“We have been conditioned to not want more. I think that is a fallacy. I think that is a falsehood. I think that is a lie.” —Monica Hebert

My guru, mentor, and all-around waker-upper, , author of here on Substack, got me thinking this morning. I listened to her talk for 12 minutes. Then I listened to her words a second time.

I hardly ever do that. Usually, I don’t even make it halfway through anything.

She talked about the conditioning we received when we were young, and how we continue to run those systems for the rest of our lives, or until we become conscious of them.

Her words inspired today’s essay. I was conditioned not to want anything except the bare minimum. Maybe you were, too.

It’s the simple things, they say, that matter.

Can’t you just see that embroidered on a throw pillow?

What are the simple things? A job, food, clothing, a partner, a family, and a decent place to live. Oh, and let’s add good health, because that is something I have grown to appreciate more as the luster of youth fades.

I understand that attaining simple things is difficult. It takes focus, effort, and some luck to achieve them.

Once you’ve got those simple things, everything else is gravy.

Gravy is tasty, but not definitely not a major food group.

The conditioning to not want more is really, really subtle. Insidious, even.

I never questioned that message because my script looked like everyone else’s. Right out of college, I got a job that paid well. I didn’t really understand what the position was all about, but a door had opened and I walked through. My problem was that I had never set my heart on a specific career path. I couldn’t see myself in a job that already had a tidy name assigned, like teacher, nurse, or secretary.

I spent so much of life doing something that happened to me, not something I chose.

I stayed in different forms of a mind-numbing career for the duration of my working years. The golden handcuffs slide easily onto the wrists of someone on autopilot.

My parents thought I had it made, but then again, they were also taught not to want anything more. How could they? They grew up poor during the war when food, clothing, and indoor plumbing were scarce.

Just be happy you’re alive.

Isn’t that enough?

Maybe if you’re the family dog curled up in a single ray of sunshine on the couch.

We are so much more than a family pet.

It’s only now that I have embraced the luxury of choosing. But first, I paid the toll.

After almost 20 years of pretending to be happily married, I divorced, which led to me leaving my church at the same time. Once I did that, gosh darn it, those blinders fell off lightning fast. The universe opened up.

So did I.

When I re-connected and married my college sweetheart, my world expanded even more. We traveled often and to places I’d never been. I give credit to my husband for showing me how rich life becomes when connecting with people all over the world.

He brought me to Greece, where his father was born. I fell in love not only with country’s beauty, but with the people who lived there. They were so warm, just like the air. They invited us into their tavernas, pulling up chairs and serving us steaming plates of souvlaki. When we visited with the kids and our four-year-old granddaughter, the wait staff carried her around as if she were their own miniature Greek goddess.

After my husband and I moved to another state, I retired and finally admitted I was glad that job was gone. My children were grown. They were always my proudest achievement and joy. But they weren’t mine to keep. They were living their own lives and following their own paths.

De-conditioning from my old life started me on the path to writing. Here on Substack, I met writers and readers who want to read my words and share their thoughts with me.

Writing also led me to connect women with each other locally. I started inviting women to come to my women’s circles as soon as we could gather after the COVID lockdowns. I remember the thrum of needing to connect with each other. How hungry we were for another woman to acknowledge and affirm our experiences.

And then one day, an idea popped out.

At first, it seemed too risky to even consider. But I’d already done the scariest hardest thing possible in my world. I’d left a loveless marriage and the church to which I’d given so much of myself.

The idea now had a chance.

What if I took a group of women to Greece? What if they wanted to enjoy Mediterranean culture and maybe fall in love too? It would be like giving them a giant hug bigger than my arms could hold.

This outrageous idea would never have come to me without the freedom to dream it.

That friends and friends of friends took a gamble and took a trip across the ocean with me to a foreign country still amazes me. All because I started living a life I wanted, and allowed myself to go to destinations unknown.

