Summer has a way of making you think things will slow down. Longer days, looser schedules, the promise of something easier. But this summer, I’m doing something different than slowing down. I’m putting something down, a role I assigned myself and have been carrying for longer than I want to admit.
For most of my life, I have been an absorber. Of other people’s emotions, their problems, their needs, their dropped balls and forgotten appointments and the things they never thought to think about in the first place. I became the coordinator, the accountant, the homework helper, the meal planner, the keeper of the schedule, the family brain. And I know I’m not alone in this. So many women I know, women who are capable, driven, deeply loving, have ended up here. Because we saw what needed doing and we did it. Because we were good at it. Because we believed, somewhere deep down, that if we didn’t, no one would. At least not the way it needed to be done.
So we did it. And kept doing it. And in doing it, we took away everyone else’s chance to participate.
I told myself it was easier. And in some ways it was, easier than explaining, easier than waiting, easier than watching something get done differently than I would have done it. But the doing came with a price. Because I was also the one seething when no one noticed how much I was holding. The thank yous came, and they did come, but they couldn’t reach me. How could they? No one could see what went into making everything look so effortless, so perfect. They saw the outcome. They couldn’t see the cost. They couldn’t know what it took, and so even their genuine gratitude landed somewhere just outside of me, close but not quite touching.
That’s where the resentment lived. In the slow accumulation of invisible labor. In being essential to everyone’s lives while disappearing from my own. And the thing is, I didn’t feel like I had a choice. Because for so long, I truly didn’t know that I did.
Then perimenopause walked in and rearranged everything.
Suddenly I didn’t want to track for everyone else anymore. I didn’t want to be in charge. I didn’t want to hold the mental load of a household, a family, a calendar on top of everything else I was already carrying. And the feeling I’d been pushing down for years started surfacing. More like an exhaustion so deep it became clarity. I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m not sure I ever did.
What shifted was something underneath, my mindset, my capacity, my desire to track and manage and make it all perfect. That desire was gone. And with it went the willingness to be mad and resentful and invisible. I didn’t want any of it anymore. The labor, and the bitterness that came with it.
I had to reckon with something uncomfortable. The control I thought I wanted was also a trap I built for myself. I’d been so convinced others wouldn’t do it right that I never gave them the chance to do it at all. And then I resented them for it. That’s not a fair bargain for anyone.
This summer, something was different.
My kids are grown now, and we decided to do it big, one of those backyard summer parties. Food, lawn games, people all over the lawn. Instead of planning and cooking every single detail of the meal, I had it catered. I asked my son to pick it up. I asked my husband to help get the backyard ready. I asked everyone to help with the dishes. But the real change was inside me. I was done white-knuckling my way through a new system. I genuinely didn’t want to do it all anymore, and I genuinely trusted that everyone else could do their part.
In years past, I would have painstakingly planned every detail, the food, the decorations, the backyard, the guest list, all of it, and then arrived at the actual gathering too depleted to be present for any of it. I would have managed everything and then been furious that I missed what I’d created. I’d move through the day keeping score in my head, waiting for acknowledgement that could never quite cover what it had cost me to pull it all together.
This year, we laughed. We played lawn games. We sat in the backyard as the sun went down and I wasn’t running a ledger in my head. There were no tense moments, no seething underneath the surface. I wasn’t waiting to be seen for all I had done, because I hadn’t done it all, and more than that, I hadn’t wanted to.
And when everyone thanked me this year, I could actually feel it.
That is what I had been missing. The thank yous were always there. The capacity to receive them wasn’t.
Here’s what I know now: just because I can, doesn’t mean I should. Just because I can see the problem doesn’t mean I need to be the solution. Just because I’m capable doesn’t mean I should assign it to myself.
Just because I’ve always done it doesn’t mean it was ever really mine to do alone. And here’s what else I’ve come to understand, in all my rushing to be helpful, to be needed, to be in control, I robbed people of the chance to rise to things. I robbed my family of participation. I robbed myself of presence.
I’m in the middle of a slow, sometimes clumsy unlearning. My life now looks like me saying I don’t know and I have complete faith you’ll figure it out. It looks like letting things stay undone a little longer than I used to tolerate. It looks like watching people I love discover they are more capable than they ever had to be, because I was always right there, doing it for them.
This summer, I’m practicing a new bargain. I do it for me. I let others do for themselves.
And for the first time in a long time, that feels like enough.
Try This: The Handoff Practice
Think of one recurring thing you carry, at home, for your family, in your life, that you picked up because you were sure it wouldn’t get done right without you.
Ask yourself three questions:
- What am I actually protecting by holding onto this? Is it about the outcome, or about control? About competence, or about being needed?
- What is it costing me? Not just in time or energy, but in presence, in joy, in my ability to actually receive the people around me?
- Who could do this instead, even imperfectly? Name a person. Name the task. Sit with what it would feel like to hand it over and not take it back.
You don’t have to let go of everything. Start with one thing. One handoff. One moment of trusting that imperfect participation from others is worth more than perfect execution from you alone.
With you,
Gretchen
