To My Fellow Capable and Exhausted Women: Let Alice Help You

I know how to take care of myself. I mean, let’s not get carried away: I call AAA when I have a flat tire, my furniture assembly skills max out with an Ikea bookshelf, and even with Google maps I get lost heading to familiar destinations. I’m hardly a rugged loner vying for a spot on Survivor. But I grew up in a family that reinforced independence as a value and I clarified through college feminist studies classes how I wanted to be known: I’ve got this.

That identity’s been one I’ve worn with pride, like a Superbowl ring that signals hard work and triumph. As a new mom, I remember the rush of adrenaline accompanied by making tomorrow’s kid lunches and tonight’s family dinner, all between 5:30 and 6:15pm, after a full day of work, with an infant in the ergo, listening to a required recording for my coaching certification, and responding to texts about playdate requests. ‘Nailed it,’ I’d think, to an empty audience. 

Since then I’ve volunteered in classrooms between client calls, planned the school Carnival over wine with neighbors, kept up with laundry and birthday gifts, organized family vacations, and plotted my next getaway with college girlfriends. In an orchestrated relay race with my husband I’ve done pickups and drop-offs at fields, courts, and tournaments around the Bay and beyond; in the early mornings I’ve found quiet time running through our hilly streets, and in the evenings I’ve snuggled in with a book for a few fleeting minutes before slumber calls. 

Goddammit, I’ve smugly thought: I can do it all. 

At 46 years old though, I’m starting to wonder if I can. 

The wondering’s been creeping in slowly and persistently over the past year, like a solicitor at my door who I ignore but who sneaks a brochure in my mailbox, willing me to consider their offering of solar panels or tree trimming services. Exhausted from repeatedly rejecting their advances, I’m feeling worn down enough to hear the pitch. My nagging wondering sounds like: ‘I know you think you can take care of it all, but aren’t you tired?’

My answer: ‘YES.’ 

I remember a time, years ago, on the soccer sideline, watching my then nine-year-old daughter on the pitch. I’d set up a blanket with markers and coloring books for her younger sister, a football for her brother, and Pirate’s Booty for them to share. As the game wrapped up I stuffed the accoutrements into a canvas bag, disassembled our folding chairs, and carried them on my shoulders to the tune of children whining about the ‘long’ walk to the car. ‘Let’s go!’ I directed my unwilling brood like a cheery camp counselor. 

Alice, an empty-handed player’s grandma and dear friend’s mom, noticed the chaos encircling me and said, ‘Let me help you.’ Without missing a beat I boasted, ‘I’ve got it!’ smiling while burdened by the weight of it all. 

She paused and said, ‘I know you do, but let me help you.’

Alice’s response, one that recognized I could carry it all but didn’t have to, confounded me then and is one I’m craving today. She made an offering to an ignored and unmet need I’m realizing now we all likely crave: to be taken care of.

At 46 years old I feel myself drowning. Early morning exercise and the daily rigors of work blend into the afternoons of orthodontist and vet appointments, Amazon returns, homework management, sibling rivarly mediation, and baseball practice drop-off. That seeps into evenings of meal prep, back-to-school nights, volleyball carpool, mentions of needed and neglected home repairs, and kid bedtime (which is now the same time as my own) and then blurs into weekends of basketball tournaments, laundry, and errands. These gratifying and relentless tactical demands are accompanied by the adaptive demands of trusting but verifying my teen’s well-being, navigating aging parents, and leveraging AI professionally. And, they collide with once quiet and now loud existential questions - ‘Do my flawed and perfect children trust I love all parts of them? When will fear stop inhibiting me? What’s the shape of my ambition now? What does it mean to accept aging and mortality? How do we keep evolving a 17-year-old marriage? How do I love the life I have and grieve the one I never will?’ - all amid hormonal shifts, and fear of school shootings, a pending World War, and an insufficient 529. 

I’m left to wonder, ‘What does it mean to be taken care of as a capable, high-capacity middle-aged woman and mother?’ 

Maybe mid-week medical intervention? I had a colonoscopy two weeks ago and while the prep (drinking foul liquid, fasting on broth and jello, and befriending the toilet) is admittedly less desirable than any number of spa treatments, the requirements after the procedure felt like a much coveted birthday gift: rest and don’t drive. I almost gave an open mouth kiss to the nurse who delivered the news and proceeded to take her orders seriously. My recovery included binge watching The Perfect Couple (and awkwardly drooling over that intro dance scene), napping, and respectfully declining carpool participation. I felt more rested than I have in 14 years.