Monica’s words stick with me: “Every time I as an individual, expand my own joy, my happiness, and I expand my thinking, I contribute to the expansion of the universe. So how could wanting more be hurtful to anybody else? It can’t be.”

Thank you, Monica, for your wisdom and for reminding us to want more.

I want it all.

I believe something shifts in a woman when she steps out of her everyday life. If you’re curious about what that looks like, I talk about our next all-ladies trip with my co-creator Jenny Santa Maria, in the Zoom information session below. This next trip will be to the Amalfi Coast in Italy. You can learn more about the trip, by clicking HERE.

To watch the info session, click below.

Picture a van load of women on a dark road on a Greek island, singing “Sweet Caroline” at the top of their lungs. Not all of us could carry a tune. Nobody cared. Jenny started it, of course. Up front, our driver, Giorgos (you can call him George), wasn’t singing, but he’d helped her get her phone connected to the Bluetooth, and he kept turning the volume up.

I think about that night a lot. Partly because it was so much fun, and partly because I can’t remember the last time I saw grown women that loud and joyful together here at home.

We do not have enough woman-to-woman time.

The COVID pandemic didn’t help. Our lives got to a certain point, and the many friendships we enjoyed when we were young are now much fewer. Distance and time are often the culprits that keep old friends apart.

Sure, we may meet for dinner or a walk. But if we had time to spare, where we could just be, without the baggage, the old stories, and the what-ifs.

I know a place where this can happen, but you will have to get out of your comfort zone to get there. And I mean leave-your-home-and-go-somewhere outside your normal routine.

I come with receipts.

Last September, nine women spent uninterrupted time talking, sharing, laughing, crying, hugging, and empathizing on Zakynthos, an island in Greece. They bonded over feta cheese, the Ionian Sea, and a resident overweight cat. The year before that, twelve women made the journey. Some came in pairs, some came solo, but they all left remembering what it was like to connect without an agenda.

There was no worrying about getting to the next place. No grocery lists, no taking care of anybody, just the foreign concept of focusing on ourselves and our own enjoyment.

And delicious fresh food you didn’t have to make yourself. And plenty of local wine.

Sailing and swimming in blue waters, not worrying who sees you in your bathing suit. It was just us girls. Well, except for the captain, an older gent in a red Speedo who could navigate his way in and out of the narrowest of caves blindfolded.

But don’t take my word for any of this. To read what prior retreat participants have said, click here.

There’s a poem many of you probably know, Jenny Joseph’s “Warning,” the one about the woman who plans to wear purple and misbehave once she’s old. After all that dreaming about someday, she wonders whether she ought to practice now.

That’s what the weeks in Greece were. Practice. Grown women who spent decades being sensible, belting out “Sweet Caroline” in a dark van.

So here’s your next chance to practice: May 29-June 5, 2027 on the Amalfi Coast. We will have Villa Solaria to ourselves for seven nights. That’s every bedroom, the pool, and the rooftop terrace where we’ll eat dinner with the sea below us, weather permitting, of course.

Each morning starts with gentle Qigong and movement. Evenings bring Women’s Circles, with sketching and watercolor for whoever is willing to try (no talent required, supplies provided).

In between, we’ll sail on board a private boat to Capri, make pizza at the villa, enjoy a cooking class with the villa’s chef, and spend an afternoon wandering Positano before our farewell dinner.

Breakfast every day and six dinners with wine. There are optional excursions to Pompeii, a beach day, Vietri sul Mare, and plenty of time to do absolutely nothing.

This is a woman-only week. Come with a friend or come on your own. If you’d like to share a room, we’ll match you with a roommate.

Rooms start at $3,425. Click here to see the details.

Jenny and I are hosting a relaxed Zoom this Saturday to share more about the week and answer your questions. Yes, that Jenny. Bring your singing voice.

