two men. It is the daycare, the pediatrician’s office, the room parent, the orthodontist, the camp registration portal that has your email in it and not his. It is the gift you pick out for someone on his side of the family, that he signs both your names to, and that the two of you then agree, without discussing it, is from both of you.

None of these people are doing anything wrong, and I think we lose this argument the moment we pretend otherwise. There is no villain here. There is an old and nearly universal assumption, held by more or less everyone including us, that when something needs managing, it goes to her.

Allison Daminger’s research gets at the texture of this better than anything else I have read. She interviewed thirty five couples about the thinking involved in running a household, and she broke it into four parts: anticipating what will be needed, identifying the options, making the decision, and monitoring how it goes.

Decision making, it turns out, was roughly equal between partners.

Anticipation and monitoring were not. Those fell disproportionately to women.

I found that clarifying in a way that was almost uncomfortable, because it explains why so many of these conversations go nowhere. He is not refusing to participate. He genuinely does weigh in on the camp, and he means it when he says he helped choose. What he did not do was notice in February that camps fill in February. And he is not tracking, in the back of his mind, whether the deposit went through.

The visible, discussable, decision shaped part of the work is shared. The part that runs silently underneath everything, all day, is not. So when you try to describe the problem you find yourself gesturing at something he cannot see, and he responds by listing the decisions he made, and both of you leave the conversation frustrated and slightly further apart.

And then there is the study I think about most. Lucia Ciciolla and Suniya Luthar surveyed nearly four hundred mothers, most of them college educated, most of them employed. Almost ninety percent said they were solely responsible for organizing the family’s schedule. Nearly eighty percent said they were the only parent who knew their children’s teachers and administrators.

Eighty percent. The only one who knows the teachers.

Their finding about consequences is the part that stayed with me clinically. It was not the physical tasks that predicted a mother’s distress. It was the invisible work of overseeing children’s wellbeing, and it specifically predicted feelings of emptiness.

Not exhaustion. Emptiness. That is a different symptom, and it points somewhere else entirely.

The Part Where We Blame Ourselves

A lot of the writing about the mental load implies that women are holding onto it. That we are perfectionists, that we cannot let go, that if we would simply lower the standard and let him pack the school bag his own way, the whole thing would resolve itself.

Some women do hold the standard high, and that is worth examining if it is you. By the standard I mean the invisible template for how a household runs: what goes in the lunches, when the pediatrician appointments are, how a birthday party is supposed to look, what needs restocking before anyone notices it is gone.

But plenty of women, and I am one of them, would happily let the school bag get packed a completely different way if someone else took the task off the plate entirely. I do not care how the bag gets packed. I care that I am the one who remembers it needs packing.

The issue is not personality. I think the single sex group finding settles that about as cleanly as social science ever settles anything. The issue is that the system defaults to us regardless of personality. The load falls to whoever has been designated responsible, and that designation happened so early and so quietly that most of us do not remember agreeing to it. The good enough mother and the perfectionist mother are both carrying it. One of them just feels worse about how it is being carried.

What holds it in place, for almost everyone I know, is guilt combined with the path of least resistance. Moment to moment it is genuinely faster to do the thing yourself. It is easier than explaining how you want it done. There is nothing to justify, nobody to negotiate with, no anxiety about watching someone help imperfectly or help resentfully. So you absorb it, and you manage it, and you keep going.

I do not think that is strength. It is the cheapest choice available in the moment, made a few thousand times, until it starts to look like who you are.

Being Needed Is Not Nothing

And there is a harder version of this that I have watched in myself.

Being the one who knows everything is not only a burden. It also feels like something. If I am indispensable then I am valuable. If everyone needs me then I matter. If I am carrying the heaviest thing then perhaps I am winning some invisible competition that nobody else knows we are having.

Usefulness is a real and available identity, and it is considerably easier to inhabit than the question of who you would be if nobody needed anything from you for an entire afternoon.

But usefulness is not the same thing as fulfillment, and being needed is not the same thing as being known.

I say this without much superiority, because I like being useful. I am good at it. Some of the pleasure I take in running things is not martyrdom at all, it is just competence enjoying itself, and I do not think every capable woman needs to be talked out of that. The problem is not that we are good at managing. The problem is when managing becomes the only thing anyone, including us, knows how to look for.

One Line, Not the Whole Ledger

I am not going to tell you that changing an emergency contact list fixed the division of labor in my house. It did not, and now I know from the research that it could not have, entirely. What it did was slightly more interesting than that. It took one default and made it visible, and once it was visible it turned out to be changeable, and then the school started calling Steve.

Which is, notably, what the experiment found too. Signaling the father’s availability did not eliminate the gap. It moved it substantially. Fifty nine percent down to twenty six.

That may be the whole method. You cannot renegotiate an assumption you have not named. Most of the mental load is not a series of decisions anyone made. It is a series of decisions nobody made, which is exactly why arguing with it feels so strange. There is no argument on the other side. There is only the way things are.

So make it an argument. Find one default and move it. Not the whole ledger, which is overwhelming and will make you feel like you are building a case against someone you love. One line.

Who is listed first at the school. Whose email goes on the camp form. Who answers the group chat. Who buys the gift for his side of the family this year, and what happens if you simply do not, and let it find its way to the person whose family it is.

I would like to promise you that the guilt will not come. It will. Mine came over an emergency contact list, which, again, was a phone call.

Notice how little it takes. One name, one form. Nobody harmed, nothing neglected, and the guilt shows up anyway, right on time, because it does not wait to find out whether you have actually done anything wrong.

Maybe that is the most useful thing to know about it. Maybe the guilt was never a measurement of what you owe anyone, and you can move the line while you still feel it.

Sources

Kristy Buzard, Laura K. Gee and Olga Stoddard, “Who You Gonna Call? Gender Inequality in External Demands for Parental Involvement,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 140, no. 4 (2025), pp. 2805–2849.

Linda Babcock, Maria P. Recalde, Lise Vesterlund and Laurie Weingart, “Gender Differences in Accepting and Receiving Requests for Tasks with Low Promotability,” American Economic Review, 2017.

Allison Daminger, “The Cognitive Dimension of Household Labor,” American Sociological Review, vol. 84, no. 4 (2019).

Lucia Ciciolla and Suniya S. Luthar, “Invisible Household Labor and Ramifications for Adjustment: Mothers as Captains of Households,” Sex Roles, 2019.

Stay together for the kids.

It’s one of the last pieces of relationship advice almost everyone still agrees on. We repeat it the way we repeat proverbs, reflexively and reverently, as if the words themselves were load-bearing. Somewhere along the way, staying married stopped being one good outcome among several and became a moral achievement, proof that you were serious, that you tried, that you were not the kind of person who quits.

But I’ve spent enough years helping people navigate their relationships to think we’ve had the instruction slightly wrong the whole time. The word that matters was never together. It was respectful.

Because here is the part the proverb leaves out: sometimes people don’t stay together. Sometimes one person stops wanting the marriage. Sometimes both people quietly grow into strangers who happen to share a mortgage. Sometimes years of trying turn out to be years of trying, and no more. And sometimes a relationship simply arrives at its natural end, the way seasons do, without anyone committing a crime.

That is not always a failure. Sometimes it’s just life doing what life does.

We are living longer than any humans in history. We get multiple careers, multiple reinventions, a whole catalog of identities our grandparents never had the time or the money or the permission to try on. The person you chose at twenty-eight may have very little to say to the person you become at forty-eight. That doesn’t retroactively erase the marriage. It means you were both alive the entire time, and living things change.

Let me be clear about where I stand. I believe in working on relationships. It’s what I help people do, every single day. Honest conversation matters. Repair matters. Relationships can be rebuilt, and I’ve watched people do it. Commitment, the unglamorous daily kind, matters more than we tend to give it credit for.

And also: sometimes one person doesn’t want to continue.

And that gets to be their decision.

We don’t have to like it. We don’t have to call it fair. But forcing someone to stay in a relationship they’ve left in every way but the paperwork is not love, and we should stop dressing it up as devotion. It’s captivity with better branding.

When I decided to get divorced, I read Conscious Uncoupling. Yes, I know. I picked it up half-cringing, bracing for Gwyneth Paltrow and a scented candle named after a feeling. But the idea at its center is, unfortunately, still a novel one, and it rearranged something in me. It offered a possibility our culture almost never extends: that a relationship could end without anyone being cast as the villain. That idea felt faintly illicit, like getting away with something, because we are trained from childhood to believe every ending needs a bad guy.

If someone leaves, they must be selfish. If someone wants a different life, they must have failed at this one. Even the people who love you rush to help by turning your ex into a cautionary tale, because we’ve confused loyalty with enlistment. They think being on your side means there has to be a war with sides.

All it actually does is keep the story running: someone has to lose.

Why, though?

Some relationships just run their course. Some people genuinely did the best they could with the tools they were handed, which for many of us weren’t much. Some marriages were lovely for a season and then weren’t. All of that can be true without hatred anywhere in it.

And most of the time, the actual reason a marriage ends is too tangled to fit in the version people tell at dinner. It’s rarely one betrayal or one villain. It’s a slow accumulation: a hundred small erosions, timing, money, the things two people needed and couldn’t give, the private math no outsider is ever shown the full ledger of. Which is exactly why the rest of us should hold our verdicts. You almost never know why a marriage ended. You know the highlight reel someone could bear to say out loud, and even that is usually generous to everyone involved. Judgment is what we reach for when we don’t have the whole story and can’t sit with not having it.

And here’s one I wish more people would let themselves say out loud: sometimes a person is a terrible husband and a wonderful father. Both. At the same time. The man who was careless with you can be tender and steady with your children, and pretending otherwise, flattening him into all-bad because it’s cleaner for your grief, costs your kids something real. There’s also the harder version: he wasn’t a terrible husband, full stop. He was a terrible husband for you. He may go on to be a perfectly good one for someone else, and that isn’t a verdict on your worth. It’s just the unglamorous truth that fit is specific, and that two decent people can be wrong for each other without either one being the problem.

Here’s what fascinates me, in the way a splinter fascinates: watching someone insist they want to “stay together for the kids” while treating the person who wants to leave with open contempt.

If that’s you, I’d gently offer a harder question.

Were you staying together for the kids? Or were you staying together because you could not stand the ending?

Because if the children are truly the priority, the priority doesn’t expire the moment someone says the word divorce. In a lot of ways, that’s the moment it actually starts.

And here the research is almost boringly consistent, which is my favorite kind of research. Divorce, on its own, is not what predicts bad outcomes for kids. High-conflict relationships are: the ongoing, grinding kind, whether or not there’s a marriage license attached. Children do far better with two emotionally regulated parents in two houses than with two resentful ones white-knuckling it in one. The hostility is the toxin. The staying was never the cure.

Kids don’t need parents who stay married at any cost. They need parents who can manage their own feelings without subcontracting them out to a nine-year-old. Who don’t recruit their children as allies. Who don’t turn birthdays and holidays and Saturday soccer into contested territory. Who can speak about the other parent with something like dignity, even while bleeding. Who remember, especially when it’s inconvenient, that their child is made of both of them, and that every insult aimed at an ex lands somewhere tender in the kid.

And here is the part I can speak to from the other side of the equation, because I am a child of divorce myself: your kid cannot divorce their parent. You got to leave. They don’t. Whatever that person did to you, however awful, however much you have earned your anger, it has almost nothing to do with the mother or father your child still needs to love and be loved by. The relationship you had with them as a wounded spouse and the relationship your child has with them as a parent are two different animals, and you do not get to collapse the second into the first just because it would feel like justice. Sit with the harder truth for a second: you chose this person. You married them. You are the reason your child is in this exact spot, even if you would take it all back now. The regret is yours to carry. The parent is not yours to take away.

None of this is easy. I won’t pretend it is. Grief makes people petty. Rejection reaches straight past the adult and grabs the frightened kid we all still carry. Divorce can bring out the absolute worst in otherwise generous people, and I’ve watched it happen to people I admire.

But adulthood asks the hard thing of us anyway. To feel our own pain without handing it to our children to hold. To mourn without conscripting the kids into the mourning. To understand that the marriage may be ending while the parenting is not. That co-authored, lifelong, unglamorous work doesn’t get a divorce.

We don’t get to choose whether our children witness our divorce.

