Dear Woman Who Has Been Last on Her Own List

This letter is for the woman who has been running on empty for longer than she can remember. It is time to put yourself back on your own list.

This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase I will earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Today is my grandmother’s birthday. She’s been gone for a long time but I think of her every time I step foot in my kitchen and bake. Happy heavenly birthday grandma, I love you and miss you.

She was one of fourteen children. Her twin sister became a Notre Dame nun and gave her life to God. My grandmother married and gave her life to her family — ten children, every meal made from scratch, bread baked every week, cinnamon rolls and prune rolls and a walnut sweet roll I have been trying to recreate my entire adult life. She made everything from nothing and she did it every single day without complaint and without anyone thinking to ask if she needed anything. I often wonder how she did it. Let’s face it, she had to be tired. I am just thinking about it.

Later, after most of the children had left home, she co-owned a men’s clothing store. I loved that old world shop and would try on the velvet fedoras and scarves whenever we visited. This was no ordinary shop — imagine beautiful wood cabinets with glass fronts, brass rails and wood floors with tin ceilings. My grandmother was the proprietor but also the tailor and seamstress. She didn’t make bespoke suits but when you left your pants were the correct length with just the right break above your shoe and your jacket fit like a glove. After she was done working every day she did the shopping and then went home, tidied the house and cooked dinner for my grandfather.

When my mother started her leather manufacturing business, my grandmother came out of retirement to help. Because that is what she did. She would give you her last dime and the coat off her back — and she did, more than once — but the most important thing she gave me was her faith. She never spoke about it very much. She simply lived it. Every single day it guided everything she did and everyone could see it even if she never said a word.

My mother is the same. When we were small my father was often away — an engineer in the Coast Guard does not make much and he was gone more than he was home — and my mother made every day special anyway. After school our snacks appeared in decorative muffin cups. When she baked my grandmother’s recipes she put her own spin on them — that is how we got Sputnik donuts, which are exactly what they sound like and are one of the great joys of my childhood. She took us on picnics and to the beach which was right in our backyard on the shores of Lake Michigan. She kept us in our all girls school after my parents divorced, scrimping and saving to make it work. And on her way to work in the mornings she would leave little notes and small treats in my car for me to find after school. I found them every time. Every single time. And every time my heart swelled with that feeling you only get from someone who loves you so completely they are thinking of you even when you are not in the room.

My mother has always put herself last. She still does, just like her mother and probably her mother before her. Right now she is a caretaker to my stepfather and she does it the way she does everything — without reservation, without making it about herself. I watch her and I think: where did she learn this? And then I think of my grandmother and I know.

I am lucky beyond measure. Seven aunts on my mother’s side, each of them a presence in my life. When we were young the two youngest babysat us, took us to the movies and the ballet, took us shopping for our Easter clothes every year. One year I came home with a black hat with white daisies and a red purse. My grandmother and mother were not pleased by this particular sartorial choice — I can tell you that. But they let me be me. I strode into church that Easter in red clogs, a red bag and a black hat with white daisies and I thought I looked absolutely magnificent. I cannot remember the dress. I remember exactly how I felt. When we were teenagers they taught us to be independent, they took us camping, and came as a chaperone on our first trip to Europe. The older aunts made our favorite cakes for birthdays, shared books, recipes and memories, had us for sleepovers and shopping trips.

And Then There Was Betty

When I married Bill I gained a mother-in-law who could have done what some mother-in-laws do — held me at a distance, assessed me slowly, made me earn my place. Betty did none of that. From the moment I came into her family she made me feel like a daughter.

We had our moments, she and I. There was the yellow lamp she wanted to give me. There were the faux flowers she insisted every room needed. We did not always see eye to eye on matters of decor and I will leave it at that. But those things were small and we both knew it. What was not small was everything else — her kindness, her warmth, her quiet guidance, the way she folded not just me but my entire family into hers as though we had always belonged there. When you marry into a family like that you understand what a gift it is. Not everyone gets it.

