Good morning Reader,
I pulled into the winery a little after eight, later than I meant to, on the last night of my three-month writing retreat. It sits off a two-lane road in a quiet stretch of Ohio, the kind of place you find only because you went looking for it. They were already closing, the chairs up on half the tables and the light low. I had called an hour ahead to ask if I could park the RV in their lot for the night, and the two women behind the bar had said yes, and then stayed on past their own closing so a stranger would have somewhere to sleep. The whole evening began with two tired women giving me still more of the little time they had left to themselves.
Their names were Deana and Adriana. While one of them ran a rag over the tables and the other counted down the register, we talked, the way you do at the end of a long day when the work is nearly finished. They were easy company. Warm, funny, quick to laugh. Both had raised children alone. Deana had done it for eight years and has since remarried. Adriana had her kids so young that she gave up her early twenties without ever quite deciding to, and she told me she had not felt like herself in a long time. Over those years she had lost the thread of what she used to enjoy.
So I asked the kind of questions I ask, and what came back from both of them was a long list of other people, the children always first, the parents older now and needing more, the job and for one of them a second and a third, and always someone else needing something, because someone always did.
Their days were completely full, just not with anything of their own. Their lives had run on everyone else’s needs so faithfully and for so long that they had stopped asking what they themselves wanted. Deana told me she can spend on her kids without a flicker of hesitation, but the thought of buying one small thing for herself makes her feel selfish, every time. She has a hard time even receiving. Hand her a small kindness and you can watch her not quite know how to take it.
Watching them close down the bar, it looked like the very thing we were all raised to admire, two good women who show up and carry the load and never once make their own needs anybody else’s problem. This kind of giving wears the face of the very best in them, which is why no one thinks to call it a cost, least of all the women paying it.
And then Deana said something. She said it half to me and half to the empty room, and she followed it all the way across the table she was wiping down.
“I serve my husband, I serve my kids. I do everything. But who does that for me?” She paused for half a second, hearing what she had just said, and then added, “And when I say that to myself, I really sit and think, wow. Who does that for me?”
The room went quiet. Adriana was gentler about hers. When the idea came up of taking even thirty minutes in a day for herself, the half hour was findable, and she knew it. What stopped her was something older and a good deal heavier than a scheduling problem.
“I just feel like I don’t deserve it.”
There was no complaint in any of it. They said it the way you mention the weather, a plain fact of the climate they had lived in for years. What pressed on me, sitting there at that bar, was the accumulation of the yeses. Any single one was light. A person can carry any one yes. It was the pile that had weight. Eight years of it. A whole decade of somebody’s twenties. Ten thousand small yeses, every one reasonable on the day it was spoken, every one the loving and responsible thing to do, stacked up now into a life so full of other people that there was no obvious place left in it to set yourself down. A life fills up this way, in a slow, quiet pile of good deeds, until the pile is the whole shape of our days and we cannot remember the last time our own name appeared anywhere on the list.
I knew the shape of this, even though I have only ever felt the thinnest sliver of what Deana and Adriana carry. Two days before, I had stood up in front of a room of 16 leaders and given them everything I had for three hours. I poured all I had into our very first Honor Yourself workshop. It went well. And when it was over and everyone filed out, I walked to my waiting RV at the back of the parking lot and, inside of half an hour, I was collapsed on the bed. Exhausted in a way that caught me off guard. Lonely in my chest, with no one out in that lot to do for me the thing I had just spent the whole afternoon doing for a room full of people. That was one afternoon, one come-down off one good day of giving everything away. These two women had been living inside that exact feeling, with no name for it and no night off, for most of their adult lives. I had visited the place for an afternoon. They lived there.
There is a word we like to hang on people like Deana and Adriana. Generous. Deana’s question sent me looking, wanting to know what we are naming when we call anyone that. It comes from the Latin generosus, of noble birth. Underneath that sits the root it grew from, genus, which meant kin. Family. The line you are born into and belong to. Long before generous was ever a word about giving, it was a word about belonging to your own people.
Deana and Adriana had given everything to their families, and in all that giving they had forgotten themselves. They belonged to these people. They were of them. The one name they had left off the list of the people they cared for was their own.
I pulled out of that lot the next morning still hearing Deana’s question, and I have been hearing it ever since. I don’t think it belongs only to her. It sits, mostly unspoken, in a great many of us who have spent years being good to everyone within reach and have called that our life.
Who does that for me?
So few of us have ever let ourselves ask it at all, let alone sit still long enough to answer it. Maybe it begins there, with letting our own name onto the list of the people we are good to, without doing one thing less for the people we love.