We absolutely get to choose what kind of divorce they witness. One defined by bitterness and scorekeeping. Or one defined by respect, however through-gritted-teeth that respect has to be at first.

Have you ever watched a child stand between two parents who are no longer together but genuinely get along? Who laugh at the same joke about their kid, who hand off a backpack without a single note of ice in it, who let the child love them both out loud and at the same time? It will undo you. The kid’s whole body settles. There’s no calculating who to please, no scanning the room for the temperature. It is one of the most quietly magical things I have ever seen, and it is available to far more families than ever reach for it. Please don’t miss it because your pride got there first.

So maybe it’s time to retire the old advice, or at least demote it.

Instead of stay together for the kids...

how about we teach people to stay respectful for the kids.

That’s the lesson that outlasts the marriage. It might even be the one they pass down.

Twice in the past few weeks, a woman has apologized to me for “trauma dumping.”

The first time, we were having drinks and getting to know each other. The second was over dinner in New York City with someone whose friendship was just beginning to unfold. Different women. Different stories. But at some point in both conversations, after sharing something difficult about their lives, they stopped, looked at me almost apologetically, and said some version of the same thing.

“I’m sorry. I feel like I’m trauma dumping.”

I laughed both times because by then I had already shared pieces of my own story.

“I don’t think we’re trauma dumping,” I told them. “I think we’re just talking about our lives.”

I’ve been thinking about those conversations ever since.

Somewhere along the way, “trauma dumping” has become shorthand for talking about anything painful. We want to be authentic, but not so authentic that we make someone uncomfortable. We want to be vulnerable, but only if our vulnerability has already been neatly processed and wrapped up with a lesson at the end.

Life rarely cooperates with those rules.

By the time you’ve lived long enough, almost everyone has accumulated chapters they never would have chosen. A marriage ends. A parent struggles with addiction. A child gets sick. A dream quietly falls apart. Someone you love dies far too young.

These aren’t dramatic stories we tell to make ourselves interesting.

They are our lives.

When someone asks me how many siblings I have, I still hesitate.

The easy answer is two.

The truthful answer is more complicated.

I also had a sister who died just before she turned eighteen.

Sometimes I wonder whether people are asking for a number or for my story.

Because saying “two” feels strangely dishonest, as though I’m pretending an entire person never existed. But saying, “I had three siblings, but my sister died,” can suddenly feel like I’ve made the conversation too heavy.

Except that’s not a trauma dump.

That’s my life.

The more I’ve thought about it, the more I think the difference has very little to do with what someone shares and everything to do with what they’re asking another person to do with it.

If I tell you my story because I expect you to rescue me, heal me, or become responsible for regulating my emotions, that’s something no friendship can sustain.

But if I tell you because this is part of who I am, because I want you to know me, because this is the honest answer to your question, then I don’t think that’s trauma dumping at all.

It’s simply telling the truth.

As a psychologist, I’ve learned that most people are not looking for someone to erase their pain. More often, they’re looking for someone who can hear it without rushing to solve it. Someone who can simply say, “I’m really glad you told me.”

There is something profoundly healing about being witnessed without being rescued.

Maybe we’ve become so afraid of burdening each other that we’ve forgotten what intimacy actually asks of us.

Not that we fix each other’s stories.

Just that we know them.

Sometimes our stories include trauma because life includes trauma.

That doesn’t mean we’re asking someone else to carry it.

Sometimes we’re simply answering the question honestly.

And maybe that’s not trauma dumping at all.

Maybe that’s just what it looks like to let someone know who you are.

For most of my life, I’ve treated loneliness as a problem to solve. If I felt disconnected, I assumed the answer was to reach out more, make plans, repair the relationship, explain myself better, or simply find people who understood me. As a psychologist, I know how profoundly human connection shapes our well-being. We are wired for one another, and prolonged loneliness carries real consequences for both our minds and our bodies.

But lately I’ve begun to wonder if not every experience of loneliness is asking the same thing of us.

What if there are seasons when loneliness isn’t an invitation back toward other people, but inward toward ourselves? What if the ache isn’t always evidence that something is missing, but sometimes evidence that something is changing?

That question keeps bringing me back to a quote often attributed to Carl Jung:

“No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you out.”

Technically, Jung was quoting an old alchemist, a detail I find strangely comforting. Wisdom has always belonged to many voices before it settles into one.

I wish I could tell you I read those words and immediately felt reassured.

Instead, they unsettled me.

Because if I’m honest, I am in one of those seasons where becoming more myself has also meant feeling more alone.

Over the past year, I’ve found myself thinking about another phrase that seems to be everywhere lately: match people’s energy. Stop chasing. Stop overextending. Let people show you who they are.

It’s tidy advice, and perhaps even good advice.

Unless you’ve spent most of your life believing, consciously or not, that relationships survive because of what you do.

I’ve always been the one who remembers birthdays, plans dinners, notices when someone seems quieter than usual, sends the first text after an awkward conversation, or quietly assumes responsibility for keeping the thread of connection from unraveling. I genuinely love caring for people. Creating community has never felt like a burden to me. It has felt like purpose.

The harder realization has been acknowledging that purpose and fear can sometimes wear the same clothes.

One of the strange things about being a psychologist is that I understand exactly what’s happening while it’s happening. I know the research on anxious attachment. I know about rejection sensitivity. I understand that some nervous systems become exquisitely attuned to the possibility of distance, interpreting even subtle shifts in another person’s behavior as potential signs of abandonment.

I can explain all of this to my patients. I can teach it to therapists. I can speak about it on television or the radio.

And yet knowledge has never been the same thing as freedom.

I’ve often told my patients that most psychological struggles aren’t information problems; they’re implementation problems. We usually know what would help. What we struggle with is tolerating the uncertainty that comes from living differently before our nervous system catches up.

So despite everything I know, an unanswered text can still tighten something inside me. A friendship that changes shape can still awaken old fears. Being left out of something can still tempt me to believe that I’ve somehow become less worthy of being loved.

When people say, “Just match their energy,” they’re usually talking about behavior.

What they rarely acknowledge is what it costs emotionally to change that behavior when your identity has been built around maintaining connection.

For someone with anxious attachment, matching someone’s energy doesn’t initially feel like self-respect.

It feels like standing perfectly still while every instinct in your body begs you to run after them.

Lately I’ve been trying anyway.

Not because I want to become colder or more guarded, and certainly not because I believe relationships should be transactional. Rather, I’m trying to conduct a different experiment. I’m trying to stop overriding reality. I’m trying to resist the urge to fill every silence, close every gap, or assume responsibility for every relationship that begins to drift. I’m trying to let people show me what they actually have the capacity—or perhaps the desire—to give, instead of unconsciously giving enough for both of us.

The truth is, I don’t always like what I find.

Some relationships become quieter. Some people don’t notice. Occasionally I’m forced to admit that I was carrying far more of a relationship than I ever allowed myself to see.

That realization hurts.

But lately I’ve begun to wonder whether I’ve been asking the wrong question altogether.

I’ve spent so much time asking, Why do I feel so alone?

Now I find myself asking something different.

What if this feeling isn’t really about other people at all?

The past year has quietly rearranged almost every part of my identity. I’ve been questioning my career, writing a book that feels less like a professional project and more like an excavation, asking different things of my relationship, setting boundaries I should have set years ago, allowing friendships to evolve, and slowly untangling my worth from how useful I can be to everyone around me.

That isn’t merely change.

It’s transformation.

And transformation carries with it a particular kind of solitude.

Not because no one loves you.

But because no one else can become you.

There are seasons when the person you’ve been no longer fits comfortably, while the person you’re becoming has not yet fully arrived. It’s an awkward, unsteady place to live. The old ways of earning approval no longer feel honest, but the new ways of living haven’t yet become familiar. There is no map for that territory.

Your friends can love you deeply.

Your partner can stand beside you.

Your therapist can bear witness.

And still, there are stretches of becoming that no one else can walk.

I’ve started wondering whether what I’ve been calling loneliness is, in fact, something closer to the solitude of becoming—the quiet, often disorienting work of growing into a life that feels more honest than the one you knew before. A life where you no longer organize yourself around being indispensable, universally liked, or endlessly accommodating, but around something much quieter and much harder: your own values.

Perhaps this is what Jung meant by doing your work.

Not simply building the career or writing the book.

But becoming the person only you can become.

Writing has become the place where I practice that work. Every week I sit down with a blank page, and instead of trying to anticipate what people want from me, I try to tell the truth as I understand it that day. To my surprise, the more honestly I write, the less interested I become in performing a version of myself that everyone approves of.

Not because rejection no longer hurts.

It does.

But because I’ve begun to suspect there is something even lonelier than being rejected.

It is living an entire life organized around preventing rejection from ever happening.

For years I assumed loneliness meant I needed to look outward.

Now I’m beginning to wonder if, sometimes, it is asking us to look inward instead.

Perhaps the ache I’ve been feeling isn’t simply about who is or isn’t beside me.

Perhaps it’s what it feels like to meet myself for the first time.

I don’t know yet whether unknown friends come seeking you.

I’m still in the middle of that story.

What I do know is that every time I choose authenticity over approval, I become a little more recognizable to myself.

And perhaps belonging doesn’t begin when we’re finally chosen by everyone else.

Perhaps it begins the moment we stop abandoning ourselves in the hope that they will.

There is a question I return to again and again with patients, the way a tongue returns to a sore tooth: Have you asked for help?

It sounds like nothing. A small thing, a simple thing. And yet for so many people it is one of the hardest sentences to say out loud. They don’t want to be an inconvenience. They don’t want to seem needy. They don’t want to feel, even for a moment, like a burden set down on someone else’s shoulders. So instead they become the shoulders. They become the person everyone else leans on.

I’ve watched this pattern for years now, in exam rooms and living rooms, in my own family, and I’ve come to believe it is not a coincidence. The people who find it hardest to ask for help are, more often than not, the very people who cannot stop offering it.

They don’t wait to be asked.

They host. They organize. They watch the children so someone else can rest. They see the problem coming and step in front of it before anyone else has even noticed it’s there.

From a distance, this looks like generosity. Sometimes it is exactly that: nothing more, nothing less.

But sometimes it’s a translation of something quieter, something closer to fear than to love: If I am useful, I am valuable. If people need me, they will keep me.

And slowly, without any single dramatic moment, helping stops being something a person does. It becomes who they believe themselves to be.

That’s when the trouble starts, because a person who has fused their worth to their usefulness will keep volunteering for weight no one asked them to carry. They will say yes before the question is even finished. And the debt accumulates, silent and compounding, until one day it comes due.

After everything I’ve done for you.

I’m always the one who has to do everything.

No one ever helps me.

The exhaustion in those sentences is real. The years of sacrifice behind them are real. But there is another truth sitting right beside that one, uninvited and just as important: the other person may never have asked for any of it.

They didn’t ask to be hosted every single holiday.

They didn’t ask for every gathering to be organized on their behalf.

They didn’t ask for their problems to be solved before they’d even had the chance to name them.

We write checks no one requested, and then, years later, we’re wounded that no one seems to appreciate what they cost us. A favor that survives long enough to become evidence in a future argument was never really a gift. It was a contract, signed by one party, its terms invisible to the other. And that is precisely where trust begins to erode: not in the giving, but in the quiet expectation that giving created a debt.

I encourage people to ask for help because I believe that is the actual architecture of community: not one person holding up the roof alone, but many people trusting each other enough to say, plainly, Could you help me?

That sentence is a small act of courage. It requires believing someone might show up for you before you’ve earned it through exhaustion. And it does something else, too, something we rarely name: it hands the other person their dignity back. They get to choose. Yes, because they want to. No, because they can’t. Either answer is honest. Neither one leaves a debt on the table.

That’s reciprocity, and reciprocity was never about perfect symmetry, never about trading turns with a calculator in hand. Healthy relationships tilt and settle like a boat finding its balance. One person carries more for a season because the other is grieving, or drowning in young children, or simply trying to keep their head above water. Then the current shifts, and the weight moves the other way. No one keeps count, because everyone trusts that, given time, the tide comes back in.

Scorekeeping is a different animal entirely. It tallies every favor, every inconvenience absorbed, every sacrifice quietly logged in a ledger only one person can see. It turns love into currency and generosity into something that can be cashed in later, with interest.

