Part 1: We Spent Decades Taking Care of Everybody. Now What?

For a lot of women, adult life came with a very long job description. We raised children, managed households, built careers or worked because bills had to be paid, took care of partners, helped aging parents, remembered birthdays, planned meals, scheduled appointments and generally kept an astonishing number of plates spinning.

Some of us loved much of it. Some of us hated parts of it. Most of us probably experienced both.

But somewhere in those decades, taking care of what needed to be taken care of became so normal that we stopped thinking much about it.

We just did it.

And then life changed.

Nobody Warned Us About the After

Children grew up. Marriages changed or ended. Careers slowed down, ended or stopped defining us quite so completely. Parents died—or became the people who needed us most.

The details are different for every woman, but eventually an unsettling question can creep in:

Now what?

For decades, the next thing was usually obvious. Get everybody out the door. Go to work. Make dinner. Pay the bill. Solve the crisis. Do the laundry. Start over tomorrow. There wasn’t much time to wonder what you wanted your life to look like. You were busy living it.

Then some of those jobs disappear. And freedom, strangely enough, can be confusing.

So…What Do I Want?

We hear a lot about finally having time for ourselves, as though the minute that time appears we’ll know exactly what to do with it.

What if we don’t?

After decades of making decisions around what the family needed, what we could afford, what worked with everyone’s schedules, what our jobs required and what everybody else wanted, we may be a little rusty at asking a very basic question:

What do I want?

Not what’s practical, profitable or expected. Not what the kids think you should do or what a partner would enjoy. Not what women our age are supposedly meant to want.

What do you want now?

Sometimes We Stopped Asking

For years, many of our choices weren’t really about what we wanted. They were about what worked—or what caused the least conflict.

We bought the meat pizza because that’s what our husband and kids wanted, instead of the Margherita pizza we actually preferred. Buying both seemed wasteful, and insisting on our choice meant complaints, arguments, or listening to someone make it very clear that this was not what they wanted.

We cooked the meals our families preferred, including our partners. Foods we loved but they didn’t gradually disappeared from the menu because, after making sure everyone else got something they liked, who had the energy to cook a second meal for ourselves?

The same thing happened outside the kitchen. We watched what our partners or children wanted to watch, planned vacations around their preferences, and spent money on things they wanted while finding it much harder to justify the added expense of something just for us.

Often, it was simply easier.

And that’s important, because not every compromise was some terrible act of oppression. Sometimes we chose the meat pizza because we were tired and didn’t feel like dealing with someone bitching about the Margherita.

Avoiding conflict has value when you’re tired.

The problem is what happens after years of making the easier choice. We can get so accustomed to asking What will everybody eat? What will keep everyone happy? What will cause the least hassle? that eventually we stop checking what we would have chosen in the first place.

We haven’t necessarily forgotten ourselves.

We may just be badly out of practice at consulting ourselves.

Maybe We Don’t Need to “Find Ourselves”

There’s a lot of talk about women at this stage of life finding themselves again.

I’m not sure I buy it.

Maybe we didn’t lose ourselves. Maybe we changed.

Why should the woman you were at 25 determine what the woman you are at 55, 65 or 75 wants? You’ve lived some shit since then. You’ve learned things, changed your mind and probably become much clearer about what you’re willing to tolerate—and what you’re absolutely fucking done tolerating.

Maybe we don’t need to rediscover who we used to be.

Maybe we need to get acquainted with who we are now.

Unfortunately, We Brought the Old Rules With Us

Even when life changes, decades of habits don’t vanish with it. We may still put everyone else’s needs on the calendar first, feel guilty sitting down when something could be cleaned, jump in to solve problems because we’re good at it, or ask what everyone else wants before considering ourselves.

We may even have absorbed the idea that being useful is part of what makes us valuable.

Some of those old rules still serve us. Others may be running our lives long after the circumstances that created them have disappeared.

It’s probably time to see which is which.

“Now What?” Doesn’t Need a Grand Answer

There’s tremendous pressure to turn this stage of life into another assignment. Find your purpose. Reinvent yourself. Start a business. Travel the world. Get in shape. Become the fabulous silver-haired woman laughing on a beach in a pharmaceutical commercial.

Or maybe not.

Maybe we start smaller. What do I enjoy now? What do I want more of? What am I done with? What am I curious about? Who do I enjoy spending time with? How do I want an ordinary Tuesday to feel?

And here’s a big one:

What would I choose if I didn’t have to justify wanting it?

You don’t need the answers today. You don’t need a five-year plan or a dramatic reinvention. For now, maybe the assignment is simply to start noticing what you want before automatically asking what everybody else needs.

After decades of being very good at that job, this might take some practice.

But the next part of your life doesn’t have to be built entirely around who everyone else needs you to be.

Apparently, you get a vote now.

Next: Part 2 — Figuring Out What You Actually Want—and Making Room for It