Ep. 228: The Losses Midlife Women Carry That Never Get a Funeral

Before we get into it, I want to ask you something. And I want you to actually sit with it for a second.

How are you, really?

Not the "I'm fine" version. Not the answer you give when someone asks in the school pickup line or at the family dinner table. The real one.

Because here's what I notice about a lot of women in this season of life. Life looks… fine. Maybe even good. The house is standing. The kids are mostly okay. You're showing up. You're handling it.

But something feels heavier than it used to.

And you can't quite explain why.

You haven't lost anyone. Nothing catastrophic has happened. There's no obvious reason to feel what you feel. So you push it down. You tell yourself you're just tired. You tell yourself to be grateful. You make another cup of coffee and you keep going.

But it doesn't go away.

There is a kind of grief in midlife that doesn't look like grief at all. No funeral. No casseroles. No one sending flowers or asking how you're holding up. And yet… something is gone.

And I think it's time we talked about it.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

The Losses Midlife Women Carry That No One Talks About

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Transcript

So here's what I want you to know before we dive in. We're not fixing anything today. I'm not gonna hand you a five-step plan or tell you to journal your feelings and then do some deep breathing. That's not at all what today is about. Today, we're naming something because here's the thing that I have learned in coaching women through this season of life. If you don't have language for what you're experiencing, you'll keep thinking that something is wrong with you. You will keep blaming yourself and you will keep wondering why you can't just get it together.

And the answer isn't that something is wrong with you. The answer is that something has shifted. Something has happened. And nobody gave you a framework for it. And so that's what we're doing today. We're building this framework. So let me tell you a story about a moment that happened not too long ago in my house. My son wanted a job, which honestly is a good thing. It's a great thing, right? He's stepping into responsibility. He's showing initiative. And as a mom, I was proud of that.

but the job that he wanted required him to have a car. And the car situation, that's where things get complicated. I had concerns, real ones, not because I wanted to hold him back, but because I could see the things that he couldn't see yet. Insurance, safety, the schedules, the bigger picture. And so I said no, or at least not yet. And the look on his face, it wasn't disappointment, it was something closer to frustration, maybe even a little bit of contempt. Like he was looking at an obstacle instead of at a person.

like I was the problem. And he said something along the lines of, you're so controlling. And I stood there, this woman who had spent years building her life around this family, this kid, and this whole world that I created around their wellbeing. And I heard the word controlling, not protective, not caring, not thoughtful, but controlling. And if I'm honest with you, and I'm always gonna be honest with you, that didn't just feel frustrating, it felt personal because

There's a shift that happens somewhere in motherhood that nobody prepares you for. There's a moment when you go from being the one that they wanted to the one that they question. And that is a loss, a real one. And I sat with that interaction for a while afterward and I noticed what was happening inside of me, not the anger on the surface. I could handle that. It was the questions underneath the anger that were harder to sit with. Am I getting this wrong? Why don't they see what I'm doing for them? When did I become the bad guy?

Do I even matter to them like I used to? And this is the one that hit the hardest. I miss being needed in the way that I used to be because there was a time when being the mom meant something totally different. When they ran to me with the scraped knees and the bad dreams and when I was the one with all the answers, when my presence was enough, when I was honestly their whole world. And that version of needed, it's shifting now. And nobody told me that there would be grief in that.

And then not long after that conversation, he applied for that job and he didn't get it. And I had to hold two things at once. On the one hand, this is part of his growth. Rejection is part of life. He needs to learn this. And I know that and I fully believe that. But on the other hand, this was breaking my heart. Watching your kid get rejected when they're pushing you away in the same breath is a very particular kind of painful because you can't swoop in and fix it. You can't kiss it and make it better. You can...

barely even acknowledge it without it becoming a thing. And so you stand at a distance holding your breath, loving them fiercely and quietly and from a place that they can't see. And if I'm really going to be honest with you, there are days when I cannot wait for them to grow older and move out. When the tension and the pushback and the emotional labor of navigating teenagers who think that you're the enemy feels like too much. But then there are days when the thought of them leaving makes me want to stop time. That's the balance. It's the impossible

beautiful gut-wrenching balance of this season. I can't wait for them to move out sometimes and then I never want them to leave, both at the same time. And if you've ever felt that, if you've ever caught yourself feeling relief at the idea of empty nesting and then immediately feeling guilty about it, I want you to know that's not abnormal. That's midlife motherhood. And this is what I mean when I say that there are losses in midlife that never get acknowledged.