But asking to be seen is not the same thing as keeping score, and it’s worth being honest about that difference too. There’s a version of this that isn’t about debt at all. It’s simply saying, plainly and without a knife hidden in it, I did this, and I want you to notice. You packed the kids’ bags for the trip, every last swimsuit and charger and forgotten sock, and you want your partner to look up from what he’s doing and say so. That isn’t a ledger entry. It isn’t leverage saved for later. It’s a request, made in the moment, for the effort to be witnessed rather than absorbed like weather. The difference between that and scorekeeping isn’t subtle once you look for it: scorekeeping waits, and collects, and cashes in during an argument three months later. Asking for acknowledgment says the thing out loud, right when it’s true, and lets it go once it’s been heard. One builds resentment in the dark. The other builds intimacy in the light.

No community survives that kind of accounting. It isn’t built to.

And here is the part we tend to skip, because it’s less comfortable than blaming the taker: no one can take advantage of you without your own hand extending the invitation. People will accept what is offered. That is simply what people do. The exhausted host who keeps setting an extra place, the friend who keeps saying “it’s fine” when it isn’t, the parent who keeps absorbing every request without a word of protest: none of them were ambushed. They agreed to the terms, over and over, quietly, and then wondered why no one renegotiated a contract they themselves kept signing. The boundary was always available. It simply went unused.

What I’ve come to believe, after all these years of listening, is that most of us don’t need to become more generous. We need to become more honest.

Instead of What else can I do? try Did anyone actually ask me to do this?

Instead of stepping in reflexively, let the responsibility sit there a moment, unclaimed, and see if someone else picks it up.

And if you are the one who always volunteers, if your hand is always the first one raised, I wonder if the real challenge isn’t to do more. I wonder if it’s to do less, and see what’s still standing.

No one wants a favor that will be held over their head someday. So do them a favor. Do less.

Let someone else pick up your child one afternoon.

Admit that you’re overwhelmed instead of insisting, again, that you’ve got it.

Discover, and this may be the hardest part, that you were never loved for being indispensable.

You were loved for being you.

The strongest communities are not built by the people who do everything. They are built by people who know how to give and how to receive, how to ask and how to trust: people who understand, finally, that no relationship worth keeping was ever meant to be tallied.

I grew up in evangelical Christianity, in a house where God was always speaking, if you knew how to listen.

Every coincidence carried the weight of possible meaning. A closed door might be mercy in disguise. A chance encounter could be a calling wearing street clothes. If the same verse kept surfacing, in a sermon, a stranger’s mouth, the spine of a book glimpsed on a shelf, we were taught to lean in, because perhaps God was trying to say something twice. There was a deep comfort in believing that someone else was holding the pen, and that if I read closely enough, I might catch a glimpse of where the story was going.

My relationship with that certainty did not end so much as erode. The questions grew more complicated as I did, until one day the answers I’d inherited no longer fit the shape of the life I was actually living. I didn’t storm out. I just stopped being able to pretend.

What surprised me was that the certainty left long before the longing did.

I assumed walking away from religion meant walking away from the appetite for something larger than myself. Instead I found that appetite relocating: into books that seemed to arrive exactly when I needed them, into conversations that kept talking long after they’d ended, into the lake behind my house at the hour when the water turns to glass and you can no longer tell where the sky stops and the earth begins. Into the particular look on my child’s face in the half-second before understanding lands. Into moments too small to qualify as miracles that nonetheless felt, unmistakably, like something.

Recently, that hunger led me back to Carl Jung.

Jung has held my attention for years, not because he offered certainty, but because he seemed so at ease inside mystery. He was drawn to astrology, though not for the reasons people assume. He wasn’t hunting for proof that the planets shape our personalities or chart our futures. He was asking a quieter, stranger question: why human beings, in every culture and every century, keep reaching for symbol to understand themselves. His answer was that these systems survive not because they govern us, but because they speak some dialect the psyche already knows.

One of his most beautiful ideas was synchronicity, meaningful coincidence, two events bound not by cause and effect but by significance, the way two notes can belong to the same chord without one striking the other.

The psychologist in me wants, immediately, to explain it away. I know the brain is a pattern-hungry machine. Buy a red car and suddenly the road is full of them. Start trying to conceive and every stranger on the street is visibly pregnant. Attention shifts, and the world appears to shift with it, not because it has changed, but because we have started looking.

But lately I wonder if naming the mechanism is a way of dodging the question underneath it.

Whether synchronicity is selective attention, or pattern recognition working overtime, or something we simply lack the vocabulary for yet, maybe the real question was never is the universe speaking to us.

Maybe the real question is: why, all of a sudden, can we hear?

Over the past year I wrote essays that seemed, at the time, unrelated. One about motherhood. One about friendship. One about martyrdom, one about boundaries, one about the slow labor of becoming authentic, one about learning to live with other people’s disappointment. Each felt like its own weather system, born of its own particular storm, until the day I laid them side by side and saw they were all asking one question, wearing different coats.

What does it mean to become more fully myself?

I didn’t choose that question. It chose its way into everything I wrote until I had no choice but to notice.

It seems the story has been writing me as much as I’ve been writing it.

That recognition pulled me back toward another tradition that has shaped my life: mindfulness.

People tend to think mindfulness means breathing exercises, or an app, or five borrowed minutes of calm inside a chaotic day. Those things help. But they are the porch, not the house. The actual instruction at the center of mindfulness is almost embarrassingly simple.

Notice.

Notice the thought before you mistake it for the truth.

Notice the body before it has to raise its voice to be heard.

Notice the reaction before it calcifies into a habit you no longer remember choosing.

Notice what keeps coming back, uninvited.

Notice what you keep finding reasons to avoid.

Notice the thing that quietly, stubbornly, makes you feel like yourself.

The invitation was never to become someone new. It was to grow fluent in the person you already are.

Sitting with that, I started noticing how many different rooms lead to the same hallway. Mindfulness asks us to meet the present moment without flinching from it. Good therapy asks us to notice the beliefs running the show without our consent. Jung asked us to notice the dreams, the recurring symbols, the themes that won’t stop knocking. Neuroscience tells us, in its own dry language, that attention doesn’t just record reality. It builds it, deciding in real time what counts as signal and what gets filed away as noise.

Different vocabularies.

Different centuries.

Different disciplines, none of them aware of the others.

And yet they all hand you the same small instruction, like a note passed across a crowded room.

Pay attention.

Not the scattered, half-attention of scrolling, but the kind that stays long enough for meaning to surface, the way a name only comes back to you once you’ve stopped grasping for it.

Maybe this is why certain books seem to find us at precisely the right hour, not because the universe slid them under the door, but because we had finally, slowly, become people capable of reading them. Maybe this is why a sentence we’ve read ten times finally undoes us on the eleventh, or why the same lesson keeps showing up in different friendships, different seasons, different rooms, patient as weather, until we finally let it in.

I don’t know whether some larger consciousness is weaving these moments together on purpose. I don’t know that it isn’t.

The older I get, the less appetite I have for defending a certainty I no longer possess.

If I’ve grown more spiritual with age, it isn’t because I found new answers. It’s because I’ve grown more willing to live inside the questions that don’t resolve.

I feel closest to something larger than myself not in certainty but in awe. Standing at the lake’s edge at dusk. Hearing a sentence that rearranges the furniture of my mind. Recognizing myself in a novel written by someone who died before I was born. Watching a patient unknowingly speak a sentence I’ve been carrying in silence for years. Realizing that people separated by oceans and centuries keep telling the same handful of stories, because underneath all our differences we are nursing the same fears, the same longings, the same stubborn hope that this, all of it, might somehow matter.

Maybe that larger consciousness lives outside us.

Maybe it lives inside us.

Maybe those were never two different addresses.

I don’t know.

But I’ve started to suspect that a meaningful life depends less on the answers we manage to pin down than on the quality of attention we bring to the asking, the kind that lets us recognize meaning when it finally walks through the door.

Because maybe synchronicity isn’t proof that the universe is whispering to us.

Maybe it’s proof that we’ve finally gone quiet enough to hear it.

And maybe that was the invitation all along.

Not to know more.

Not to believe more.

But simply, stubbornly, to notice more.

A life is rarely changed by the acquisition of new information.

It is changed by the quality of attention we bring to the one we are already living.

We were cringe before “cringe” was a thing.

We wrote embarrassingly earnest blog posts on Xanga as though someone might discover them years later and mistake us for profound. We spent hours customizing our MySpace pages, carefully choosing songs that perfectly reflected our personalities that week. We obsessed over our Top 8 friends. We crafted AIM away messages that were clearly directed at one person while pretending they weren’t.

We were trying on identities in public long before personal branding became a career.

And somehow, despite all of that spectacular earnestness, we survived.

Today, it feels like we’ve swung in the opposite direction. We edit ourselves before anyone else gets the chance. We hesitate before posting because we don’t want to seem like we’re trying too hard. We rewrite texts so we don’t sound too eager. We hold back enthusiasm because somewhere along the way, sincerity became uncool.

We’ve become experts at managing how we’re perceived.

The older I get, the less interested I am in that project.

In fact, I find myself leaning in the opposite direction. I want to be a little cringe.

Not because I aspire to be embarrassing, but because I’ve become convinced that authenticity requires a willingness to risk it.

If you write honestly, someone will think you’re oversharing.

If you dance enthusiastically at a wedding, someone will roll their eyes.

If you wear the outfit that makes you happy, someone will think it’s too much.

If you publish the essay, start the business, learn tennis at forty, or admit you’re struggling, someone will inevitably think, Oof.

I’ve started to believe that’s simply the price of being fully alive.

The funny thing is, I’ve always lived with this tension inside of me.

There is one part of me that genuinely enjoys being myself. I like the loud outfit. I like making jokes. I like saying the thing everyone else is thinking but won’t say. I like getting excited about books, psychology, tennis, and conversations that make me forget to look at my phone. I’ve never really wanted to be cool.

And yet there is another part of me that desperately wants everyone to like me.

I’ve been a people pleaser for as long as I can remember.

Those two parts of me have spent decades negotiating with one another.

One says, Be yourself.

The other quietly whispers, Yes… but make sure everyone approves first.

That is an impossible assignment.

Years ago, I covered for my friend Laurie while she was on maternity leave.

Laurie is one of the warmest, gentlest, most genuinely lovely therapists I’ve ever met. She has this calming presence that immediately puts people at ease.

I… do not have quite the same vibe.

I love my patients fiercely, but I’m also pretty direct. I’ll lovingly call you out on your excuses. I’ll tease you when your anxiety convinces you that forgetting to text someone back means the friendship is over. My patients know I care deeply about them, but they also know I’m not going to let them hide behind their fear.

While I was covering Laurie’s patients, I started hearing something fascinating.

Some people would leave sessions saying, “Wow… I really needed someone to kick my ass.”

Others would smile and ask, “So… when is Laurie coming back?”

I remember laughing because they were both right.

Some people needed Laurie.

Some people needed me.

Neither of us was doing therapy the wrong way. We were simply different therapists for different people.

It was one of the most freeing lessons of my career.

I’ve thought about those patients so many times over the years because the same principle applies to almost everything.

Some people are going to love your energy.

Some people are going to find it exhausting.

Some people will appreciate your honesty.

Some people will wish you were gentler.

Some people will laugh at your jokes.

Some people won’t get you at all.

None of that is evidence that you’re doing life wrong.

It’s evidence that you’re finally letting people meet the real you.

People have always said to me, “Only you could pull that outfit off.”

For years I thought they were complimenting my clothes.

Now I think they’re noticing something else.

The outfit isn’t doing the work.

Ownership is.

My tennis coach has a phrase he repeats all the time: “Own your racket.”

At first, he meant it literally. Stop gripping it timidly. Stop apologizing for every shot. Commit. Swing. Trust yourself.

But somewhere along the way I realized he wasn’t really talking about tennis.

Own your voice.

Own your laugh.

Own your enthusiasm.

Own your weirdness.

Own your mistakes.

Own your beginner stage.

Own the outfit.

Own the fact that not everyone is going to understand you.

Because confidence isn’t believing everyone will like you.

Confidence is believing you’ll be okay when they don’t.

I’m not there yet.

I still reread texts. I still occasionally leave a dinner wondering if I talked too much. I still notice that old reflex that wants to smooth an edge, soften an opinion, make myself just a little easier to digest.

But I’m working on it.

Every single day, I’m working on it.

