(ThySistas.com) There is a specific kind of weariness that settles into the shoulders after three decades of being everybody’s answer. You have felt it. It shows up quiet, and it sinks low in your back around nine at night when you are at the stove and the phone keeps buzzing, your grown son needing you again. Most of us stopped noticing it a long while back. We were raised to carry, and it never occurred to anyone to ask whether we minded. Somebody’s plate always wanted fixing. A grandbaby’s edges always wanted smoothing. The school program always wanted a chaperone, and we showed up, because showing up was the assignment nobody remembered handing us.
So when I catch Michelle Obama on my screen these days, 62 and in no hurry about a thing, the former First Lady is not really who I am looking at. It is a woman who quit fixing everybody else’s plate and, late in the game, started tending her own.
She is not the whole point, though. Think of her instead as a doorway.
Here is what her recent seasons have made plain for anybody paying attention. The girls are up and out. Malia, 28, is off building a life behind the camera, Sasha, 25, is making her own way in the world, and both of them, by their mother’s own telling, spent years trying to become people separate from the famous last name they carry. That is the good and proper order of things. Children are supposed to leave. What nobody prepares you for is the strange, ringing silence they leave behind, and someone standing in the middle of it, wondering who she is when the house has stopped calling her name.
Lately she has been honest about something plenty of us whisper and almost none of us say out loud. These days she is finished arranging her calendar around everyone else’s comfort. When she stepped back from certain rooms and certain events, folks could not fathom a wife simply picking her own schedule, so they invented a marriage falling apart to explain it. Sit with that a moment. A grown woman deciding how to spend an afternoon got turned into a headline. She named the real trouble plainly. Women, she has said, struggle with disappointing people. Sistas, does that not land right in the chest?
We know the shape of that fear intimately. We were raised inside it. Church on Sunday meant you were serving on three committees before the benediction. A job meant being twice as good for half the credit and never once flinching. Motherhood meant your own hunger came dead last, after the kids, after the husband, after your mama, after the sick neighbor down the block whose grass you also somehow ended up cutting. Black women have been the load-bearing wall of nearly every family and institution we have ever touched, and the thanks for that has mostly been a request to carry a little more.
Somewhere along the way we got handed a cruel little myth about ourselves. The strong one, the sister who does not break, does not tire, does not want. We repeated it until we believed it, and the belief cost us. You cannot rest when resting feels like betrayal, and reaching for something of your own feels like theft from the people depending on you. Plenty of us have confused being useful with being worthy, and we passed that confusion right down to our daughters like a family recipe.
Which is why the empty nest gets described as loss, a hollow, a grief. For some, it surely is. But for a whole lot of us it is the first real exhale in twenty-five years. It is the morning you wake up and the calendar is blank and, instead of panic, you feel something warm and unfamiliar move through you. Room. Actual room, in your own life, for your own thoughts, with your own name written across the top.
That is the invitation Michelle keeps holding open, and it has almost nothing to do with her resources or the podcast studio. Most of us will never have her lifestyle or her brother co-hosting a podcast while we swap stories about raising kids and getting older. That is not the part to copy. The real thing worth taking is the posture, the willingness to ask, out loud and unashamed, who do I actually want to be now. What do I want my Tuesday to feel like. If a girlfriend calls and says come on, let’s go, can I finally say yes without a committee meeting in my own head about whether I have earned it.
Recently she put a fine point on it. If not now, when. That question ought to be cross-stitched and hung in every kitchen where a tired mother has been putting herself off for later, because later has a way of never arriving on its own. Later has to be seized.
Picture the ordinary versions of this. The 60 year old who raised four children on a school cafeteria wage and is only now learning she is allowed to book a bus trip to Charleston just to see the water. Then there’s the auntie who mothered every child on the block and is signing up for a painting class at the rec center because color always made her happy and nobody ever asked her about happy. Or the retired nurse who spent forty years holding strangers through the worst nights of their lives and is standing in a garden center on a Saturday, buying tomato plants for a yard that will be tended for the pure pleasure of tending. These Black women are not famous. They are the whole story. Michelle Obama simply gave the feeling a face the country could not ignore.
There is grief mixed into it, sure. Nobody hands over the mothering years without a little ache. You miss the noise even when the noise nearly finished you. Some mornings your hand still reaches for the phone to remind one of them about a dentist appointment, and halfway through you remember they handle their own now. That part stings, and there is no pretending otherwise. But here is what folks are not supposed to say out loud. Michelle went on her podcast and admitted she does not miss having her daughters at home, not really, and she laughed while she said it. A generation back, that kind of confession earned you a long talk after service. Now it sounds a lot like the truth plenty of us have been swallowing for a long time.
When Black women watch her carry all of that without a word of apology, what lands is a kind of permission most of us were never handed. Permission to be a person and not only a function. Leave to disappoint a few folks and survive it. Room to admit that the version of yourself who existed only to hold others up was never the whole of you, and that the rest of you has been waiting, patient and hungry, all this time.
So take the trip. Sign up for the class you keep circling in the catalog. Turn down the next thing that leaves you hollow, and do not apologize for it. Some evening soon, let the pot go cold and take yourself out to the porch, hands empty, no one needing a thing from you. The children are grown. That wall got built, and it held. Now the woman who built it gets to walk through the door she has been holding open for everyone else and, for once, hold it open for herself.
That is the life waiting on the far side of all that giving. And Sistas, we have more than earned the right to go find it.
Staff Writer: Brenda Poole
BP writes about entertainment, relationships, faith, and life in general… She enjoys speaking on things Black women can relate to and hopefully giving a sista something useful along the way…
Feel free to email her at BrendaP@ThySistas.com.