And this isn't just about parenting. Now stay with me here because I want to broaden this out. I want you to see the full picture. In our culture, we have very clear rituals for loss. Someone dies and we gather. We mourn. We bring food. Someone gets divorced and people rally around the person. Someone loses a job and there's acknowledgement that something happened. But what about the losses that don't have ceremonies or any pomp and circumstance?

Because here's the truth about midlife, nothing officially ended. You're still a mom, you're still married, you still have a life, and on paper, really, everything is intact. But something has changed. And because nothing officially ended, you never got permission to grieve it. Nobody sat with you, nobody brought the casserole, nobody asked how you're holding up. You just woke up one day carrying something heavy with no name for it and started wondering what was wrong with you. That's the trap, and I wanna help you out of it.

This is so important what I'm gonna say. So if you're kind of half paying attention, lean in close for this part. You didn't lose motherhood, but you did lose a version of it. You lost being needed in that specific, irreplaceable way. The way where your presence solved the problem. The way where you were trusted without question. Where your instincts were their instincts. When mom meant safe and safe meant you.

You lost feeling effective in a simpler way because parenting young kids while exhausting, it has a kind of clarity to it, right? Feed them, love them, protect them, teach them. The metrics are obvious, but parenting teenagers and young adults and adults? Well, those metrics disappear. You can do everything right and still get the look, still get the pushback, still feel like nothing you do is landing. And here's what that does to a woman who has spent her entire life being capable. It makes her

question herself. She starts to wonder if she's too much, too emotional, too involved, too controlling. That word again. She second-guesses decisions she would have made without hesitation five years ago. She starts shrinking in spaces where she used to lead confidently and she tells herself it's fine. She tells herself this is just what parenting teenagers looks like and she keeps moving. But underneath that movement, she's quietly grieving. You lost feeling close?

without resistance. There was a season when your presence was comfort, when you walked into the room and the energy kind of settled, when they wanted to be near you. And now you walk into the room and sometimes the energy shifts in the other way. Sometimes your presence is the thing that creates friction. And you have to find a way to not take that personally while also being completely human about the fact that it hurts. And none of that gets a funeral. But let me expand this even further because I said earlier, it's not just about parenting.

It's the version of the future that you thought you'd have by now. Here's something I see constantly in the women that I work with. There's this picture that they've been carrying. It's a mental image of what their life would look like at this age and stage. Maybe it was formed in their 20s. Maybe they weren't even conscious of it. It was just this quiet assumption running in the background that the marriage would feel a certain way. It was just that the career would have gone in a certain direction. The body would look or feel different. That's never gonna happen to me.

The house would be a certain kind of peaceful. Life would feel more stable, more settled. And then midlife arrives and it holds up a mirror. And the gap between the picture and the reality, that gap, what's standing in that gap is grief. Even if everything in your actual life is objectively fine, even if you know that you're blessed, even if you feel guilty for feeling it, the gap is still real. And pretending that it doesn't exist,

It just makes you feel worse about feeling it. Now, this is one of the things that I come back to again and again in working with women. Most women aren't treating the real problem. Doesn't matter what it is. They're just treating the symptoms. They're buying the planners and they're downloading the habit trackers and they're trying to optimize their morning routine and wondering why none of it sticks. It doesn't stick because the root issue isn't a productivity problem. It's a grief that hasn't been named.

You can't organize your way out of unprocessed loss. You can't schedule your way into peace if what you're actually carrying is grief. That's not a systems problem. That's a soul problem. And it requires something different than another checklist. And there's also the energy that you used to have that comes into play. When did that change? When did you start, when did you stop bouncing back after a hard week? When did rest?

Stop being restorative and start feeling like a debt that you can't ever fully repay. Nobody tells you that midlife hits your body differently, that hormones shift and sleep changes and recovery takes longer and the mental load that you used to carry without noticing now feels like it has physical weight. Nobody prepares you to grieve the version of yourself who could push through without consequence. And I wanna be careful here because I'm not talking about giving up. I'm not talking about accepting defeat or

lowering the bar. I'm talking about the grief that comes from your body asking you to operate differently than it used to and not knowing how to honor that without feeling like you're failing or falling behind. Because here's what I hear from women constantly. I used to be able to handle so much more. I don't know what happened to me. I feel like I'm failing at things that should be simple and they used to be simple. This is not failure. This is a woman who is grieving aversion of herself

that she hasn't been given permission to mourn. It's the version of you who felt lighter. There's this version of you, maybe from 10 years ago, maybe 20, who laughed more easily, who didn't carry the weight of so much, who woke up with some version of hope or energy or possibility, even if her life wasn't perfect. She wasn't more capable of you than you are now. She was just carrying less. She hadn't accumulated the weight of all of these years yet.

and the disappointments and the pivots and the seasons that asked more than you expected to give. And somewhere along the way you lost touch with her, not because you failed, but because you lived. A thousand little funerals that never got acknowledged. That is what I want you to hear today. The heaviness that you feel, it has a name, it's grief, real grief, real losses. They just didn't come with funerals. And here's what I want you to understand, and this really is...

