The Question That Revealed Everything
A few years ago, I went away overnight.
One night.
Before I had even left the house, both my mother and my mother-in-law asked the same question:
"But who's watching the children?"
I remember how fast the irritation hit me.
"Their Father," Not a Babysitter
"Their father," I said. "Their father is watching the children. He's not babysitting them. They are his children."
The room became quiet afterward, but the moment stayed with me for years because it revealed something much bigger than the question itself.
It exposed how deeply women are conditioned to believe that caregiving belongs primarily to us. It showed me how normalized it is for mothers to explain their absence while fathers are often praised simply for participating. Even now, women are still expected to justify why they need rest, space, solitude, ambition, or time away from their families, while men are far less likely to be interrogated for the same choices.
And what struck me most was not that they asked the question. It was how instinctively I felt I needed to defend my right to leave for one night.
The Invisible Choreography of Leaving
Men could come home from work, leave for a business trip, disappear for a golf weekend, or go out with friends without the same psychological choreography women perform before leaving the house for twelve hours.
Who's picking up the kids? What's everyone eating? Did you sign the forms? Who's driving where? Can you still answer your phone?
The logistical replacement of the "traditional wife and mother" role still feels like a small organizational crisis in many homes. And despite how progressive we like to believe we've become, women are still quietly carrying the operational and emotional weight of daily life while calling it partnership. That realization unsettled me because it forced me to confront how deeply I had confused self-abandonment with love.
Confusing Self-Abandonment With Love
For years, I believed being a good woman meant learning how to need very little. I thought strength meant endurance. I thought love looked like constantly accommodating, constantly managing, constantly holding everything together without becoming "too much" for anyone around me. What unsettles me now is realizing how often I interpreted exhaustion as evidence that I was doing womanhood correctly.
There were times I believed asking for less made me easier to love. I thought tolerating emotional neglect meant I was loyal. I wore my ability to absorb pressure without complaint like a badge of honour, even while parts of me were quietly collapsing underneath the performance.
The Woman Everyone Depends On
From the outside, I looked capable. Inside, I was exhausted from constantly negotiating against myself. I think many women know exactly what that feels like. The woman everyone depends on is often the woman least likely to admit she's drowning. She's still answering emails. Still remembering birthdays. Still carrying conversations emotionally. Still functioning.
Meanwhile, she hasn't felt fully alive in years. And when that exhaustion finally surfaces as anxiety, resentment, numbness, rage, burnout, brain fog, or the overwhelming desire to disappear for a week without explaining herself to anyone, women are often made to feel as though they are failing instead of responding normally to years of emotional over functioning.
When Something Finally Shifts
I think this is why so many women reach a point where something suddenly shifts.
Sometimes it happens in midlife, after motherhood, after betrayal, burnout, illness, grief, or divorce. But eventually many women arrive at the same terrifying realization: they can no longer tolerate living disconnected from themselves. It looks like exhaustion finally refusing to stay quiet, or like a woman waking up one day and realizing she has spent years being emotionally responsible for everyone in the room while privately disappearing from herself.
Becoming Disruptive by Becoming Honest
And once a woman sees that dynamic clearly, it becomes impossible to unsee. A woman who stops apologizing for her needs becomes disruptive.
Not because she becomes cruel or selfish, but because she becomes honest.
She begins setting boundaries that make other people uncomfortable. She stops shrinking herself to preserve relationships that only function through her self-abandonment. She stops translating her pain into softer language so everyone else can avoid discomfort. She becomes more willing to disappoint others rather than continuously betray herself.
Reclaiming the Appetite for a Full Life
I think this is the appetite women are reclaiming now.
Not simply an appetite for success, sex, or ambition, although those desires deserve space too. I think women are reclaiming the appetite to fully inhabit their own lives. The appetite to feel alive again. The appetite to experience joy, pleasure, rest, truth, intimacy, creativity, and freedom without immediately attaching guilt to it.
For generations, women have been taught that desire is dangerous. A woman with too many needs is labelled difficult. A woman with ambition is intimidating. A woman with anger is unstable. A woman who prioritizes herself is selfish.
So we learned how to become palatable instead.
Learning We Were Never Meant to Survive on Less
We swallowed betrayal to keep the peace. We swallowed loneliness inside relationships that looked successful from the outside. We swallowed burnout and called it achievement. We swallowed grief, disappointment, rage, and exhaustion because many women still believe being loved requires being endlessly accommodating.
But I think something is changing. I think women are becoming tired of earning love through depletion. I think we are beginning to understand that constantly abandoning ourselves is not the same thing as being good.
And maybe that is the real appetite issue.
Not whether women want too much, but whether we were conditioned to believe we should survive on less. I think many of us are asking, perhaps for the first time, for what should have belonged to us all along.
The Most Radical Thing She Can Say
And maybe the most radical thing a woman can say now is not "I'm sorry."
Maybe the most radical thing she can say is "I want more for myself."
And finally mean it.
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