Maybe that’s what growth actually looks like. Not waking up one morning completely free from people pleasing, but slowly becoming more committed to your authenticity than to your approval rating.

I still want people to like me.

I probably always will.

I’m just trying to want my own authenticity a little bit more.

Because the older I get, the more convinced I am that life is simply too short to spend it performing.

Life is serious enough.

I’d rather own my racket.

Recently a close friend texted me feeling guilty about something that, when I heard it, struck me as almost completely reasonable.

Her son had a travel hockey tournament several hours away. Her husband was going. Her son was excited and prepared and loved. Everything, by any sensible accounting, was covered. But she didn't want to go. She's a CEO. She was exhausted in the particular bone-deep way that only accumulates over time, and she desperately wanted a morning to herself — not to do anything extraordinary, just to exist without being needed for a few hours.

What struck me wasn't that she wanted the morning. What struck me was that she felt she had to apologize for it.

I've been turning that over ever since, because I think it points to something strange that has happened to the way we think about parenting — or more specifically, to the way we think about parents and physical presence. Somewhere in the last generation or two, we seem to have arrived at a quiet consensus: that a good parent is one who shows up for everything, and that the desire to occasionally not show up is evidence of something deficient in you.

I'm not sure we've thought this through.

When I sit with my own childhood memories — and I spent an afternoon recently doing exactly this with Steve, trading stories the way you do when enough time has passed that everything is funny — I notice something interesting about the texture of those memories. My parents appear in them, of course. They loved us, fed us, drove us places, worried about us in the particular parental way that never fully stops. But they are rarely the center of the stories. They are more like the conditions under which the stories were possible. The infrastructure, as someone once put it to me, rather than the plot.

What I remember is that my parents came to the performances, not every rehearsal. They knew my teachers and cared about what I was learning, but they weren't sitting in the corner watching me plié twice a week. And honestly? I preferred it that way. I liked having something that was mine. I liked the feeling that parts of my life existed independently of my parents' gaze — that I could have friendships and small failures and private triumphs that didn't immediately become family conversation.

This is not an argument against involvement. It's an argument against a particular conflation we seem to have made, which is treating physical presence as though it were the same thing as emotional presence. We use the phrase "present parent" as if it means proximity — as if being there, bodily, at every lesson and practice and tournament is what the phrase is reaching for. But I don't think that's what presence actually means. I think presence means emotional availability. It means a child who feels known and safe and loved. It means a parent who notices when something is wrong. It means connection, which is a different thing entirely from attendance.

As a psychologist, one of the most consistent findings in child development is that children need both connection and autonomy — secure attachment and genuine room to become themselves. They need loving parents, yes, but they also need friendships that don't involve their parents, teachers who see them as separate people, coaches and mentors and experiences that belong entirely to them. A child can be deeply loved without being constantly observed. A child can feel secure without a parent at every practice.

I think about my seven-year-old disappearing into her own world — setting up a lemonade stand with the neighborhood kids, creating a whole social ecosystem that has nothing to do with me — and I don't feel left out. I feel something closer to relief and delight. Because I don't want to be the most interesting thing in my children's lives. I want them to have lives. Rich, complicated, joyful lives filled with people and experiences and mistakes that belong to them.

There's another piece of this I keep coming back to, which is what happens to parents when we pour nearly everything into the parental role. I've noticed that many people invest almost all of their emotional capital in their children, and we tend to praise this rather than worry about it. But if a friend told me she'd put every dollar of her savings into a single stock, I'd be concerned — not because the investment was bad, but because the concentration was dangerous. The same logic applies here. The problem isn't that children matter too much. It's that everything else — friendships, curiosity, the parts of ourselves that exist outside of being needed — begins to matter too little.

Another friend told me recently, with complete sincerity, "I love you guys, but my kids always come first." I understood what she meant, and I also felt something a little like sadness for her — not because her children aren't worth prioritizing, but because a life in which every friendship and every interest permanently ranks below a single role is a very small life. And it puts an enormous amount of pressure on children, who are not meant to be the source of all our meaning, not meant to be responsible for our happiness, not meant to become our entire world. They are meant to become themselves.

My children are among the greatest loves of my life. I am also a psychologist, a writer, a partner, a friend, a tennis player, a person who loves books and long dinners and laughing until something hurts. I am still becoming things I can't fully predict. These are not competing facts — they are just all true at the same time, the way I can be fiercely glad to be a mother and occasionally find motherhood tedious, the way I can feel lucky to be here and also, sometimes, wish everyone would stop talking for ten minutes.

My children want things from me constantly, and I don't mean that as a complaint so much as an observation about the nature of children. They want me to buy them something in every store we pass through. They want to stay home when it's a school day. They want more screen time, more dessert, more of whatever it is they've decided they need in that particular moment. And I say no, regularly and without much guilt, because I've come to understand that meeting every want is not the same thing as meeting every need — and that conflating the two doesn't actually serve them.

This connects to something I think about a lot, which is that my goal as a parent has never really been to make my children happy, at least not in the immediate sense. Happiness is too thin a target, too contingent on whether we said yes to the toy or the extra hour of TV. What I want for them is something harder to produce and harder to measure — a sense of competence, of resilience, of meaning. Fulfillment, maybe, rather than happiness. And fulfillment, as far as I can tell, tends to come from doing hard things, from tolerating disappointment, from building a self that doesn't collapse the first time the world says no. You don't get there by having a parent who can't bear to see you frustrated.

The goal of parenting, when I try to articulate it honestly, is not to remain indispensable forever. It's to gradually become less necessary in certain ways while staying deeply connected. It's to help your children become the main characters in their own stories while you keep being the main character in yours — not stepping back, exactly, but stepping alongside.

Sometimes I wonder whether parents would actually enjoy their children more if we released some of the pressure. Less pressure to attend everything. Less pressure to make every moment count. Less pressure to be physically present at all times as proof of love. Not distance — room. Room for children to become themselves. Room for parents to do the same. Room for everyone, in the same family, to be still growing.

That seems healthier for children. And if I'm being honest about it, it seems healthier for the rest of us too.

“You only have 18 summers.”

“One day you’ll pick them up for the last time.”

“They are only your biggest fans for a few years.”

“Enjoy every moment.”

If you’re a mother, you’ve heard some version of these phrases more times than you can count. They appear in Instagram captions and parenting books, in conversations at playgrounds and birthday parties, offered as gentle reminders that childhood is fleeting and that we should appreciate it while we can.

I understand the sentiment. I really do.

This past weekend I found myself standing in the kitchen watching my children play, overcome by a wave of gratitude so intense it brought tears to my eyes. Nothing extraordinary was happening. In fact, it was the ordinariness of the moment that caught me off guard. The kids were laughing. Nobody was fighting. The afternoon light was spilling through the windows, and for a brief moment I could see the whole picture at once. The noise. The mess. The exhaustion. The love.

I remember thinking, very clearly, that one day I would miss this.

A few hours later, one child was whining, another was arguing, someone needed a snack despite having eaten ten minutes earlier, and my son pooped his pants.

Not metaphorically.

Literally.

And if I’m being honest, I wasn’t thinking about how fleeting childhood is. I was thinking about how badly I wanted everyone to stop talking.

The strange thing is that I have never found those two experiences contradictory.

I can be overwhelmed with gratitude for my life and still find parts of it tedious. I can love my children fiercely and still find motherhood repetitive. I can feel lucky to be here and exhausted by being here.

Yet motherhood often seems to be the one relationship in which we are discouraged from acknowledging these truths.

Somewhere along the way, mothers were handed an impossible assignment: not only are we expected to care for our children, but we are expected to enjoy doing it all the time. If we are overwhelmed, we are reminded that it goes fast. If we are exhausted, we are told to cherish these days. If we are frustrated, someone inevitably points out that one day we will miss this.

But when did motherhood become synonymous with denying our own humanity?

At what point did we decide that one of the most demanding, repetitive, emotionally consuming roles a person can undertake should somehow be exempt from the full range of human emotions?

I love being a mother.

Not in the glossy, curated sense that social media often presents, but in the real sense. I love my children with a depth that still surprises me. I love hearing about their days, watching them discover who they are, and witnessing the gradual unfolding of their personalities. I love being the person they look for when they are hurt, scared, excited, or proud.

I also find parts of motherhood mind-numbing.

Not because I don’t love my children, but because some aspects of caring for young humans are, by their very nature, repetitive. The same questions. The same reminders. The same negotiations. The same sibling arguments. The same requests for snacks from children who appear to have eaten continuously since birth.

Some of it is hard.

Some of it is boring.

Some of it is mind-numbing.

And I think I’ve spent enough years being a mother to admit that without feeling guilty about it.

The expectation that we should enjoy every moment feels strange when applied to almost any other meaningful part of life. I love being a psychologist, but there are sessions that leave me frustrated, discouraged, or emotionally drained. I love writing, but there are revisions I dread. I love my friends, but not every conversation leaves me energized or fulfilled.

None of that calls the love into question.

Why would motherhood be any different?

What makes the message even more difficult is that it has become tangled up with another idea, one that seems designed to make mothers anxious.

It’s no longer enough to enjoy motherhood.

Now we’re supposed to enjoy it while keeping one eye fixed on the clock.

You only have eighteen summers.

You only have so many weekends.

One day you’ll pick them up for the last time.

What is presented as gratitude often feels remarkably close to panic.

Instead of helping mothers become more present, these reminders can pull us out of the moment entirely. Rather than experiencing what is happening, we find ourselves evaluating it. Am I appreciating this enough? Will I regret being annoyed by this later? Should I be cherishing this more than I currently am?

The result is often guilt rather than presence.

Because being a present parent has very little to do with enjoying every moment.

Presence is not delight. Presence is not gratitude. Presence is not finding every stage magical.

Presence is listening when your child wants to tell you something for the third time. It is putting down your phone. It is showing up again tomorrow. It is apologizing when you lose your patience. It is sitting beside a sick child in the middle of the night, not because you are enjoying yourself, but because they need you.

Some of the most meaningful moments in parenting are not enjoyable at all.

Their value comes from connection, not pleasure.

This past week I was talking with a woman from tennis whose children are grown. At some point the conversation turned to parenting and I braced myself for the usual script. I expected to hear about how quickly it all goes and how much she missed the years when her children were small.

Instead, she told me how much she loves having adult children.

She talked about long dinners, deeper conversations, and the joy of watching her children build lives of their own. She described a relationship that had changed, but not diminished. There was no sadness in her voice. No sense that the best part was over.

If anything, she seemed excited.

I can’t fully explain why, but I found that conversation incredibly comforting.

Perhaps because so much of the messaging directed at mothers focuses on what is ending.

Very little focuses on what is still to come.

We are constantly reminded that childhood is fleeting, but almost nobody talks about the possibility that the future may be wonderful too.

Almost nobody tells mothers that there are things to look forward to.

That conversation felt like someone opening a window.

Because the goal of parenting is not to keep our children small.

The goal is to help them grow.

We are not raising permanent fans. We are not raising people whose job is to make us feel needed forever. We are raising future adults, people who will hopefully build meaningful lives of their own and, if we are lucky, continue inviting us into them.

What troubles me most about the countdown-clock version of motherhood is not simply that it creates anxiety. It’s that it quietly suggests that a woman’s most meaningful years are the years when her children are young, as though the story peaks during school pickups and bedtime stories and family movie nights.

I don’t believe that.

My children’s lives will continue to unfold.

And so will mine.

After talking with my tennis friend, I found myself thinking less about how much time is left and more about how much life is still ahead.

Maybe that’s what I want mothers to hear.

Not that they should stop appreciating their children. Not that they shouldn’t soak in the beautiful moments when they arrive.

Only that they don’t need to enjoy every moment in order to love their lives.

They don’t need to cherish every second in order to be grateful.

They don’t need to find meaning in every tantrum, every argument, every sleepless night, or every pair of pants that didn’t quite make it to the bathroom in time.

The truth is that I was overcome with gratitude this weekend.

The truth is that I also wanted to run away from the whining.

The truth is that I love being a mother.

And the truth is that sometimes being a mother is boring.

All of those things can be true at the same time.

Maybe motherhood isn’t about enjoying every moment.

Maybe it’s about making room for all of them.

One of the things I have started noticing in conversations with women is how often honesty makes only a brief appearance before it gets escorted out of the room.