Betty came to who she was the hard way. At 41 she found herself starting over — her husband had left when Bill was thirteen, his sister sixteen and was not heard from again until he was dying fifteen years later. She was left with a mountain of debts, two children, a home she was determined to keep and a life she was determined to rebuild with dignity. So she worked three jobs. She paid off every debt that was not hers to carry. She kept the family together. She did all of it without bitterness, without complaint, without making her children feel the weight of what she was carrying.

And then she built something. She took a small agriculture marketing business and turned it into a multi-million dollar company. She became a pillar of her community. She was a friend to everyone — the kind of person that other people orbit because being near her made them feel steadier. She retired at 75 and kept working anyway because that was who she was. She served and gave and showed up for the people she loved until she passed last year at the age of 97.

Ninety-seven years. Every one of them lived with purpose and love and an absolute refusal to be diminished by anything life sent her way.

I think about her often and talk to her on my afternoon walks. I think about what it means to face the hardest thing alone and come through it not broken but stronger. Not bitter but generous. Not closed but more open than before. That is not a small thing. That is the whole thing.

These women — my grandmother, my mother, Betty, my seven aunts, my daughter-in-law, step-daughter, sister-in law, my three best friends who have walked every season of my life beside me — have shaped everything I am and everything I do. They are the reason I understand what it means to give everything you have to the people you love.

They are also the reason I understand what it costs.

This post is for them. And for you.

Because every woman I have just described to you was last on her own list for most of her life. And I suspect you are too.

Dear friend,

I have been thinking about you.

Not you in particular — though if you are reading this I suspect you know exactly who you are. I mean the woman who has been running on empty for longer than she can remember. The one who gets up before everyone else and goes to bed after everyone else and somewhere in the middle of all of that forgets to ask herself how she is doing.

I mean the woman who has been last on her own list for years. Maybe decades.

This letter is for her. For you.

I Know What Your Days Look Like

They start before you are ready. There is always something — someone — that needs attending to before you have had a chance to properly wake up. You make the coffee or the tea or the hot chocolate and you drink it standing at the counter, already thinking about the first thing on the list, already halfway into the day before the day has properly begun. The cup goes cold. You drink it anyway.

You are good at this. You have always been good at this. Anticipating what is needed, showing up before you are asked, making things run smoothly for everyone around you. It is not a small thing — it is a kind of quiet heroism that the world does not celebrate nearly enough and almost never notices at all.

But I wonder when you last sat down with your own cup of something warm and did absolutely nothing for fifteen minutes. Not scrolling. Not planning. Not running through the list in your head. Just sitting. Just being. Just you, in the quiet, with nothing asked of you.

I wonder when you last did something purely because it made you happy.

What Got Lost Along the Way

Here is what happens when we spend years being everything to everyone. We get very good at it. So good, in fact, that we start to lose track of the difference between what we want and what everyone else needs. The two things blur together until we are not sure where one ends and the other begins.

I have talked to so many women over the years — on this blog, before that on Between Sisters Between Friends, before that in real life over cups of tea and long phone calls — and the story is remarkably consistent. At some point, without quite meaning to, we made ourselves small. We stopped buying the flowers because it felt indulgent. We stopped reading the books because there was never enough time. We stopped wearing the things we loved because it seemed like too much effort for just an ordinary day. We saved the good china for company and ate every other night off the everyday plates, and somewhere along the way the ordinary days — which are most of the days, which are in fact almost all of the days — stopped feeling special.

And then midlife arrives. Life shifts. And one day you look up from the list and think — wait. When did I stop being a person and become a function? Where did I go? Am I still in here?

You Are Still In There

She is. I promise you she is.

The woman you were before the roles and the responsibilities and the years of becoming what everyone needed you to be. The one with opinions and preferences and small pleasures she loved and a particular way of moving through the world that was entirely her own. She did not disappear. She went very quiet. She has been waiting, patiently and without complaint, for you to remember her.

Midlife is not the end of something. It is the invitation — perhaps the most important one you will ever receive — to come back to yourself. Not to who you were at 25. Not to some idealized version. To the truest, most essential version of who you have always been underneath all of it.

