Ep. 251: The conversations midlife besties are having behind closed doors

I want to start today with a question.

When was the last time someone asked you how you were doing…and you actually told them the truth?

Not the "I'm good, just busy" version. Not the polished, capable, holding-it-together version. The real answer. The one you maybe said out loud in your car on the way home, or typed into a voice memo at 11pm, or almost said before you caught yourself and changed the subject.

Because here's what I know about midlife women: we are incredibly good at pretending we are fine.

We have perfected it. We can be in the middle of the hardest season of our lives and walk into a room and smile and say, "Things are good, how are you?" and mean it just enough that no one asks a follow-up question.

We are the queens of gaslighting when it comes to hiding what’s really going on underneath the lump in our throat.

But some of the realest conversations midlife women have never happen in public.

They happen in parked cars. Over coffee after everyone else leaves. In voice memos we send to our one safe person and we preface it by saying…listen to this when no one else is around. 

In texts that start with, "Can I say something honest?" On late-night walks where the dark makes honesty feel easier.

That's where the mask comes off.

That's where women say the things they've been carrying all week…or all year.

This conversation is not about gossip. It's not about complaining. It's about honesty. It's about naming what so many women are quietly living inside: the exhaustion, the loneliness, the identity confusion, the grief they can't quite explain and giving it language so it feels less like a personal failure and more like a shared human experience.

Because here's what I've come to believe after years of coaching women:

Women, especially midlife women, are carrying conversations inside themselves that rarely get said out loud.

And the cost of keeping them inside is real.

I remember a moment…sitting across from a friend over coffee, the kind of friend I've known long enough that we've stopped performing for each other and she said something I'll never forget. She said, "Can I just say something without you trying to fix it?" 

And I said yes. 

And what came out was this quiet, honest admission that she was lonely. Not friendless. Not in a crisis. Just lonely in a way she couldn't fully explain. Lonely inside her marriage. Lonely in her friendships. Lonely inside a life she had worked very hard to build.

And I remember thinking: how many of us are walking around with that same feeling, dressed up in productivity and capability, hoping no one looks too closely?

A lot. The answer is a lot.

So today we're pulling back the curtain. We're going into the conversations. The real ones.

Let's get into it.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

https://www.jenniferroskamp.com/1-this-is-why-midlife-feels-so-much-harder-than-you-expected

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Transcript

Well, okay. So there's this question and answer that we women are very good at having rehearsed perfectly. The question is something like, How are you doing? And the answer is, I'm fine. I'm just so busy, but I'm fine. And the conversations that we're really having, they're not really about gossiping. It's not about

complaining either. It's just that we're having real honest conversations behind closed doors. Because we women are starting to name what we are quietly living inside. The exhaustion, the loneliness, the identity confusion, the grief that they can't quite explain. And giving it a language so that it feels like a personal failure and more like a shared human experience instead.

Because here's what I've come to believe after years of working with and coaching women. Women, especially midlife and older women, are carrying conversations inside themselves that they rarely get to to say out loud. And the cost of keeping them inside, it's real. I remember a moment sitting across from a friend over coffee, the kind of friend that I've known long enough that we've stopped performing for each other. And she said something that I'll never forget. She said,

Can I just say something without you trying to fix it? And I said yes. And what came out was this quiet, honest admission that she was lonely, not friendless, not in a crisis, just lonely in a way that she couldn't fully explain. Lonely inside her marriage, lonely in her friendships, lonely inside a life that she'd worked so hard to build. And I remember thinking, how many of us are walking around with that same kind of feeling?

Dressed up in productivity and capability, hoping no one looks too closely. A lot. I bet the answer is a lot of women. And so today we're pulling back the curtain. We're going into the conversations, the real authentic ones. And so let's get into it. So we're gonna start, we're gonna start with something that I think is one of the most common conversations that are happening behind closed doors.

And it's one of the least talked about publicly because it feels disloyal to say out loud. The relationship didn't necessarily fall apart, but it changed. Women are living inside marriages that have changed. And many women are quietly living inside a version of their marriage that they don't have language for because it's not dramatic enough to be a crisis, but it's painful enough to matter. And it sounds like.

