I am seventy-eight years old, and I need to tell you something that nobody told me when I was your age. It’s a secret that sits heavy in the bones of women my age, a truth we usually only whisper to our mirrors when the house is quiet and the tea has gone cold. For most of my life, I thought being a “good woman” meant saying yes to everyone. I thought my value was measured in the comfort I provided to others, the meals I cooked, the silences I maintained, and the dreams I quietly folded up and tucked into the bottom drawer of a dresser I never opened.

I thought that’s what love looked like. I thought that’s what strength looked like. I was wrong about everything.

The Beautiful, Terrible Lie

I spent sixty years of my life trying to be perfect. If there were a prize for the most accommodating woman in the tri-state area, I would have won it every year from 1968 to 2018. I was the perfect wife, the perfect mother, the perfect daughter, and the perfect employee. And do you know what I got for all that perfection? I didn’t get a trophy. I didn’t get a “Thank You” that lasted longer than the time it took to wash a dinner plate. What I got was exhaustion. I got a deep, simmering resentment that I didn’t even have the words to describe. And most tragically, I got a life that didn’t feel like mine.

Seven years ago, the world as I knew it ended. My husband died. After forty-two years of marriage, of waking up to the same rhythm of his breathing, he was gone. And for the first time in my adult life, I was alone. Completely alone. I remember sitting in our living room, the silence so loud it made my ears ring, and I was terrified. Not because I missed him—though I did, in that complicated way you miss a person who has been your entire landscape for four decades—but because I realized I had no idea who I was without him. I had spent my entire life being someone’s *something*. I was David’s wife. I was Sarah and Michael’s mother. I was my boss’s “reliable” assistant. But who was I? What did I actually want for breakfast when no one else was there to eat it? What made me happy when I wasn’t busy making others happy?

A Marriage of Expectations

Let me take you back to 1968. I was twenty-two, with hair that reached my waist and a heart full of unvoiced questions. That was the year I got married. It was a different time, you have to understand. We didn’t talk about “self-actualization” or “setting boundaries.” My mother, a woman who had survived the Great Depression and a world war by being a pillar of selfless service, told me: “Ava, a good husband is all you need. Everything else will follow.”

So I married a “nice man.” He was a good provider, steady and predictable. And I became the good wife. I cooked the pot roasts, I kept the floors shining, I raised the children with a smile that I wore like a uniform. I supported his career, moving cities when he needed to, and I stayed quiet when I was supposed to stay quiet. I wasn’t unhappy, not exactly. I loved my children fiercely. But there was always this voice in the back of my head, a small, persistent whisper that asked, “Is this it? Is this all there is?” I ignored that voice for forty years. I treated it like a nuisance, like a fly I could swat away if I just stayed busy enough.

The Infinite Wait

When I was thirty-five, I felt a spark. I’d always loved literature—the way a single sentence could crack open the world. I dreamed of going back to school, of teaching. I remember bringing it up over dinner. My husband looked at me as if I’d suggested we move to Mars. “We can’t afford it, Ava. The children need you here. Maybe later,” he said. So I waited.

When the kids were grown, I brought it up again. Now he was thinking about retirement. His parents were failing, and we’d need to help them. “Maybe in a few years,” he said. So I waited again. When I was fifty-five, I thought, *Now. Now it’s my turn.* But our daughter got divorced. She moved home with the grandchildren, her heart broken and her pockets empty. How could I think about myself when my family needed me? So I waited. Again. And then, at seventy-one, he died. And there was nobody left to wait for.

Here’s what nobody tells you about being a woman: We were taught that self-sacrifice was noble. We were taught that putting everyone else first made us “good.” That our worth came from how much we gave away, not from the core of who we were. And it’s a lie. It’s a beautiful, terrible lie that keeps us small and manageable.

The Resurrection at Seventy-Two

The first year after he died, I was a ghost. I’d wake up and realize I had no one to serve. For sixty years, my identity had been wrapped up in other people. Then, about eighteen months later, I found a letter. It was tucked into an old box of keepsakes—a letter David had written to me before we were married. In it, he talked about my intelligence, my curiosity, and how he couldn’t wait to see what I would accomplish. I sat on the floor and cried until my throat was raw. Because that girl he’d fallen in love with? I’d buried her. I’d told myself I was being selfless, but really, I was disappearing.

That was the moment I decided: It wasn’t too late. At seventy-two, I enrolled in community college. I sat in rows with nineteen-year-olds who looked at me like a fossil, but I didn’t care. I studied literature, art history, and philosophy. For the first time in decades, I felt the electric hum of being alive. I started traveling—not the kind of trips my husband liked (golf resorts and buffets), but the kind *I* liked. I went to small villages in France, I visited museums in Florence, and I ate dinner alone in crowded bistros, feeling like a queen.

The Power of ‘No’

The hardest part wasn’t the schoolwork or the travel. The hardest part was learning to say “No.” When my children would call and ask me to babysit on a whim, I started saying, “I’m sorry, I have plans.” When friends invited me to events that bored me, I said, “No, thank you.” And do you know what? The world didn’t end. My children didn’t stop loving me. People adjusted. And I felt lighter, as if I’d finally set down a heavy backpack I’d been carrying since the sixties.

I am seventy-eight now. I finally know who I am. I am not “somebody’s” anything. I am Ava. I am a woman who loves the smell of old books and the taste of bitter espresso. I am a woman who enjoys her own company. But the heartbreaking part is that I wasted sixty years. Sixty years of shrinking myself to make room for everyone else. I can never get those years back.

A Manifesto for You

So, let me tell you what I wish someone had told me at twenty. At thirty. At forty. You are not selfish for having dreams. You are not selfish for wanting things for yourself. You think you have all the time in the world, but “later” is a dangerous word. There will always be another person who needs you. Another obligation. Another reason to wait. If you wait for permission to live your own life, you will wait until you are seventy-eight and full of regrets.

Don’t wait. If you want to go back to school, do it now. If you want to leave a relationship that makes you feel small, leave now. If you want to change careers, change now. Your life is not a practice run. This is the only one you get. You can love your family and still have your own life. In fact, you will be a better mother, wife, and friend when you are living authentically. You cannot give from an empty cup.

The women of my generation, we disappeared so that others could shine. But you? You have choices we didn’t have. Don’t waste them trying to be perfect. Be yourself. It’s the only thing that matters.

The permission is granted. Now, go live.