Saturday, October 10, at 10:00 am Eastern

Join on Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/95069848061?pwd=V53EIHI12KiF5aFAqU5xgRmXvzabfa.1

Meeting ID: 950 6984 8061

Passcode: 274279

If you’re thinking about it and would like more information, this is a lovely way to get a feel for it. We’ll walk through a day at the villa, Capri and Positano, the rooms, and how payments work, and you can ask us anything.

It’s been a week.

I’m not writing to complain but rather to let you know that I wasn’t up for writing a newsletter today. So, please, go ahead and cheer me on for not succumbing to the old good-girl script of plowing through when I’m feeling drained. This is the work.

But there is something I would like to do this week— I want to talk to my Substack friend, on a Live on Friday at 11 a.m.

You may remember Keith from his guest post here in February, “Finding Your Therapist: A Journey Worth Taking.”

For those who don’t know him, Keith writes about how as a high school student, a female teacher targeted him for sex. Like most predators, she saw something broken in him and knew it made him easy prey.

It turns out she wasn’t the first one to target Keith. He shares transparently about surviving both parental abuse and sexual abuse by a series of older women on his Substack, Don’t Let the Past Steal Your Soul.

With the Cornell 7 case all over the news, I want to talk with Keith about what it’s like to watch institutions look away, why survivors take so long to be believed, and why male survivors are almost never part of the conversation.

This will be a tender conversation. Come as you are, and take care of yourself if it’s close to home.

Here’s the link to join live:

https://open.substack.com/live-stream/389130?utm_source=live-stream-scheduled-upsell

I’m on the elliptical warming up before I head downstairs to work out. Here on the second floor, I have a panoramic view of the cafe, the front desk, and the machines. My heart skips when I see his dark gray head bobbing, coffee cup to his lips.

Why is he always here?

Yes, I’m talking about Gym Guy — the same man from “The Invisible Woman,” the piece I wrote a couple of weeks ago. If I can see him, I conclude he can see me should he look up.

Please don’t look up.

Too late.

I look away and cast my eyes down, hoping against hope that I don’t have to speak to him later.

To deter men, especially Gym Guy, from talking to me, I’ve started wearing light-blue colored headphones. What says “don’t talk to me” more than noise-cancelling cans on your ears?

These prove no obstacle for Gym Guy. He has finished his coffee and finds me at the leg press — again — and comes near. I take my time sliding the headphones off. He’s patient, then gushes.

“I googled your name. I found out some interesting things. How do you spell it?”

“It’s spelled with an ‘I.’” My voice is flat, bored.

No one can ever pronounce “Ilona,” let alone remember it. I’m filled with dread that he thought of me outside of our brief interactions, that he remembered my name and typed the closest facsimile into his phone.

With that, I put the headphones back on. He leaves and then turns around, quizzically. I pull at the headphones as if they’re too heavy to take off.

“I can always tell people who are highly educated. You must have an advanced degree.”

I confess I do, and he is pleased. Very pleased.

“Yes, I knew it!”

My headphones go back on. I need to escape ASAP and move somewhere remote, far enough away without sacrificing why I’m here. There’s an overheated space at the gym’s edge with only benches and free weights and, more importantly, no people.

He doesn’t follow me.

By myself, I find my breath. Gym Guy does not know that googling someone’s name — and then telling them you did — is stepping further over a line. He doesn’t know that calling out someone’s credentials is also overreach.

Where will this end?

I know from experience that these guys don’t suddenly get religion and back off. You can’t insult them, and directness can inflame.

This experience isn’t the first on a list of violations I could recite, and it won’t be the last.

Start with my daughter. When she commuted to her first job out of college, a forty-year-old man stalked her. He would greet her and chat her up every morning, no matter which train car she tried to hide in. Then at night he would find her again and walk her to her car. She was polite. She engaged in small talk because she was too scared not to.

My advice was to take an earlier train or drive to a different train station. The problem went only away when she moved from the suburbs into a city apartment.