I love him, but I'm just irritated constantly. We're fine. We're just more like roommates than anything else. Or I feel emotionally alone even when he's right there. Women are also saying something like, I am so tired of carrying the mental load of this family all by myself. These aren't sentences that women say at dinner parties. They're not for the Instagram caption either, but they are said.

These conversations are said quietly and carefully to the one or two people who are safe enough to hear them. And what I want to say clearly here is this is not husband bashing that's happening. This is not about blame. This is about women trying to process change, honestly, because midlife brings real shifts in relationships. The season changes, the kids need less hands-on parenting.

The routines that used to hold everyone together, they start to feel hollow. And two people who have been running the same race for 20 years or more suddenly look up and realize they don't know who the other person is anymore, or sometimes who they are themselves. Emotional distance is real and it can happen slowly, quietly, without any single dramatic moment that you can even point to. Resentment from uneven distribution of labor, that's real too.

The invisible work of managing a family, the appointments, the emotional needs, the mental load, falls disproportionately on women, often for years, and it accumulates in ways that are hard to articulate without sounding ungrateful for a life that looks good on paper. Communication fatigue? That's a real thing too. At some point, women stop trying to have the conversation because they've had it so many times and nothing changes. And it's exhausting to keep hoping.

And here's the line I really want you to hear. A lot of women don't need perfection in their marriage. That's not what they're waiting for, but they need partnership. Not a fairy tale, not a romantic comedy, just a partner who sees the load and picks some of it up. Just someone who asks how you're doing and waits for the real answer. That's not too much to want. And it's not something to be ashamed of wanting.

If this is the conversation that you've been having in a parked car with your bestie, I want you to know you're not alone, not even a little bit. So the next conversation that women are having centers around body changes and aging. And this one is a little bit hard to hear, and I want to care handle this carefully because I think it gets dismissed too quickly, either minimized as vanity or overwhelmed with advice before the grief even gets room to breathe.

Midlife can feel like betrayal inside your own body. Women are quietly talking about fatigue that sleep doesn't fix. Brain fog that makes you feel like you're thinking through cotton. Weight changes that don't respond the way that they used to. Hormonal shifts that affect mood and sleep and anxiety and your ability to feel like yourself. Menopause symptoms that nobody prepared you for, hot flashes, insomnia.

Emotional volatility, these arrive uninvited and they change the landscape of your daily life. And underneath all of it, there's something harder to name. Many women feel like strangers in bodies that they used to trust. And I want to say this plainly: there is a grief associated with this. Not vanity, not superficiality, but there's grief, the grief of losing predictability.

The grief of a body that used to respond in familiar ways and now doesn't. The grief of looking in the mirror and doing a double take, not because you're falling apart, but because you look like someone who is living in time. And that is disorienting when you feel when you still feel like you're 28 on the inside most of the days. Women need places where they can say, you know what, this is harder than I expected, without someone immediately minimizing it. At least you're healthy.

Or that's just part of aging. Or have you tried drinking more water? Yes. Yes, we've tried drinking more water. That's not the point. The point is that the body is changing and it's happening whether you are emotionally ready or not. And for many women, especially women who have spent decades managing and caring for everyone around them, the body is one of the last places that they've had any sense of control or famili familiar airity.

I have such a hard time with that word, familiarity. And when that shifts, it lands hard. You're not broken. There's nothing wrong with your body, but you are navigating something real. And if you've been minimizing the difficulty of this season because it feels too small to complain about, I want to gently push back on that. It's not too small. Your experience in your own body matters. The changes are real.

And giving yourself permission to say, you know what, this is hard. It doesn't signal weakness. It's actual, actually honesty. The third thing that women are talking about is kind of centering around friendship shifts and friendship grief. Now, this might be the one that catches people off guard because we talk a lot about marriage struggles and parenting challenges, but friendship grief in midlife, it's one of the most quietly painful things that women experience. And it almost

Never gets a name for what it is. Midlife friendship changes, they are real and they can be deeply painful. The common conversations behind closed doors sound like this: why am I always the one reaching out? I think we've just outgrown each other and I don't know what to do with that. Or I miss easy friendships, the ones where you didn't have to explain yourself. Or why does friendship feel so much harder now? And here's what happens: life shifts.

People move, seasons change, the friendships that were built on proximity, the neighbor that you saw every day, the work friend that you grabbed lunch with, the moms that you bonded with at the school pickup line, those friendships don't survive the logistics, sometimes. And when the shared context disappears, you realize something that was the whole foundation. And that is the thing you had in common. And now that that's gone, there's nothing left.