I wrote about this in Who Am I Now? How Midlife Didn’t Change Me — It Reminded Me and the response from so many of you was the same: yes. That is exactly it. She is still there.

She is. And she has been waiting long enough.

What I Want You to Do Today

Not tomorrow. Not when things calm down. Not after the next thing on the list gets handled.

Today.

I want you to do one small thing purely for yourself. It does not need to be significant. It does not need to be Instagram-worthy or justifiable or make sense to anyone else. It only needs to be yours.

Maybe it is pulling out the beautiful cup you keep saving for special occasions — because today is a special occasion. Every ordinary day is a special occasion if you decide to treat it like one. Maybe it is buying yourself the flowers at the market — the tulips you walk past every week and talk yourself out of. Maybe it is sitting down with your gratitude journal for ten minutes before the rest of the house wakes up and writing down three things you are grateful for today.

Maybe it is making a proper cup of drinking chocolate the slow way — real chocolate, warm milk, unhurried — and drinking it sitting down in the room you love best while the morning light comes through the window. Maybe it is wrapping a cashmere throw around your shoulders on a cold evening with the book that has been on your nightstand for three months and the phone in the other room and the door closed.

Or maybe it is something bigger. Taking yourself out to dinner, alone, to the restaurant you actually like. A day out doing all the things you love — antiquing, window shopping, sitting in the bookstore with a stack of British magazines and a latte and a piece of cake, taking your time, answering to nobody. Booking a long dreamed of adventure that you keep putting off — a trip to the Paris flea markets, a walk on the Camino de Santiago, to see the pyramids of Giza or a Rhine river cruise. Or something simpler still — a day in bed. Reading, resting, watching something you have been saving, sleeping if you need to. Just that. Just rest.

Whatever it is — let it be small or large or somewhere in between. Let it be yours. Let it be today.

A Word About the Guilt

It will come. It almost always does at first — that particular feeling that you should be doing something more useful, more productive, something for someone else that justifies the time spent.

Here is what I want you to remember when it does.

You cannot pour from an empty cup. You have heard that before, I know. But I mean it more literally than it is usually intended. The woman who takes twenty minutes in the morning for herself — for her quiet, her ritual, her cup of something warm and her few minutes of gratitude — is a calmer, more present, more generous version of herself for the rest of the day. The care you give yourself is not taken from the people you love. It comes back to them, tenfold, when your cup is full and you are feeling like yourself again.

You are not being selfish. You are being sensible. You are being kind — to yourself, and by extension to everyone around you.

One Last Thing

I want to tell you something that I mean sincerely.

You are enough. Right now, as you are, with the list unfinished and the inbox full and the garden in whatever state the deer have left it in — the weeds, the dead plants in the pots, possibly the Christmas wreath still on the door because it is April and nobody has dealt with it yet. The extra ten pounds, the gray hair, the midlife body and mindset. You are enough. You have always been enough. And the ordinary life you are living — this beautiful, imperfect, full and sometimes exhausting ordinary life — is worth celebrating. Every single day.

Not with grand gestures. With small ones. A candle lit on a Tuesday. Flowers in a jar on the kitchen table. A cup of something warm drunk slowly in the quiet of the morning before the world needs anything from you.

My grandmother never bought herself flowers. My mother still puts herself last. Betty worked until she was 97 because she did not know how to stop. I think about all of them when I tell you this:

These things matter. You matter.

The list can wait five minutes.

For more on living intentionally at this stage of life: Intentional Living After 50: What It Really Looks Like. And if you are ready to give yourself permission to spend on the small beautiful things — that post is here: You Have Earned This: A Permission Slip for Women Over 50.

What is the one thing you keep putting last — and what would it feel like to put it first, just for today? Tell me in the comments. I would genuinely love to know.

If you like the post please share and don’t forget to follow along on Facebook, Instagram or X or Pinterest.

You might also enjoy:

• Intentional Living After 50: What It Really Looks Like
• You Have Earned This: A Permission Slip for Women Over 50
• Who Am I Now? How Midlife Didn’t Change Me — It Reminded Me

On My Radar