I’ve had a man expose himself to me on a subway. I’ve received an angry, X-rated letter from a guy I rebuffed. I’ve had a man follow me when I used to walk the dog in the neighborhood.

I could go on.

That’s the part that’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived it. It isn’t one rotten morning. It’s a ledger so long that the entries stop being able to hold their own weight. I recite them without emotion because outrage, every single time, is its own full-time job, and I ran out of that energy a long time ago.

I’m disgusted with the situation I find myself in with Gym Guy.

I don’t want to change gyms, or the time I go. Yesterday I saw him again at the cafe, sipping his coffee. I held my breath the whole time I was there, knowing my headphones refuse the work I needed them to do.

Miraculously, he didn’t seek me out. He was still sitting there when I left, an hour later.

I consider I might be over-reacting. He’s probably lonely. I’ve heard about the male loneliness epidemic, but fixing it was never going to be my job.

Where he lands—overly interested, creep, or full-fledged stalker—I couldn’t tell you. Sorting him out isn’t supposed to be my job. And yet here I am doing it anyway. Clocking him from the elliptical, cataloging what he says, deciding day to day whether today’s the day he doesn’t take the hint.

That’s the part that makes me tired.

I’ve learned this much: the vigilance gets applied evenly, to all of them, because from where I’m standing there’s no way to tell the harmless ones from the ones who go looking. If you’re lonely, I’m not here to fix that for you. I’m just trying to keep myself safe.

What would you do? Help me with your comments.

Next week, I’m back to doing my Substack Lives. On Thursday, September 24th at 11 a.m. ET, I will chat with of the Daily Rewire. She writes for women who are done playing by the old rules and are ready to dream again. Monica’s deepest desire is for you to be remember who you were before the world got its hands on you.

Sound familiar?

We are definitely vibing. It’s going to be a great conversation, so mark you calendar!

Thanks for reading The Pebble in Your Shoe! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

After a fifteen-year break, I’m back to lifting weights. A little thing called “osteopenia” was the catalyst. I used to love the gym back in the day when I lived in Pennsylvania, so I’m no stranger to the scene.

Nothing’s changed much, especially the clientele.

The gym has always been a bit of a meat market, with plenty of muscle-y meatheads hogging the machines and tanned girls in sports bras with abs to die for.

Despite numerous signs to clean the equipment after you’re done, only a handful of people actually do. None of them are men.

I don’t speak a word to anyone while I’m there. I don’t want to. People wear headphones or look down at their phones anyway. For the hour that I’m there, I’m very goal-focused to get in and out.

I was on my last set on the leg extension machine when, out of the corner of my eye, a 70ish man made a beeline towards me.

Oh no.

“I make it a point to say hello to all the attractive women,” he gushed as the corners of his smile met swinging earlobes.

What the actual fuck.

I am 63 years old and I don’t want this. I never wanted this. Anger swelled up as my words leaped out.

“So you don’t say hi to unattractive women?”

For one moment, he was speechless. Flabbergasted.

He recovered and suggested that he was just a silly man.

I didn’t disabuse him. He was correct.

Maybe I’d been watching too much of the hot summer series “Furious” but something in me wasn’t interested in being nice about men’s behavior anymore.

The younger me would have been glad to have been chosen. To be noticed. To be called pretty.

That girl has left the building.

I wonder—where is that cloak of invisibility which older women complain about? I don’t want to be noticed that way, just like I never enjoyed the leering looks, the catcalling, or the handsy guy friends.

Just leave me alone.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to completely disappear because I did that, too, and not in a good way. But I want that cloak available for when I choose to stay an observer, or just be a person who is finishing a workout.

I don’t want to be noticed by a man on his terms, because he likes what he sees. I want to be treated with respect, like every other person in that gym.

Down the road from the gym is a book cafe with a T-shirt on a clearance table that said “Strong female protagonist.” I know what it costs to disappear—I’ve done it before. I picked up the shirt to remind me— never again. I write my own story now. I come up with my own script.