The strategic piece, so lean in. The first step toward anything getting better is always a diagnosis. It's not action, it's not doing things, it's not strategy, it's not a new system, it's diagnosis. You have to correctly identify what is actually going on before you can do anything meaningful about it. And for most of the women that I work with, they've been treating the wrong problem for years.

They've been trying to fix productivity when the real issue is grief. They've been trying to fix their schedule when the real issue is identity. They've been trying to fix their habits when what they actually need is to process something that they've never been given a language for. And today you got that language. And that is not a small thing. And now I need you to say something, I need to say something important and I need you to hear this clearly. So again, if you're kind of half paying attention, give me all your focus for just a minute.

None of these things mean that something is wrong. It means that you have lived. You can only grieve what you've had. And the fact that you're grieving a version of motherhood means that you've experienced it deeply. You didn't coast through those years. You were present. You were plugged in. You cared for your kids. You invested in them. You showed up. You can only grieve the future you imagined if you were brave enough to imagine it in the first place.

You can only grieve the energy that you used to have if you actually used that energy for something that mattered. And so this grief, it's not a sign of weakness or dysfunction, it's the evidence of a life fully engaged. And here's the reframe I wanna offer you. What if the heaviness that you've been carrying isn't a sign that you're falling apart, but a sign that you're growing? What if feeling the weight of these invisible losses is actually the beginning of something?

Because here's what I know, you can't move forward from something that you haven't named. You can't process what you're not willing to see. And you can't grieve what you keep pretending isn't gone. The women who stay stuck in this season, the ones who keep white knuckling through the week, week after week after week, numb and exhausted and quietly falling apart, they're stuck because they never gave themselves permission to name what they're actually caring. They're busy.

pathologizing themselves and trying to process and label themselves with a bunch of labels rather than processing their grief. They keep asking what's wrong with me when the real question is what am I caring that I haven't acknowledged yet? This is the difference between suffering and processing and today we're moving towards processing. There's actually something really meaningful happening during this season. You are being asked to grow into a version of yourself

that is less about what you do for everyone else and more about who you actually are. That doesn't have to be loss. This can be depth. So let me bring it back to my son for a minute. When I sat with that interaction, when I let myself feel the sting of it, instead of just powering through, something shifted in me. I thought, he can't see it right now. He doesn't have the perspective yet to understand what I am building for him. He doesn't know what I know.

He hasn't lived what I've lived. He's 17 or 19 or 22 or whatever age your kid is at the moment when you're experiencing something similar. And your kid is doing exactly what kids at that age do. He's pushing against the edges. But one day he will. One day he will see it. He will get it. I have to believe that and so do you. It's not wishful thinking. But it's grounded. This is actually a grounded truth about how growth works.

the perspective that I carry right now, the one that comes from being 50 something and having lived through things that he hasn't faced yet, well, he doesn't have access to that yet, but he will. And in the meantime, my job isn't to be validated by him. My job isn't to need him to see my worth in order to keep showing up. My job is to lead anyway. My job is to lead even if he can't see it.

And I want to sit with that for a minute because I think it's one of the most important reframes for women and moms in this season. We have spent years, decades, some of us, leading from a place of feedback. Our kids needed us and we showed up. Our husbands or partners expressed appreciation and we felt valued. Our friends called and we felt connected. Our work produced results and we felt effective. The feedback loops were relatively intact.

But midlife disrupts that feedback loop. The kids push back instead of leaning in. The marriage settles into a kind of routine that doesn't always feel like appreciation. The body doesn't respond the way it used to. The work feels less certain and suddenly you're leading, you're showing up, you're doing the work, you're carrying the weight without the external confirmation that it's working. And for a woman who has been wired to measure her worth by her output and the response of the people around her,

This is now disorienting. This is destabilizing. And that is exactly where a lot of women in midlife get stuck. Because here's what is happening. When the external feedback disappears, we either collapse inward or we over function outward. We either shrink, we stop taking up space, stop trusting our instincts, start deferring to everyone else's opinions because we've lost confidence in our own, or we push harder, do more.

try to manufacture the response we're not getting organically. Neither one of these are actually leadership. Real leadership leading yourself means making the decision and moving, even when the confirmation doesn't come. It means trusting your compass when the GPS keeps rerouting. It means staying steady in the role, even when the role isn't giving you the same return that it used to. And I want to say something directly now, because I think some of you need to hear this today.