And then there's this more painful version. The friendships that are still technically there, but emotionally, you've both grown in different directions. You show up to coffee and you realize you don't have much to say to each other anymore. Or worse, you realize the friendship has become one-sided. You're always initiating, you're always accommodating, you're always making it work. And one day you just stop. There's no drama, there's no fight. You just quietly stop trying because you're too tired to keep reaching for something.

That isn't reaching back. Sometimes midlife doesn't just reveal who you are, it reveals who your relationships really are. And there's also something that I want to name that doesn't get talked about enough: grieving a friendship while the person is still alive. It doesn't have a name the way that grief does. There's no funeral, there's no casseroles from neighbors, there's no card that says, I'm sorry for your loss.

But the loss is real, and the grief of it, the missing someone who is still technically there, just no longer someone that you're truly close to. It's it's one of the loneliest feelings that I think midlife women are experiencing. Women are carrying friendships the same way that they carry households, through invisible labor and through consistent emotional effort that goes unnoticed and unreciprocated. And what most women are craving, what they say quietly in those parked car conversations.

Is reciprocity, not perfection, not a best friend who's available 24-7, just someone who reaches back. If you're in a season where friendship feels thin, I want you to hear this. You're not too much, and you're not asking for too much. And the longing for real, honest, reciprocal friendship is not dramatic. It is deeply and completely human. So the fourth conversation that women are talking about.

Kind of centers around motherhood and family stress and emotional whiplash. So if you're a midlife woman, this piece is especially for you. And I want to say up front, this is a complicated one because motherhood in midlife is emotionally disorienting in ways that are hard to prepare for. The needs don't disappear, they just change shape. Teenagers need you differently than toddlers did.

But the emotional labor can actually be heavier because now the stakes are higher and your ability to fix things is lower. You can't kiss the hurt away. You can't solve the problem. You can only show up and hope that they let you in. And adult children need you in a different way again. And for many women, that transition from being the central figure in your children's lives to being someone they love but don't necessarily need every day, that has its own kind of loss with it.

And then there are aging parents, the role reversal, the care, the grief of watching someone who was once your anchor become someone who needs to be anchored. Midlife mothers are often grieving versions of motherhood while they are still actively mothering. Now let me say that again because I think it lands a little bit differently the second time.

Midlife mothers are often grieving versions of motherhood while they are still actively mothering. They are grieving who their children used to be, missing a season that is gone, while simultaneously showing up for the season that's here. That is emotional whiplash. And most women are doing it without acknowledging it as grief at all. Because there's no loss to point to. Everybody is alive. Everyone is okay. And yet something has changed, and there's this.

constant ache. The conversations happening behind closed doors, they sound something like this. I can't fix this for them anymore. And I don't know what to do with that. Or I miss my kids the way that they used to need me. And I feel guilty even saying that. Also, I feel guilty for wanting more space from my own family. Who does that make me? Maybe it sounds like this. I'm exhausted from the worry, just the constant

Low grade, never going away worry. And that last one, let's focus on that one for a minute because the worry doesn't go away when kids get older. It just changes. You stop worrying about whether they're eating enough and you start worrying about whether they're making good decisions, whether they're okay emotionally, whether you said the right thing or the wrong thing in that conversation last Tuesday. And the worry, unlike when they were small, is much harder to act on. You can't

Pick them up. You can't fix it. You can only pray and wait to love them in a way that they're able to receive. And the worry, the worry just never goes away. But here's what I want you to know. Wanting space does not make you a bad mother. And grieving a season does not mean that you're ungrateful for the one that you're in.

Feeling emotionally maxed out by the demands of midlife motherhood does not mean that you love your kids any less. It means you are human. And you deserve space to say that out loud to someone safe. The fifth conversation that women are having it deals with identity and invisibility and emotional overload. Now, underneath all of these conversations that we've named thus far, right, we've talked about the marriage frustrations.

The body grief, the friendship changes, the motherhood disorientation. There is usually this one deeper question that is quietly running in the background. Who am I now? It sounds simple, but it is not simple at all. Women in midlife are often confronting an identity that was built around all of the different roles that you had: wife, mother, daughter, employee, volunteer, caregiver.