What about you?

.

A lot has happened since February, when a car crash sent me to an urgent-care curtain cubicle, then to a trauma ER, and eventually home with a liver cyst that had burst. I’ve been meaning to write about it ever since.

But apparently I needed a little time before I could find the funny.

So, six months later, I’m finally ready to tell the story. Mostly because I’m okay now. Also because if you’re going to spend a night in a hospital, you might as well get a story out of it.

A woman I did not recognize peered through the window.

“Are you okay?”

I looked up at her from underneath a limp airbag.

“I think so.”

“Turn your car off!”

I pressed the button and got out.

A car had crashed into mine as I crossed an intersection, and I found myself—and my Camry—on a curb under an old oak tree.

A policewoman appeared to take my insurance and registration. An ambulance parked across the street.

“You okay?” an EMT asked.

I did not know the answer. I considered whether yes or no was accurate, but nothing came out.

“You’re walking and talking.” He raised his eyebrows as his impatience surfaced. “Call me if you need me.”

And off he went.

I hadn’t whacked my head, but in retrospect, I was in shock. My body didn’t feel normal. The impact had left me feeling strange.

Warnings from friends who had taken ambulance rides and later been socked with $2,500 transportation bills made me glad the EMT had gone. I had spared myself the medical-bill headache.

Back home, I walked around stunned. During the impact, my waist had twisted hard under the seatbelt. As my car spun around, my thought was: I probably should do more ab work.

I noticed a dull ache just below my rib cage.

Nothing really.

Or was it?

We were supposed to fly to Florida on Friday, and I should probably make sure I was safe to travel.

The belief that I was fine persisted. I’m always fine. I can also be a bit of a hypochondriac, so I straightened up the house, because apparently my first response to possible internal injuries is light housekeeping. Then I decided I should lie down.

My daughter called and encouraged me to get checked out. It made sense, but what was this hesitation?

The thought of being in the emergency room during flu season was the main deterrent. I had already spent endless hours in ERs with my spouse, kids, and sickly parents.

If I could help it, I would never go to a hospital again.

I’d also been binging The Pitt, a hospital drama that documents, by the hour, a typical day in a Pittsburgh ER. Dr. Robbie, played by Noah Wyle, is the handsome, middle-aged chief of staff.

Maybe the hospital wouldn’t be so bad.

As the afternoon wore on, the ache continued. I talked myself into a compromise: the neighborhood urgent care. It was close by, and if my visit swallowed the rest of the day, at least I’d have a short ride home.

My husband drove me over around 4 p.m. No cars occupied the lot. The waiting room was empty.

Optimism: dangerous, but briefly available.

My exam bay was a room with curtains for walls, bordered by another woman about my age. I didn’t have to guess why she was there. She coughed like it was her job.

“Have you been here long?” I timed my question between coughing fits.

“Hours.” She’d been there since 11 a.m.

Terrible answer.

Two hours passed as we lay side by side, never seeing each other, while I eavesdropped on her conversations with colleagues from work. Finally, the nurse came in and announced that my neighbor had RSV.

“Wear this mask.”

“Oh, I’m a pariah now!” she said, finding humor in her diagnosis.

I stopped breathing and wondered how easily RSV could sail between the gaps in the curtains. I whispered to the nurse that I needed a mask, too.

Great. My worst fear was coming true.

“Oh, and bring my nice black pajamas, honey.” My neighbor was not too sick to think about fashion. Who gets to wear pajamas in the infectious-care unit? She must have coughed part of her brain out.

I was getting pissy waiting there, waiting for RSV to claim me, when I learned that her husband was bringing her a homemade dinner.

Maybe she should wear the black pajamas.

The MRI technician arrived for my dye imaging. By then, I was sure I was absolutely fine and this had all been a colossal waste of time. I was savoring my good fortune at being a healthy person, my upcoming Florida trip, and the fact that I wouldn’t have to spend months fighting incorrectly coded medical bills.