A woman will say she feels lonely and then immediately remind everyone how busy life is and how hard it is to stay connected. Another will admit she is struggling in her marriage and quickly follow it with a list of her partner’s positive qualities. Someone else will confess that she feels overwhelmed and then rush to explain how grateful she is for everything she has.

The truth appears, but only briefly. Before anyone has a chance to sit with it, examine it, or respond to it, it has already been softened, qualified, explained away, or wrapped in enough context to make it feel less dangerous.

Once I noticed this pattern, I couldn’t stop seeing it.

I saw it in conversations with friends. I saw it in therapy sessions. And if I’m being honest, I saw it in myself.

A few years ago, during Covid, I found myself in a situation that I never would have chosen. Like many parents, I was suddenly trying to work from home while caring for my eighteen-month-old daughter because daycare wasn’t available. The days felt endless and chaotic, and like so many women, I was attempting to do two full-time jobs at the same time.

What surprised me wasn’t that it was hard. What surprised me was what it taught me.

Before Covid, I had always assumed that my desire to work was largely practical. Of course I worked. I had bills to pay, responsibilities, and a family to support. Work wasn’t really something I had spent much time questioning because it felt like a necessity.

Like many mothers, I had also felt the bittersweet pull of returning after maternity leave. There was sadness in leaving my daughter. There was guilt. There was the sense that I was missing things.

But Covid created an unexpected experiment. For the first time, I had the opportunity to spend nearly all of my time with my daughter while simultaneously trying to hold onto my professional identity. And what I discovered was something I hadn’t anticipated.

Even if money had not been a factor, I still would have wanted to work.

Not because I loved my daughter any less. Not because motherhood wasn’t meaningful. And not because I was trying to escape my life.

I wanted to work because I liked using my brain. I liked contributing. I liked helping people. I liked learning. I liked having a place in the world that belonged entirely to me.

There was something incredibly freeing about realizing that.

For years, I had unconsciously framed work as an obligation, something I had to do because I was an adult with responsibilities. Covid forced me to confront a different truth, which was that I didn’t just work because I needed a paycheck. I worked because work was part of who I was.

And somehow that felt harder to admit.

Saying that I had to work felt understandable.

Saying that I wanted to work felt selfish.

Even now, as I write that, I can feel the urge to start qualifying it. I want to tell you that I adore my daughter. I want to tell you how lucky I felt to have that time with her. I want to explain that I was grateful. I want to make sure you understand that I wasn’t unhappy and that I wasn’t taking any of it for granted.

In other words, before I can tell you the truth, I feel compelled to convince you that I’m a good person.

The more I thought about that reaction, the more curious I became. Why did I feel the need to provide evidence in my defense before expressing a preference? Why did it feel risky to simply say that I enjoyed working, that I missed using my brain in a different way, and that spending all of my time caring for a child wasn’t the life I wanted for myself?

What exactly was I afraid would happen?

I don’t think this is unique to me. In fact, I think many women spend an enormous amount of time preparing the jury before presenting the evidence.

We establish that we’re grateful before we admit we’re struggling.

We remind everyone that we’re lucky before we acknowledge disappointment.

We explain all of the reasons someone else is wonderful before we admit we’re hurt.

We spend so much energy proving that we’re good that we barely leave any room to be honest.

The older I get, the more I think women live inside a set of unspoken rules about what we’re allowed to say.

We’re allowed to say we’re busy.

We’re allowed to say we’re tired.

We’re allowed to complain about how much there is to do.

But there are other truths that still seem to make people uncomfortable.

I don’t enjoy every stage of parenting.

I need time away from my children.

I want more from my marriage.

I’m lonely.

I’m resentful.

I’m disappointed.

I don’t want to do this anymore.

I want something different.

As a psychologist, I hear these thoughts all the time. Women say them behind closed doors. They say them in therapy offices. They say them to close friends when they finally feel safe enough to stop performing.

What strikes me isn’t that women have these thoughts. Of course they do. What strikes me is how quickly they retreat from them.

Almost immediately, the qualifications begin.

But I’m grateful.

But everyone is struggling.

But I know I’m lucky.

But I shouldn’t complain.

It’s as though we’re constantly negotiating with ourselves about whether we’re allowed to have our own experience.

I think women do this to one another, but I think we do it to ourselves even more. We become experts at interrupting our own honesty before anyone else gets the chance.

Part of the problem is that the moment a difficult feeling appears, everyone rushes to solve it. A woman says she’s lonely and is immediately encouraged to join a book club, plan a girls’ trip, or put herself out there more. A woman says she’s overwhelmed and is given advice about boundaries, productivity, or asking for help. A woman says she’s stuck and someone recommends a hobby, a podcast, or a morning routine.

None of those suggestions are bad. Many of them are helpful. What interests me, though, is how quickly we move toward solutions.

As a psychologist, I’ve learned that insight usually arrives before change. Long before people leave a relationship, set a boundary, ask for help, change careers, or start living differently, there is often a quieter moment when they simply tell themselves the truth.

The problem is that many of us don’t stay with the truth very long.

We rush to explain it.

We rush to soften it.

We rush to justify it.

We rush to find gratitude.

We rush to find the lesson.

And in doing so, we sometimes lose access to the information the feeling was trying to provide.

Not every uncomfortable emotion is a problem to solve. Sometimes loneliness is information. Sometimes resentment is information. Sometimes dissatisfaction is information. Sometimes the feeling we are trying hardest to eliminate is pointing us toward a part of ourselves that has been neglected.

The older I get, the less interested I am in fixing every uncomfortable emotion as quickly as possible. What interests me now is whether we’re willing to listen before we silence ourselves, whether we’re willing to stay with a difficult truth long enough to understand what it might be trying to teach us, and whether we can resist the urge to prove we’re good before we’re willing to be honest.

Because I have started to wonder if some of the most important truths in our lives are hidden underneath all the explanations, disclaimers, and apologies.

And perhaps the first step isn’t solving them.

Perhaps the first step is simply letting them exist.

Last week I sat down to dinner with a group of women in their forties, and within minutes the conversation landed exactly where you would expect it to. We talked about schools and teachers, sports schedules and summer plans, who was thriving, who was struggling, and what everyone was doing next year. As often happens when mothers gather, our children quickly became the center of the conversation.

About twenty minutes in, I had a thought that felt slightly disloyal.

I can’t do this for the next two hours.

Not because I don’t love talking about parenting. Some of the most meaningful conversations I’ve had over the years have been with other mothers, particularly the honest ones, the conversations about guilt and exhaustion and identity and marriage and the strange emotional complexity of loving people so much that their happiness can feel physically tied to your own. Parenting reveals all sorts of things about us, our fears, our need for control, our capacity for selflessness, our insecurities, our hopes. There is no shortage of depth there.

But that wasn’t the conversation we were having.

We were exchanging information. Teachers and coaches, schedules and logistics, activities and plans. The conversation felt less like a group of women getting to know one another and more like a series of status updates. Every child had a calendar. Every family had a situation. Every parent had a report to deliver.

And as I sat there listening, I found myself thinking that there were a dozen intelligent, funny, complicated women around the table and somehow none of them were actually in the conversation.

Their children were.

The thing is, I understand exactly how this happens. The work of parenting occupies an astonishing amount of mental space. Most mothers I know are carrying around a running inventory of appointments, emotional concerns, forgotten forms, social dynamics, sports schedules, school emails, and future plans at all times. We don’t merely care for our children; we become project managers of their lives. We monitor, anticipate, coordinate, encourage, intervene, remember. It is difficult to overstate how much attention that requires.

And somewhere along the way, many women slowly begin to fade into their children’s stories.

Their children’s accomplishments become the primary source of pride. Their children’s social lives become the primary source of stimulation. Their children’s futures become the thing everyone discusses at dinner parties and on sidelines and in group chats. Entire years become organized around the growth and development of other people, while our own growth becomes increasingly abstract, postponed, difficult to locate beneath all the noise.

I don’t think most women consciously choose this. In many ways, our culture encourages it. Mothers are praised for devotion, sacrifice, and endless availability. The woman who is completely consumed by her family is often treated as the gold standard, while the woman who remains deeply invested in her own evolution can still, in subtle ways, be made to feel selfish.

So over time, many women stop thinking of themselves as people in the middle of their own lives and begin thinking of themselves primarily in relation to everyone else. Their role becomes facilitating other people’s growth, managing other people’s emotions, supporting other people’s ambitions.

And if we’re not careful, we can start living somewhat vicariously through our children without even realizing it. Their milestones become our milestones. Their ambitions become the closest thing we have to ambition. Their successes give us purpose, structure, identity, and direction in a world where many women have quietly stopped asking themselves what they want outside of motherhood.

Again, I don’t say this critically. I recognize the pull of it in myself too.

There is something comforting about being needed. There is clarity in motherhood, especially during years when children require so much from us physically, emotionally, and practically. Focusing on their lives can feel easier than confronting the uncertainty of our own unanswered questions. Easier to discuss a child’s future than to consider what we want from the next chapter of our own life. Easier to stay occupied with logistics than to sit quietly long enough to notice parts of ourselves that may have gone unattended for years.

Thankfully, as the evening went on, something shifted at dinner. Maybe it was the wine or maybe everyone had simply exhausted the available material on teachers and travel sports, but gradually the conversation drifted elsewhere. People started telling ridiculous stories about themselves. We laughed at embarrassing moments and made fun of one another in the affectionate way people do when they feel comfortable. Someone told a story that became funnier every time she tried to explain it. Nobody was particularly deep or vulnerable. We weren’t unpacking childhood wounds or discussing personal growth.

We were just being people.

And honestly, I think that’s what felt so refreshing.

Not because the conversation became more profound, but because the women themselves finally emerged from behind the logistics of their lives. They became funny and absurd and self-deprecating and interesting in ways that had absolutely nothing to do with their children’s achievements or schedules.

I left thinking about how rarely adulthood allows us to exist outside the roles we perform for other people. Mother. Wife. Caretaker. Organizer. Chauffeur. Emotional support system. We become so practiced at managing life that we can slowly lose touch with ourselves as participants in it.

The strange thing about motherhood, though, is that it inevitably changes. One day the driving and coordinating and managing ends. One day our children need us differently. One day they build lives that no longer revolve around us, which is exactly what we have spent years preparing them to do.

I suppose what I wonder now is whether, when that day comes, we will still know ourselves outside of the roles we performed for everyone else.

I hope the answer is yes.

I hope somewhere beneath all the logistics and caretaking and years spent tending to other people’s growth, we have continued tending to our own.

I am going to say something that may make some women uncomfortable.

The mental load is real, the imbalance many women experience is real, and the research is clear that mothers continue to shoulder a disproportionate share of household labor, childcare responsibilities, and emotional management, even when they contribute equally financially to their households and maintain demanding careers of their own.

But there is another truth that receives far less attention: many women are participating in the very dynamic they desperately want to escape.

Before you stop reading, hear me out.

This is not an argument that women should do more, complain less, or simply accept inequality. Quite the opposite. It is an argument that if we genuinely want equity, we have to be willing to examine not only the expectations placed upon us, but also the expectations we continue to place upon ourselves, because resentment is not a strategy and martyrdom is not a path to partnership.

As a psychologist, I hear versions of this story all the time. Women tell me they are overwhelmed by the endless planning, organizing, remembering, anticipating, and coordinating that keeps family life running. They carry the appointments, the school emails, the birthday gifts, the camp registrations, the emotional needs of the family, and often careers that demand just as much of them as their partners’ careers demand of them.

Then, almost inevitably, comes a phrase I have heard hundreds of times:

“I shouldn’t have to ask.”

And honestly, I understand exactly what they mean.

If you have to remember the task, assign the task, remind someone about the task, and follow up to make sure it gets completed, it doesn’t feel like help, it feels like management. Nobody wants to become the project manager of their marriage.

But somewhere in this conversation, I think many of us get stuck, because while women often resent carrying too much, many of us are surprisingly unwilling to stop carrying it.

Not because we enjoy it, and not because we consciously choose it, but because for generations women have been taught that being a good mother, partner, daughter, friend, and employee means being endlessly available. We are praised for our selflessness, admired for our ability to juggle everything, and rewarded for putting ourselves last. Over time, what begins as caretaking can quietly become part of our identity, the burden becomes familiar, and letting go of it can feel surprisingly uncomfortable.