You are not getting this wrong. The fact that your teenager pushes back doesn't mean that your parenting is failing. The fact that your marriage feels different than it used to doesn't mean that it's broken. The fact that you feel lost doesn't mean that you are lost. It means you are in a transition, a real one, a significant one. And transitions feel like loss before they feel like growth. That's not a character flaw, that's just the nature of change.

And here's another thing I want you to hold on to, and this comes straight from the framework that I use with my clients. Most people are treating symptoms, not solving the real problem. The woman who feels like she can't get it together isn't a discipline problem. She's carrying unprocessed grief and calling it laziness. The woman who can't stick to any plan or routine, it isn't a willpower problem. She's running on empty from years of giving and giving without replenishing.

and she's calling it failure. The woman who feels invisible in her own life isn't having a relevance problem. She's lost touch with her own identity and she's calling it aging. When you can diagnose correctly, you can treat correctly. And the correct diagnosis for so many of the women that I work with, it starts here with naming what's actually been lost, with giving yourself the language, with stopping the spiral of what's wrong with me.

and replacing it with a far more accurate question that is, what have I been carrying that I haven't acknowledged? That shift from self-blame to self-awareness is where everything starts to change. Now let me also say this because I think it needs to be said. Acknowledging this grief does not mean you're giving up. It doesn't mean you're wallowing. It doesn't mean you're weak or self-indulgent or too much. It means that you're honest.

It's the beginning. Honesty is the beginning of every real change that I've ever seen in my life and in the lives of the women that I work with. You cannot build a life that fits the woman you are becoming if you're pretending you're still the same woman that you were 10 years ago. You cannot lead yourself forward if you won't look clearly at where you actually are. Here's the truth. You're not failing. You're not broken and you're not behind. You are a woman in the middle of something real.

and you are finally starting to name it. This is not weakness, this is the beginning of everything. Naming it is the first act that you can take of leadership. Now, before we end today, I want you to take away three things clearly. Number one is to name what you're grieving. Not in a sweeping, dramatic sort of way, just honestly. Maybe it's a version of motherhood that's shifting. Maybe it's a version of yourself.

The one with more energy or more hope or more certainty. Maybe it's a season that's closing whether you're ready for it or not. Whatever it is, give it a name, say it out loud, write it down if that helps. What is it? Just stop pretending that it isn't there. Number two, stop minimizing it. Just because nothing officially ended doesn't mean that nothing was lost. The invisible losses are still losses. You're not being dramatic. You're not...

overreacting. You are not weak for feeling this. Stop telling yourself to be grateful and get over it. Gratitude and grief can coexist and one doesn't cancel out the other. The third thing is that awareness comes before action. You don't need to fix this today. You don't need a plan. You need to come out of this conversation today with clarity, not 10 steps in a new morning routine.

Because when you have clarity, when you can see things clearly, it doesn't come from more thinking. It doesn't come from more podcasts or more productivity. It comes from being honest about what's actually going on. That's where it starts. And so if this conversation hit something in you, if it created something that makes you say, yes, I want you to know,

that this is not a sign that you're broken. It's a sign that you're finally being seen. Because that's what I'm here to do. That's what these conversations are that I have. It's where we tell the truth about what midlife actually feels like. Not the highlight real version. Not the I've got it all figured out version. But the real one. The one where you love your life but you're also exhausted by it. The one where you love your kids and you also don't always like them. The one where you know something needs to change but you're not sure yet.

You've been carrying something that you've never been given language for and today you got some of that. Now know that if you want to go deeper, I created a free guide called This is Why Midlife Feels So Heavy. It walks you through why this season feels different even when everything looks fine, the hidden layers of responsibility and expectation, an identity that have been building over time, and a simple but powerful shift that can start to make things feel more manageable. It's linked in the notes below.

Know that it's not about changing your entire life or dropping responsibilities that you can't drop. It's about finally understanding what's really going on so that you can start carrying your life in a way that actually supports you. Again, you can find the link below. Grab it. It's short, it's real, and it might be exactly what can start to support you. And know that if this conversation resonated with you, do me a favor, share it with the woman in your life who needs to hear it. You probably already thought of someone

while you were listening. That thought is a nudge. Follow it. Now know that next week we're going deeper in this same conversation. I'll be back with more truth and more real strategizing and more of the conversations that midlife women actually need to have. And so we'll be back then.