Taxi mom, and those roles are real and they are meaningful. But when the roles shift, when the kids leave, when the body changes, when the friendships change, when the marriage feels distant, suddenly the scaffolding that held the identity together, it begins to feel unstable. And women are left quietly asking, if I took away all the things I do for everyone else, what is left?

The conversations behind closed doors sound like this. I don't recognize myself anymore. Or I've spent so long taking care of everyone else that I don't genuinely know what I like, what I want, who I even am outside of all of this. Or I feel invisible, like I could disappear and the machine would just keep running. Or

I feel like I'm standing in the middle of a life that I built while quietly wondering where I went inside of it. So that last one, that is the experience of so many midlife women. It's not that their life is bad, it's not that they are ungrateful, but that but that somewhere along the way, in the accumulating years of showing up for everyone else, they quietly stop showing up for themselves.

And now they look around and their life is full. It's full of people and responsibilities and obligations and love. And somehow it still feels like something is missing. And that something is them. Invisibility in midlife is real. And it's not just about being seen by others, though that is a part of it. It's about not being seen by yourself, not knowing your own preferences, not recognizing your own voice, not being able to answer the question, what do you need? Because you've been so focused on what everyone else needs.

For so long that your answer just isn't there. The emotional load that women are carrying is staggering. There's too many roles, there's too much responsibility, there's too little time to exhale. And what sits underneath so many of these behind closed doors conversations is not drama and it's not weakness and it's not complaint. It is just a woman who is maxed out saying, Finally,

Quietly to someone she trusts. I cannot keep doing this at this level without something giving way. Not lazy, not dramatic, just maxed out. And there is a difference. And so, why do these conversations that we women are having whispering to our friends, maybe one close trusted friend, why do they matter? And I want to make this super clear.

These conversations that we're having, they're not pointless venting. And they're not weakness either. They're not even women being dramatic or unable to handle their lives. They are emotional processing. And emotional processing is how human beings survive hard things. When a woman finally sits down with a safe friend and says the thing that she's been carrying, when she says something like, I feel alone in my marriage, or I don't even recognize myself, or

I'm scared about what's happening with my body. Something shifts. Not because the problem is solved, not because the friend has the perfect answer, but because the thing that was only living in her head is now out in the air between two people. And suddenly it feels a little bit less heavy. Sometimes the healings that healing that we need, it doesn't come in advice. It's just finally hearing me too. Two words. That's it. Me too.

And the shift and the shame can start to lift and the isolation can start to break. The woman who thought she was the only one suddenly realizes she's not the only one. She never was. And that knowledge alone changes something powerful in women. Women are not being dramatic behind closed door doors. They're trying to make sense. They're trying to make sense of change. They're trying to survive a season that nobody adequately prepared them for.

They are trying to hold on to who they are while everything around them shifts. And when they finally find a safe place to say that out loud, when they find a friend who doesn't rush them or fix them or minimize what they're saying, that is not small. That is one of the most powerful things that can happen to a person. This is why these conversations matter. It's not because venting solves problems, but because being witnessed, honestly, being truly seen by another person without performance.

Without polish is one of the deepest human needs there is. And midlife women deserve that. Not just in stolen moments in parked cars, but as regular, sustained, real parts of their lives. So let's talk about what this actually looks like because I think some women are waiting for a safe friend to appear when what they really need is to also become one. A safe friend is not the loudest friend. She's not the one with all the answers.

She's not the one who swoops in with a solution or immediately redirects the conversation to her own experience. A safe friend is one who makes honesty feel safe. And here's what that looks like in practice. She listens without fixing. When you say something hard, she doesn't immediately hand you a solution. She sits with you in it first. She lets you feel what you're feeling before she tries out how to help you move past it.

She also doesn't rush vulnerability. She doesn't check her phone while you're busy being real. She doesn't let the conversation drift to something lighter the second things get heavy. She just stays. She stays there with you. And she doesn't compare pain. She doesn't say, Well, at least you have, fill in the blank. Or I know someone who has it so much worse. So so much worse. She understands that you're hard.

Is your hard and it doesn't need to earn its place by being worse than someone else's. Also, she doesn't weaponize what you share. She keeps it. She doesn't bring it up later in a way that makes you regret being honest. She holds what you gave her with care. And finally, she allows messy emotions. She doesn't need you or her to have it all figured out before you talk.