It’s also worth acknowledging that many of us grew up watching a very different model of family life. Many women in my generation were raised by mothers who stayed home, either full-time or for significant portions of our childhoods, and those mothers often carried the majority of the household responsibilities because that was their primary role.

Whether we realize it or not, those expectations become part of our blueprint for adulthood.

The challenge is that the blueprint changed while the expectations often didn’t.

Many of our mothers were incredible caregivers, but they were parenting in a different era. Kids had more independence, parents had less oversight, we rode our bikes around the neighborhood, disappeared for hours with friends, and came home when it got dark. There were fewer organized activities, fewer school emails, and fewer expectations that mothers would be constantly available, informed, and involved in every aspect of childhood.

That doesn’t mean motherhood was easier, but it was different.

And sometimes I wonder whether many modern mothers are being asked to sacrifice in more domains simultaneously.

That isn’t because our mothers didn’t sacrifice. Many gave up careers, ambitions, financial independence, personal time, and countless opportunities in service of their families. But today’s mothers are often being asked to do something different. We are expected to build meaningful careers, pursue advanced education, contribute financially to our households, stay engaged in our marriages, maintain friendships, remain physically healthy, volunteer at school, manage family logistics, monitor technology, support our children’s emotional wellbeing, create enriching experiences, and somehow still find time for ourselves.

The expectation isn’t simply that we will work, it’s that we will excel everywhere. We are supposed to be professionally ambitious and endlessly available, accomplished and selfless, successful and constantly present.

At some point, those expectations become mathematically impossible.

I see this dynamic in myself.

I spent years in school, earned two master’s degrees and a doctorate, built a career helping people navigate some of the hardest moments of their lives, and trained other clinicians to do the same. Yet when a child gets sick, school calls unexpectedly, or childcare falls through, my first instinct is often to rearrange my own schedule, not because my work isn’t important, demanding, or meaningful, but because, like many women, I absorbed the message that my responsibilities should somehow be more flexible than everyone else’s.

And I know I am not alone.

I hear versions of this from women who are physicians, professors, attorneys, executives, teachers, business owners, and leaders, women whose work affects other people’s lives in meaningful ways, yet who still assume that when family and work collide, their commitments should be the first to bend.

What strikes me is that many of these same women would never consciously argue that their husband’s career matters more than theirs, yet their behavior often tells a different story.

Perhaps that is because old expectations have a long shelf life. We have spent generations encouraging women to pursue education, ambition, leadership, expertise, and professional achievement, then many of us return home and continue operating under assumptions that were developed when women’s primary role was expected to be inside the home.

The problem isn’t that women have more opportunities than previous generations, it’s that the role expanded while the expectations never contracted.

Many women say they want equity, but struggle with the boundaries required to create it. We want our partners to step up, but we often step in before they have the chance. We want help, but we don’t want to ask for it, and we want things shared, but we don’t always want them done differently than we would do them ourselves.

Of course, this isn’t solely a women’s issue.

Just as women are often conditioned toward caretaking, self-sacrifice, and anticipating the needs of others, many men are conditioned in the opposite direction. Women are often taught to notice what needs to be done, while men are more likely to grow up assuming someone else will notice first.

That’s an oversimplification, of course, but like many stereotypes, it contains a kernel of truth.

If one person consistently remembers the birthday gift, schedules the dentist appointment, arranges the playdate, signs the permission slip, and rearranges their work schedule when a child gets sick, the other person can gradually become less attuned to those responsibilities. Not necessarily because they are selfish or malicious, but because humans adapt to the systems around them.

The more one partner carries, the less visible the carrying becomes.

The more someone steps in, the less often others need to step up.

Over time, what began as a practical division of labor can quietly transform into an expectation.

This is one of the reasons I find conversations about equity so complicated. Women are not imagining the imbalance. Many men genuinely need to do more. At the same time, many women have become so accustomed to compensating for that imbalance that we continue reinforcing it, even as we complain about it.

And perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us.

For generations, women have been praised for self-sacrifice while men have often been praised for participation. Mothers were expected to be caregivers. Fathers were applauded for helping. Women were taught to accommodate. Men were taught to protect their own time.

Those messages don’t disappear simply because we believe in equality.

They show up in marriages, in parenting, in careers, and perhaps most powerfully, in the stories we tell ourselves about what makes us a good woman.

What I’ve started wondering is whether one of the biggest obstacles to equity isn’t simply that women are doing too much, but that many women feel guilty whenever they stop.

Research consistently finds that women report higher levels of guilt than men, particularly around caregiving responsibilities and family obligations, and most women don’t need anyone else to police their choices because they’ve already internalized the monitoring system themselves.

A man spends six hours golfing and enjoys six hours of golf.

A woman spends six hours away and often spends at least part of those six hours wondering whether she should be somewhere else.

Did I leave too much for my partner?

Are the kids okay?

Is there something more productive I should be doing?

Have I earned this?

Even when nobody is asking these questions of us, many of us are asking them of ourselves.

The irony is that women don’t always use free time the same way men do. When women finally carve out a free afternoon, they are often just as likely to volunteer at school, organize a fundraiser, serve on a committee, coordinate a charity event, or help someone else solve a problem as they are to spend time with friends, pursue a hobby, or simply do something because it brings them joy.

We have become so accustomed to being useful that leisure can start to feel selfish, and unlike many men, women are often keeping score all day long—not of what their partners owe them, but of what they owe everyone else. The email they haven’t answered. The birthday gift they still need to buy. The school form they forgot to sign. The friend they should call. The workout they skipped. The mental tally never really ends.

Perhaps part of the guilt comes from the fact that many of us are trying to honor mothers who sacrificed enormously for their families while also recognizing that we cannot sustainably replicate their role under entirely different circumstances.

Then we wonder why so many women feel exhausted.

The problem isn’t simply that women have more responsibilities, it’s that many women carry the emotional burden of those responsibilities even when they aren’t actively performing them. Many are so busy trying to be good mothers that they become exhausted versions of themselves, physically present but emotionally depleted, checking every box while running on fumes.

And yet one of the most reassuring findings in parenting research is that children do not need perfection. What matters most is having caregivers who are warm, responsive, emotionally available, and engaged. Quality of connection matters far more than maintaining a constant physical presence.

A mother who takes an afternoon to play tennis, meet a friend for lunch, exercise, read a book, go to therapy, or simply spend time alone is not taking something away from her children. In many cases, she is protecting the very thing that allows her to show up as the mother she wants to be.

Yet culturally we continue to celebrate women who are exhausted, admiring the mother who never stops moving, never asks for help, never takes a break, and somehow manages to hold everything together. Then we wonder why so many women feel resentful.

Perhaps what we call devotion is sometimes burnout in disguise, and what we call selflessness is sometimes guilt dressed up as virtue.

Another dynamic that deserves examination is how enthusiastically we celebrate fathers for doing things that mothers are simply expected to do.

Recently, my partner’s father commented on how much he does for our children, and his family regularly praises him for being involved and engaged. To be clear, he is involved and engaged, and I am grateful for that. But I couldn’t help noticing how differently we talk about mothers and fathers.

A father attends the school event, packs lunches, coordinates schedules, drives kids to activities, and people are quick to point out what a great dad he is. A mother does those same things and they barely register because they are viewed as part of the job description.

The answer is not to stop appreciating fathers. The answer is to stop treating engaged parenting as exceptional, because equity is not a trophy, it should be the expectation.

Maybe that’s the uncomfortable truth hiding beneath so many conversations about the mental load.

Women deserve more support, many men need to do more, and the imbalance is real. At the same time, equity requires something from women, too. We have to stop treating our own time as optional, stop assuming our work is the first thing that should bend, stop confusing guilt with goodness, and stop waiting for permission to take up space in our own lives.

Because no one benefits from a woman who spends her life proving how much she can carry.

I remember getting pregnant with my first child and thinking that everything about my life had finally clicked into place. I would be a mother now. That would be my purpose. My identity. My calling. The thing that made everything make sense.

And in many ways, motherhood did change me profoundly. It expanded my capacity for love, sharpened my priorities, softened parts of me, strengthened others. I love my children with a depth that is difficult to explain unless you’ve lived it.

But I also think there was something comforting, maybe even seductive, about the idea that motherhood would become my entire purpose. It simplified things. It gave me a clean identity to hold onto in a world where women are often exhausted by the pressure to become fully themselves.

The truth is, though, my purpose did not disappear when I became a mother. It multiplied.

I still feel deeply called to my work as a psychologist. I still want to help people. I still want to use the years of training, experience, and expertise I worked so hard to build. I want my children to grow up seeing that caring for others matters, that contributing matters, that women do not have to shrink their identities in order to love their families well.

And honestly, I don’t think outsourcing some caregiving makes me less of a mother. Some of the people who cared for my children while I worked have impacted our lives in deeply meaningful ways. Teachers taught my children to read. Daycare providers comforted them when they cried. Other adults poured into them, encouraged them, believed in them. Those relationships mattered.

I think sometimes we frame motherhood as though love only counts if it comes exclusively from us, but children were never meant to be raised in isolation. Community matters. Support matters. Other caring adults matter.

And this is true whether a woman works outside the home or not.

Because I don’t actually think this is ultimately about employment status. I know deeply fulfilled stay-at-home mothers who are evolving constantly, intellectually curious, engaged with the world, connected to themselves, creative, growing. And I know professionally successful women who lost themselves entirely.

The question is not simply whether you work.

The question is whether you continue becoming.

As a psychologist, some of the saddest patients I have worked with were women who had spent decades pouring every ounce of themselves into motherhood without maintaining any relationship with their own inner life. Their children grew up, moved away, became appropriately independent, and suddenly these women were left staring at themselves without any idea who they were anymore.

Sometimes it looked like anxiety. Sometimes depression. Sometimes it looked like drinking wine every night with a Xanax just to take the edge off the emptiness.

And I say this with tremendous compassion, not judgment, because I understand exactly how it happens. Motherhood is consuming. Especially when your children are little. Especially when there are four of them climbing on you, needing you, touching you, asking for you every second of the day.

But our children cannot be asked to carry the full weight of our meaning forever. It is too much pressure for them.

I have also worked with adult children whose mothers were wonderful mothers, loving mothers, deeply devoted mothers, but whose entire identities remained frozen there long after their children became adults. And often those children feel an enormous amount of guilt and pressure because they sense that their mother has nothing beyond them.

Children want to be loved by their parents. But they also want to see their parents alive.

They want to see them growing, laughing, learning, trying new things, building relationships, evolving into fuller versions of themselves. There is something freeing for children about realizing their parents are people too.

Last weekend, I had a strange moment of clarity about this. I was away for the weekend and found myself alone at the mall for a few hours without noise, without interruptions, without someone asking me for a snack or yelling “Mom!” from another room.

And for the first time in a while, I could hear myself think.

I wandered around slowly, drank a coffee while it was still hot, looked at clothes I didn’t need, sat quietly with my own thoughts, and I had this overwhelming realization: I do not want my entire emotional ecosystem to collapse when my children leave home.

I do not want to spend my later years desperately calling my kids at college because I have no idea what to do with myself. I do not want to numb myself with endless shopping, wine, distraction, or resentment because I abandoned every other part of my identity along the way.

I want a life that continues expanding.

Right now, in this season, my children need more from me. There is less time for my own interests, more logistical chaos, more exhaustion, more sacrifice. That is real. But this season is not forever.

One day there will be more space again.

And I want to enter that stage of life as someone who continued to nurture her own mind, relationships, passions, health, and purpose along the way. Not because I love my children less, but because I love them enough not to make them responsible for my entire emotional world.

I want my relationship with my children to evolve over time into something mutual and alive. I want us to talk about books, ideas, goals, relationships, dreams. I want them to see me continuing to challenge myself.

Today I watched a woman playing tennis with her college-aged daughter. The mother was beating her, laughing, giving her tips between points. She looked strong, engaged, vibrant, fully herself.

And I thought: I want to be that mother.

Not because she was impressive, but because she was still becoming.

And every Mother’s Day, I also think about the people who do not have children, whether by circumstance, choice, grief, infertility, loss, timing, or life unfolding differently than expected. Their lives are not less meaningful. Their capacity to love, nurture, mentor, create, heal, contribute, and matter has never depended on motherhood.