I don’t think, however, that quarterly colonoscopies can cure me in an era that’s so gorgeously full of life it might be suffocating me. And, while I wouldn’t turn down a chef at my doorstep prepared to make high protein, delicious meals with in-season vegetables or a driverless car to transport my kids on demand, I sense that how I most want to be cared for at this life stage is more elusive.

It showed up when I listened to The Anxious Generation (giving up by Chapter 3 to avoid further elevating my anxiety) or when I solicited tips from experts on parental controls and contracts for devices. While I want to protect my kids’ privacy and mental health (fearing on-line predators or declining feelings of self-worth) how can I, a child of landlines, VCRs and answering machines be expected to compete in an arms race with TikTok? I have neither the interest nor bandwidth to outsmart technology designed to addict. So, I’m left to install futile screen time limits, embrace a feeling of parental inadequacy, and naively anticipate that a warning label will turn Big Tech into a modern day Florence Nightingale, finally showing up at a technological war zone to tend to us all. Please: just help me.

And I felt it during a doctor visit when I listed my annoying, but not excruciating, perimenopausal symptoms: sleepless and anxious with a dose of malaise, weight gain, and shortness of breath. My doctor let me know I could practice better sleep hygiene, take a sleep aid, stop drinking, eat a higher protein diet, find a therapist, get a pulmonary function test, try hormone replacement therapy and acupuncture, or just wait and see if symptoms persist or improve. The interaction was like showing up at a Vegas buffet when I wanted a prix fixe menu. I left her office in a resentful haze: bracing myself for 3am wakefulness and adding ‘find acupuncturist’ to my never ending to-do list. Please: just take care of me.

And I recognize it as I listen to a dear friend, now cancer-free, explaining how her husband took care of her during treatment. He made her smoothies, held her hand during chemo, loved her altered and unfamiliar body. But when she woke up breathless in the middle of the night with death stealing her attention, terror accompanying the reality that her infant and toddler might never know their mother, her husband couldn’t engage. He needed sleep for an upcoming high stakes presentation and a dose of denial to function in the morning. She needed a companion to night swim in the sea of life’s pain and uncertainty. At this stage of life, with a heightened awareness of the fleeting fragility of it all, don’t we all crave that companionship? Please: just be with me.

I know I’m not alone, the Surgeon General tells me so. So do brilliant women all around me who reveal the ability to sustain the heroic versions of themselves but a deeply depleted desire to do so. We’ve proven what we can handle, manage, and maneuver, and just want someone to unburden us given the accumulated weight of what we’re carrying. We’re craving being mothered in some essential form. ‘Where’s Alice now?’ we’re all wondering.

I’m coming to slowly realize, though, we’re all Alice. 

Us high-capacity women can, on the soccer sidelines and beyond, signal to each other: ‘I know you’ve got it, but let me help you.’ But, instead of literally carrying each other’s chairs and coolers, I think what we most need is to carry each other’s emotional burdens. We have to say, ‘How are you really…with an empty nest looming, the recent layoff, those biopsy results, the weight of it all, an anxious teen, or an ill father? 

And then we must just listen, resisting doing or fixing anything. The temptation to solve the unsolvable with recommendations - ‘Have you tried on-line grocery shopping to save time? Could your kids do more chores to decrease your load? What if you took a Friday off?’ - skim the surface of what we most crave and are insufficient solutions our capable selves have likely already considered. 

Instead, let’s allow each other to sink into all the feelings that accompany the magical magnitude of this midlife moment. We can channel Kelly Corrigan with her simple phrases: ‘Tell me more. What else? Go on,’ to explore and identify what it is we even need.

Tell me more about what’s hard, unrealized, or the loss you feel. 
What else is weighing you down, saddening, or enlivening you? 
Go on about how gorgeous, unfair, hysterical, or unexpected it all is. 

I know connecting about what’s beneath the surface won’t eradicate each other’s existential dread, eliminate the uncertainty intertwined with time’s passing, or miraculously clean the mess in our living rooms. But I believe knowing we’re not alone lessens the angst and stress; connection helps us clumsily navigate through terrain we’ve never traveled before and find our way to the other side (maybe getting the names of great acupuncturists along the way). 

So to my fellow capable and exhausted women: I see how hard you’re working, I know how much you’re holding, I get the fatigue is real. In the fine words of Alice, ‘I know you’ve got it and let me help you.’ Tell me more and I promise I’ll do the same.