She doesn't need you to arrive with a resolution or a plan. She's okay with you showing up mid-spiral. And safe friendship, it feels like exhaling. That's the best way that I can describe it. When you're with a safe person, your shoulders come down, your voice changes. The sentence that you've been editing in your head all week, it finally comes out the way you actually meant it. And here's the really big piece I want to leave you with.

Many women are waiting to receive that kind of friendship. But the question worth sitting with is this: Are you offering it too? Are you the friend who makes honesty feel safe? Are you the one who stays when things get heavy? Are you creating the kind of relationship where the people you love feel like they can tell you the truth? Because the friendships that you're craving, the one, the one where you can say the real thing.

And be received with grace, that friendship, it goes both ways. And it starts with someone being willing to go first. Maybe today, that someone could be you. Because I think that there's a lot of you who have been nodding around with this, nodding along with this conversation. You've been recognizing yourself, maybe even feeling a little bit seen or maybe a little bit emotional in a way that you weren't really expecting when you hit play. I want to give you a few questions to sit with, not to answer quickly.

Not to problem solve, just to let them breathe. Number one, who do I feel emotionally safe enough to tell the truth to? And if the answer is nobody, or if you're not sure, that's important information. Not a reason for shame, just something worth paying attention to. The next question: what am I still saying in a polished instead of a real way? Where in your life?

Are you giving people the edited version, the capable version, the I'm good version? And what would it feel like to let someone see the real version? Another question. What conversation have I been needing but avoiding? Maybe it's with a friend. Maybe it's with your spouse. Maybe it's with yourself. The next question Where in my life do I need more honesty instead of pretending? Just sit with that one.

And then I want to give you one challenge before this week is over. Reach out to one person. Not a perfect reach out, not a rehearsed one, just an honest one. A text that says, Can I say something real? Maybe a voice memo that doesn't have a tidy ending. A coffee invite with someone that you've been meaning to be honest with. One honest conversation can open a door that you didn't realize had been closed.

So let's circle back to where we started. Some of the most important conversations in midlife happen behind closed doors, in parked cars, over cooling cups of coffee, in voice memos, in the quiet, honest dark. And here's what I want you to hear before we end this conversation today. Those conversations matter because you matter, because your exhaustion matters.

And your grief matters and your confusion about who you are right now and what you want and where you went inside your own life. All of those things, they matter. Midlife women do not need more polished small talk. They need places where the truth is welcome. And they need to stop carrying the full weight of their experience in silence because they're afraid of being too much or being dramatic or not having it together enough.

Jennifer Roskamp (25:52.985)
So here are four things that I want to make sure that you take away from our conversation today. Number one, the behind closed doors conversations are not dramatic. They're actually necessary. Emotional processing is how we survive hard seasons, the loneliness, the identity confusion, the relationship shifts. Naming them out loud is not weakness. It's how the weight lifts. Takeaway number two: midlife women are grieving things that don't have names yet.

Friendship changes, body changes, shifting roles in motherhood, identity loss. These are real losses, even when nothing catastrophic has happened. Give yourself permission to call them what they are. Takeaway number three, what you're craving most is probably reciprocity, not perfection. And this is true in your marriage, in your friendships, in your family. Most women don't need everything to be fixed. They just need to be seen.

To feel the labor shared, to feel like someone is reaching back. And the fourth takeaway: become the safe friend you're looking for, the friendship where you can exhale and tell the truth. It goes both ways. Start by being that for someone else and watch what opens up in return. So this week, send that text. Make the call. Sit in a parked car with someone you trust. Tell the truth.

To someone safe, not because it's gonna fix everything, but because you deserve to be witnessed and seen honestly, fully, without pretending or performing. The door closes, the masks come off, and the truth finally gets room to breathe. This is not anything wrong. This is not your weakness showing. This is actually one of the bravest things that a woman can do. Find your person. Have the conversation.

It doesn't need to just live in you. Let someone sit in it with you. Make sure that you grab the midlife guide down below. It will really help you start to figure out why midlife feels so heavy. So make sure you follow that down in the show notes to grab that. It will make things so much easier as you try to sort this all out. Friend, until we talk again, lead yourself well.