I can see that now in a way I couldn’t when I was younger. If my life had unfolded differently, it still would have held meaning. Purpose was never exclusively waiting for me inside motherhood.

I also think about this every time I see quotes online that say things like, “My life didn’t begin until I became a mother,” or “I finally understood my purpose once I had children.” I understand the emotion behind those sentiments. Motherhood can absolutely feel transformative, clarifying, grounding. In many ways, it was for me too.

But I also think we need to be careful about framing women’s lives as though they only fully begin through motherhood.

Not only because it can unintentionally wound women who do not have children, but because I don’t believe our humanity, meaning, or purpose arrives for the first time in the delivery room. We were already people before we became mothers. We already mattered. We already carried gifts, ambitions, relationships, intellect, humor, creativity, and purpose into the world.

Motherhood deepened my life. It did not create my worth from nothing.

I think that is one of the greatest gifts we can give our children. Not martyrdom. Not total self-erasure. Not making them the sole container for our meaning.

But showing them that a full life continues unfolding long after motherhood begins.

We’re chasing optimization when most of what sustains us is far more ordinary—and far harder to practice.

I’m increasingly convinced many people are trying to optimize their way into a life that actually asks for something much simpler—and much more demanding.

There is a way we talk about wellness now that often sounds, to my ear, suspiciously like achievement dressed in softer clothing. The language may be gentler than hustle culture, but much of the ethos can feel remarkably similar, organized around the promise that with enough discipline, enough information, and enough optimization, we might finally engineer our way into feeling well, and even self-care, a phrase that once gestured toward restoration, can begin to sound like another domain in which we are meant to perform competence.

Layered onto this is a kind of wellness consumerism that quietly preys on our hope that transformation can be bought. The powders and protocols, the expensive supplement stacks making sweeping promises on often modest evidence, the suggestion that vitality may be waiting one proprietary blend away, all of it subtly reinforces the fantasy that health is something hidden in one more secret we have not yet uncovered.

Some of these things may help, some may be harmless, and some may simply produce very expensive urine.

And while I do not say that dismissively, because placebo effects are real and fascinating and expectation shapes experience in meaningful ways, I find myself increasingly uninterested in building a philosophy of health around interventions whose power sometimes seems to rest more in aspiration than in durable evidence. I do not want to live in people’s placebo effects, I want people to experience real and lasting change, and often what produces that change looks much less glamorous than what gets sold to us.

There is also a subtler version of this that shows up in how we approach self-improvement. We can consume advice the way we consume supplements, always imagining the next book, the next podcast, the next framework, the next insight will finally organize us into feeling better. I say that as someone who values growth and believes we are meant to keep learning, but I think there is a difference between staying open and becoming compulsive about self-optimization. It is possible to binge self-help the way people binge wellness products, accumulating language for change while feeling no more changed, not because reflection is unhelpful but because constant input can start to replace actual practice. At a certain point, growth looks less like consuming more and more like living what you already know.

The longer I do this work, the more I find myself returning to a deceptively simple thought, which is that many of the things that sustain us are not especially complicated. They are foundational: sleep, nourishment, movement, connection, things so ordinary they can seem almost too basic to matter, which may be precisely why we underestimate how much of well-being is built through them.

There is something profoundly reassuring in that, perhaps because it suggests health may be less about dramatic reinvention and more about the quiet ways we keep showing up to a life, again and again.

I mean this partly in opposition to the perfectionism that so easily attaches itself even to health. Sleep is a good example, because we often talk about it as though enough discipline should guarantee perfect rest, as though it is something we can force through compliance, when anyone who has lived through stress, grief, parenting, hormonal shifts, or insomnia knows sleep does not bend so easily to control. Once even rest becomes another arena for self-judgment, we have turned a foundation of health into another standard people can feel they are failing.

What matters more is approaching sleep in terms of support rather than perfection, not how do I force ideal sleep, but how do I create conditions that make rest more possible. Reducing activation, protecting wind-down, building steadier rhythms, and relating to wakefulness with less struggle tend to matter far more than chasing a perfect number, and that shift in posture, from control to support, turns out to be relevant far beyond sleep.

Food suffers from much the same moralism. Nutrition can quickly become purity, virtue, and self-surveillance, a quiet referendum on whether one is being disciplined enough, and that framing tends to make people more anxious, not more healthy. I am much more drawn to a philosophy of nourishment that is flexible enough to be lived, something closer to an 80/20 life than a perfection project, eating in a way that mostly supports your energy, mood, and long-term health while leaving room for pleasure, culture, spontaneity, desserts, dinners out, life, because health that cannot bend often breaks, and the irony is that science often supports this more moderate view far better than wellness culture does.

I feel similarly about movement, which has been reduced so often to aesthetics, as though its highest purpose were visible abs or visible discipline, when the evidence tells a much richer story. Movement supports mood, cognition, stress regulation, longevity, sleep quality, even social connection, its benefits are astonishingly broad, and much of that has very little to do with sculpting a body and much more to do with supporting a life.

I find myself increasingly drawn to what changes when movement stops being about managing a body and starts being about inhabiting one, because what if the goal were not perfection you can display but health you can feel, something that leaves you more energized, more regulated, more alive. That feels not only more humane, but far more sustainable.

Whole health, then, often seems less about doing any of these things perfectly and more about relating to them wisely, sleeping as well as you can, eating well most of the time, moving often enough to feel supported, doing your best imperfectly and repeatedly rather than trying to do any of it flawlessly, which to me feels less like compromise and more like maturity.

What also gets flattened in many wellness conversations is how hard motivation can be. We often assume people fail to care for themselves because they lack information, but most people already know far more than we give them credit for, and knowledge is rarely the problem. The harder question is why doing what supports us can feel so difficult, and that question is far more psychologically rich than wellness culture tends to acknowledge.

Sometimes self-care feels indulgent, especially for people who have learned to equate worth with usefulness, sometimes rest evokes guilt, sometimes what looks like low motivation is really depletion or perfectionism or avoidance or the nervous system conserving energy under chronic stress, and sometimes people do not protect time for themselves because they have quietly internalized that their needs should always be negotiable.

Because behavior change is rarely just behavioral, it is emotional, relational, and meaning-laden, and the gap between knowing and doing is often where shame, history, and habit live.

Which is why motivation is often less about waiting to feel inspired and more about building protections around what matters before motivation arrives, protecting the walk as if it were an appointment, scheduling friendship, guarding what restores, and treating care as maintenance rather than indulgence.

I also think wellness can overemphasize soothing and underemphasize stretching, treating comfort as the goal when some forms of well-being are built precisely by moving, gently but deliberately, beyond comfort, especially socially, where connection often grows because we risk initiating, tolerate awkwardness, and step into spaces we might otherwise avoid.

There is often vitality just beyond avoidance, and some forms of care soothe while others expand, both of which matter.

And maybe this is why I keep returning to the idea that there is no real magic in much of healing, mostly there is rhythm, repetition, and the slow accumulation of small acts of care practiced long enough to become a way of living. I find that oddly liberating, because it means transformation may not require dramatic overhaul so much as devotion.

And perhaps this is also what people mean, at its best, when they talk about romanticizing your life, not aesthetic performance but attention, the refusal to sleepwalk through ordinary beauty, noticing sunlight in the kitchen, drinking your coffee sitting down, taking the scenic route home, letting pleasure count, practicing Savoring as a form of participation in life.

Because delight is not frivolous, it is part of being alive, and perhaps part of staying well.

I increasingly think we have to fight, quietly but deliberately, for our own happiness, not by chasing some permanent emotional state but by protecting what nourishes us and refusing to postpone joy indefinitely, because there is something psychologically profound in noticing what is lovely while it is happening.

What I keep circling back to is that wellness may be both simpler and deeper than we have been taught, less a matter of mastering elaborate systems than of tending faithfully to a life.

And maybe healing begins there.

There’s been a rush to categorize Strangers as a cheating story, as if the only way we know how to make sense of a woman’s pain is by tying it neatly to a man’s behavior. That framing is not only too small for the book, it misses the entire emotional and psychological landscape the narrator is moving through. What’s actually unfolding is a portrait of shock, grief, and the slow, deliberate work of rebuilding a life with honesty. The man may set certain events in motion, but he is not the center of the story. The woman is.

Women Learn Early to Question Their Own Clarity

In my clinical work, I see how quickly women doubt themselves when they begin to speak about something painful. Before anyone else has the chance to question them, they’re already interrogating their motives. A patient once asked me whether sharing her experience meant she was “just seeking attention.” She wasn’t — but the fact that she even had to ask says everything about the cultural messages women absorb. There is a long history of treating women’s accounts of their own lives as unreliable or exaggerated, and many women internalize that suspicion long before they ever speak.

This is the psychological backdrop of Strangers. The narrator isn’t only dealing with a rupture in her marriage; she’s also navigating the pressure to minimize or reinterpret her own experience so she doesn’t appear dramatic or unkind. Her decision to tell the truth — plainly, without apology — becomes the real act of courage.

Women Are Reading This Book With a Kind of Urgency

One of the most interesting things about the book’s reception is how intensely women are consuming it. They’re finishing it in a day, passing it to friends, clearing space in their schedules because they can’t put it down. I read it in a single day myself, not because it’s light, but because something in it felt deeply familiar, like it was giving shape to an emotional experience I hadn’t fully articulated.

Women aren’t drawn to the plot mechanics. They’re drawn to the emotional undercurrent: the disorientation, the grief, the attempt to stay honest while the ground shifts beneath you. There’s a recognition there, not necessarily of the specific circumstances, but of the internal process of trying to understand a life that suddenly doesn’t match the one you thought you were living. That recognition is powerful, and women are responding to it with an intensity that makes perfect sense.

Why We Need More Women Telling Their Stories Honestly

Part of the reason Strangers is resonating so widely is because women’s interior lives are still underrepresented, not just in literature, but in public conversation. We have endless narratives about women being resilient, forgiving, accommodating, or inspirational. We have far fewer narratives about women being confused, grieving, blindsided, or simply trying to understand themselves in real time.

When women tell their stories honestly, they expand the emotional vocabulary available to all of us. They make room for complexity. They challenge the idea that a woman’s experience needs to be tidy or flattering or easily categorized. They give other women permission to stop minimizing their own lives.

And culturally, we need that. We need more stories that don’t resolve neatly, more stories that center a woman’s interiority rather than her role in someone else’s plot, more stories that treat women’s psychological realities as worthy of attention in their own right. Every time a woman speaks plainly about her life, she pushes back against the long history of being told to soften, shrink, or reinterpret her own truth.

The Emotional Arc Is Grief, Not Scandal

What the narrator is experiencing is not scandal; it’s loss. When the story you believed you were living suddenly fractures, the first response is often shock, a kind of suspended state where nothing quite makes sense. Grief follows, not only for the relationship but for the version of yourself who felt secure inside it. The book captures that internal unraveling with a kind of quiet accuracy that feels rare. It’s not dramatic; it’s human.

Financial Transparency Is Emotional Safety

One of the most important threads in the book, and one that often gets overshadowed, is the role of financial secrecy. People like to treat money as a practical matter, but in intimate relationships it’s deeply psychological. Access to financial information is access to agency. When one partner holds all of it, the other partner isn’t simply uninformed; they’re structurally dependent.

The narrator’s growing awareness of this imbalance is part of her grief. She’s not only mourning the relationship she thought she had; she’s mourning the version of herself who believed she was on equal footing. The book makes clear that financial transparency isn’t about spreadsheets but about power, safety, and the ability to make choices that are truly your own.

People Change — and So Do We

Another truth the book handles with nuance is that people change in ways we can’t control. Someone you love can become someone you no longer recognize, and that shift can be as destabilizing as any explicit betrayal. But the part that often gets overlooked is that we change too. The narrator is not simply reacting to someone else’s transformation; she is undergoing her own. She is becoming someone who can no longer ignore what she knows, someone who can no longer maintain the version of herself that made the relationship easier for someone else.

Her change is a return to herself rather than a departure.

Telling the Story Is Part of the Reconstruction

When women tell their stories, they’re trying to bring coherence to an experience that fractured their sense of self. Speaking becomes part of the rebuilding, not because it resolves everything, but because it allows them to stop minimizing or doubting what they lived through.

This is why Strangers resonates so deeply. It isn’t a story about a man’s choices. It’s a story about a woman staying with herself through shock, grief, and the slow process of rebuilding a life that feels honest. It’s about refusing to disappear inside someone else’s version of events. It’s about trusting her own voice in a world that has taught her to question it.

And for me, that’s the part that feels most personal. My own story is still unfolding. I’m still evolving, still trying to understand what it means to live honestly in real time rather than waiting for a tidy ending. Honesty isn’t always comfortable, for me or for the people around me, but discomfort isn’t a sign that I’m doing something wrong. It’s often a sign that I’m finally telling the truth.

That’s the risk. And it’s worth taking.

A Question for You

What parts of your own story have you hesitated to tell, and what might shift if you allowed yourself to speak from the middle, not the end?

There’s a quiet truth many psychologists, therapists, and helpers carry but rarely say aloud: the same sensitivity that allows you to understand people so deeply can also leave you feeling unexpectedly alone. Insight gets talked about as if it’s a kind of superpower, and sometimes it is, but there’s another side to it—one that doesn’t fit neatly into casual conversation.

When your mind is trained to notice patterns, emotional shifts, and the stories beneath the surface, you don’t simply switch that off when you leave work. You move through the world with that same orientation toward people. You listen in a way most others don’t. You ask questions that feel natural to you but land more intensely for someone who isn’t expecting depth. And every so often, you can feel the moment when your curiosity—meant as connection—gets interpreted as something heavier.

It’s subtle. You ask a question like, “What made that hard for you?” or “What did that mean for you?” or one of the hardest ones—“What were you hoping for?”—and suddenly there’s a pause, a shift in posture, a quick laugh, or a gentle “wow… that’s a lot.” In that instant, you realize they’re not experiencing your question as interest—they’re experiencing it as exposure. Not because you’ve done anything wrong, but because depth, when it arrives unexpectedly, can feel like a spotlight.

And sometimes, there’s something else underneath that reaction: a flicker of defensiveness. A sense that your question has touched a place they weren’t prepared to acknowledge. And even though you didn’t intend to provoke anything, you can feel yourself wanting to apologize, to soften, to water yourself down so they don’t feel uncomfortable. I’ve had moments where I’ve walked away from a conversation wondering if I should have just stayed quiet. It’s a strange instinct—especially because in a therapy session, you would never do that. You’d stay steady. You’d hold the space. You’d trust the process. But outside that container, you can feel the pressure to make yourself smaller so others don’t feel confronted by your natural way of engaging.

This dynamic becomes even more complicated when you consider how much of everyday social life revolves around conversations that skim the surface—vacation plans, kids’ activities, weekend logistics. These are fine, even pleasant, in small doses. But there’s a limit to how long you can stay in that space before you feel yourself drifting. Small talk has its place, but for people who live in the deeper layers, it can feel like treading water. You can do it, and you often do it well, but it doesn’t feed you. It doesn’t feel like connection. And after a while, you feel the quiet ache of wanting something more substantial.

And then there are the moments that land even harder. A friend recently told me, “You want more from friendships than most people,” and it hit me in that old familiar place—the place where depth gets mistaken for neediness. For a moment, I felt like too much. Like I was asking for something unreasonable. It’s strange how a single comment can echo in the exact place you’ve tried so hard to make peace with. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized: what I want isn’t “more.” It’s just friendship. Reciprocity. Presence. Curiosity. Emotional availability. The things that make a relationship feel like a relationship, not a series of updates.

When someone says you want “more than most people,” what they often mean is, “I’m not used to this level of closeness,” or “I don’t have the capacity for this,” or “This feels unfamiliar to me.” But what you hear is, “You’re too much.” And those are not the same thing.

Outside the therapy room, the instincts that help people feel understood can create distance. People assume you’re analyzing them, judging them, trying to “figure them out,” when in reality you’re simply trying to connect in the way you know how. But intention doesn’t always match impact. A thoughtful question can feel like a test. An invitation can feel like scrutiny. And none of that means you’re wrong—it just means the moment isn’t shared.

There’s a particular kind of loneliness that comes with this work, one that doesn’t get talked about enough. You spend your days helping people feel understood while sometimes feeling a little misunderstood yourself. You’re comfortable with complexity, but that same complexity can feel like “too much” in everyday spaces. You value reflection, but the world often rewards speed, lightness, and surface-level conversation. So you learn to calibrate. To soften. To hold back. To meet people where they are, even when it’s not where you naturally live. It isn’t inauthentic—it’s relational skill.

What people often miss is that those who are tuned in to others are usually doing just as much work internally. You question yourself. You track your reactions. You notice when you push too far or miss something important. Insight doesn’t eliminate blind spots; it just makes you more responsible for noticing them. And sometimes that level of awareness can feel disorienting. Clarity doesn’t always make things easier—it just makes things more visible.

If you’ve ever felt like your depth makes connection harder, you’re not alone. If you’ve ever held back because you didn’t want to overwhelm someone, you’re not alone. If you’ve ever felt your energy quietly slipping during conversations that stay on the surface, you’re not alone. And if you’ve ever caught yourself shrinking—apologizing for your insight, softening your questions, dimming your natural way of seeing—just to make someone else more comfortable, you’re definitely not alone.

Most of us are just trying to find the people who feel like home. People who don’t flinch at depth. People who don’t mistake curiosity for criticism. People who meet presence with presence.

Because the goal isn’t to be understood by everyone. It’s to be known by the people who can meet you in that deeper place. And the same depth that feels isolating in the wrong environment becomes profoundly connective in the right one—not because you see more than others, but because you’re willing to stay with what’s real, in yourself and in the people around you. And that’s always worth it.

If you’ve ever felt like “too much,” I hope this reminded you that your depth is a strength — it just needs the right people.

We talk endlessly about pregnancy and birth, but almost never about what happens to a woman’s body afterward—at least not in a way that reflects reality. Instead, we wrap the entire postpartum experience in soft, minimizing language. We call major reconstructive surgery a “mommy makeover.” We describe abdominal wall repair as a “tummy tuck.” And in doing so, we turn profound physical change into something cute, optional, and cosmetic. The result is a cultural narrative that fails women entirely—one that asks them to carry the weight of pregnancy, the weight of recovery, and the weight of silence about what those changes actually feel like.

Pregnancy Is Not a Neutral Event

Pregnancy is a prolonged physiological stressor. It reshapes the musculoskeletal system, alters connective tissue, shifts posture, and changes core stability. Research shows that diastasis recti affects a large percentage of postpartum women and can impair core function, stability, and movement.

This is not about appearance.

This is about function.

It’s about what it feels like to move through your day in a body that no longer works the way it used to.

I Did Everything “Right”—And It Still Happened

I had four children in five years. Two of them were twins. I exercised. I stayed fit. I followed the guidelines. And I was still impacted.

I had significant back pain.

I didn’t feel stable in my own body.

There were moments during intimacy where I felt so disconnected from myself that I cried—not because of my partner, but because my body no longer felt like mine.

And when I finally decided to repair it, something else became clear:

No one treats this like a real surgery.

When Functional Impairment Gets Labeled “Cosmetic”

Despite the pain, despite the dysfunction, despite the years my body had carried and recovered and carried again—this was still framed as elective. Optional. Aesthetic.

Insurance denied coverage.

I was redirected, dismissed, punted.

Meanwhile, clinical guidance shows that abdominal separation can contribute to back pain, pelvic instability, and reduced physical capacity.

Yet it’s still categorized as “cosmetic.”

In my surgeon’s office were images of women with severe abdominal separation—distended, destabilized, clearly beyond anything that could reasonably be dismissed as aesthetic.

They paid out of pocket.

Because incontinence isn’t “serious enough.”

Back pain isn’t “serious enough.”

Pelvic instability and prolapse often aren’t “serious enough.”

But somehow, other procedures that address quality of life or long‑term health are.

That contradiction is not incidental.

It reflects what we, collectively, choose to prioritize.

The Invisible Experience of Pregnancy

The physical experience of pregnancy and postpartum is immersive, cumulative, and often invisible to anyone not living inside that body.

It’s working through exhaustion and nausea.

It’s showing up to life when all you want is to lie down.

It’s pushing through discomfort because there is no alternative.

Women become experts at masking this.

And when something is consistently masked, it becomes easy for others not to grasp the magnitude of what is being carried.

That gap—between lived experience and perceived experience—is where disconnection grows.

Breast Changes Are Not “Just Cosmetic” Either

Breast changes after pregnancy and breastfeeding are often minimized, but the underlying physiology is significant. Cycles of glandular expansion, milk production, and involution alter both volume and structural support.

For many women, the result is not simply “smaller” breasts—but a qualitatively different shape and integrity. Not just less, but different. Foreign. Sometimes even dysphoric.

And yet we have a name for addressing these changes: the “mommy makeover.”

The term itself is telling.

It reframes functional concerns—core instability, chronic pain, tissue damage, body‑image disruption—into something indulgent. Optional. Frivolous.

And that framing has consequences.

Another Phrase Worth Questioning: “Tummy Tuck”

If “mommy makeover” trivializes the complexity of postpartum repair, “tummy tuck” outright infantilizes it.

The phrase sounds cute, light, almost playful—like something you’d tack onto a spa day. But what it actually refers to is abdominoplasty with muscle repair, a major reconstructive procedure that addresses structural damage to the abdominal wall.

There is nothing “tucky” about it.

The surgery often involves repairing stretched or separated rectus muscles, removing damaged connective tissue, and restoring core integrity. Medical guidance shows that abdominoplasty with muscle plication can improve back pain and urinary incontinence.

But the phrase “tummy tuck” makes it sound like a nip, a tweak, a vanity project. And that language has consequences.

We don’t call rotator cuff repair a “shoulder spruce‑up.”

We don’t call hernia repair a “belly button glow‑up.”

We don’t call knee reconstruction a “leg lift.”

But when the damage comes from pregnancy—when the body being repaired is a woman’s—suddenly the vocabulary becomes diminutive.

It softens the reality.

It minimizes the pain.

It makes it easier for insurers to deny coverage, easier for society to misunderstand the need, and easier for women to feel like they’re asking for something indulgent rather than necessary.

“Tummy tuck” is not just a bad phrase.

It’s a linguistic sleight of hand that turns functional repair into cosmetic fluff.

Here’s the Part That’s Hardest to Say Out Loud

When the system dismisses postpartum repair as cosmetic, the burden doesn’t disappear.

It simply shifts.

Onto the woman.

She is the one who has to research.

She is the one who has to justify.

She is the one who has to save, plan, and figure it out.

She is the one who has to navigate the financial, logistical, and emotional weight of repair—alone or almost alone.

Even though the physical changes came from creating a family that benefits everyone.

This isn’t about blame.

It’s about reality.

A reality where women’s bodies carry the cost of pregnancy, and women’s wallets often carry the cost of repair.

The Question We Don’t Ask Enough

If pregnancy, childbirth, and the physical toll of raising children are part of a shared life—a shared family—

why is the repair so often treated as an individual woman’s responsibility?

Even if it were “just about appearance”—that would still be valid.

Appearance is tied to identity, confidence, sexuality, and embodiment. When a woman’s body changes dramatically while her partner’s remains largely unchanged, it is not superficial to want to feel at home in her body again.

We do not ask men to justify caring about how they look.

Women should not have to medicalize their pain to be taken seriously.

The issue is not whether a woman chooses repair.

The issue is how that choice is understood.

To call this a “mommy makeover” is to misunderstand the problem entirely.

To treat it as hers alone to solve is where the inequity becomes most clear.

Because the most painful part is not always what pregnancy changes.

It’s what those changes reveal—

about who is expected to carry the weight of them,

and how easily that weight can be missed,

long after the children are born.

About the author

I’m a clinical psychologist writing about embodiment, identity, and the unseen emotional and physical labor women carry. My work explores the gap between lived experience and cultural understanding — especially around motherhood, relationships, and the body.

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Diastasis Recti – Mayo Clinic
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/labor-and-delivery/expert-answers/diastasis-recti/faq-20405293

Postpartum Abdominal Separation – Cleveland Clinic
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22346-diastasis-recti

Postpartum Breast Changes – Cleveland Clinic
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/21892-breasts-after-breastfeeding

Abdominoplasty / Tummy Tuck – Cleveland Clinic
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/21799-tummy-tuck

Abdominoplasty Overview – Mayo Clinic
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/tummy-tuck/about/pac-20384892