Unless RSV took me down first.

I went back to my windy curtain room.

And waited.

And waited.

The ambulance came to pick up my RSV neighbor around the 7 p.m. shift change. The new nurse introduced herself, then disappeared.

The earlier-shift doctor had assured me my test results would be back by 7, or shortly thereafter.

At 7:15, I asked.

“Nope. Not ready.”

At 8, I was hungry. Local takeout closed soon, and if I ate too late I’d have heartburn all night.

Wasn’t I one of the lucky ones, having only heartburn to worry about?

My husband brought me fast food.

At 8:30, I changed out of my gown and back into my clothes. I was cold, and besides, I wanted to be released.

At 9 p.m., a balding man parted the curtain.

He must be a doctor. I wouldn’t know because he didn’t introduce himself.

Whoever this was, he was all business.

“They found blood by your liver. It’s very serious.”

My liver?

Does this guy know I haven’t had a drink in six years? My liver was the GOAT. I was doing all the things to be healthy, and my liver was fine, more than fine. Thank you very much.

“We’re transporting you to a trauma ER.”

But I felt totally fine. This didn’t make sense. I could have walked home right then. The sensations in my abdomen had disappeared.

“Can my husband drive me there?”

“No.”

So much for bedside manner.

I couldn’t believe I was going to be a trauma patient.

An hour later, the ambulance delivered me to the new ER. A trauma team greeted me, just like The Pitt. They rushed at me, asking questions and pushing tubes into my veins.

Wow. Now this was excellent service.

Maybe they’d be on top of things here.

Now where was Dr. Robbie?

Dr. Chin, looking like the head of the class in his round glasses, spoke calmly. It was going to be okay. One more test, and it would probably be fine.

The blood, he explained, was from a hematoma on the lining of my liver. Just a bunch of blood vessels.

I would go home after some tests.

The thing about hospitals is that they’re all rush, rush, rush, then wait, wait, wait.

Minutes blurred into hours.

At 2:30 a.m., I was in an MRI machine. Five minutes in, they pulled me out.

“Do you have any metal on?”

The technician peeked under my gown at my impressive lack of clothing.

Someone had failed to remove the sticky EKG pads from my chest.

Was I supposed to know that?

The test started over.

“Breathe in,” the robot voice commanded.

“Hold.”

Hold seemed to be the theme of the day.

An hour later, I was alone in my room. Maybe I could sleep before the doctors reviewed my results.

Two nurses, Alberto and Gianna, had other ideas.

How were they this cheerful in the middle of the night?

They checked my arms for a good vein because the one they had picked wasn’t producing. Alberto cracked jokes about my veins.

How could anyone be this jokey at this hour?

Please. I needed to sleep.

But Gianna still had questions: my alcohol consumption, mental health, and whether my home was a safe place.

It certainly seemed safer than being here.

She came back at 6 a.m. to scan my wristband and offer me a drink.

Everything was bright in the room, like a noon picnic on the Fourth of July.

Had the sun come up already?

I pulled the blanket over my face. On the other side of the curtain came the thwack of a mop, the crumpling of papers and plastic.

Why were they doing this now? Didn’t they care about sick people sleeping?

At last, quiet.

Gianna came back in. I asked why it was so bright.

She turned off the overhead lights.

Darkness, at last.

Hold on. Gianna wanted to introduce me to the day nurse.

I greeted Casey and drifted back to sleep.

At 8 a.m., the breakfast tray arrived, followed by the Nutrition Manager, who wanted to discuss my food orders for the day.

“I’m leaving.”

I didn’t need to order anything.

“Just in case,” she said.

“It’s my job.”

I accepted everything she offered for lunch and dinner. It didn’t matter. I wouldn’t be here anyway.

Casey came back to take my vitals. I asked when the doctors would make their rounds.

“Oh, probably this afternoon.”

This afternoon.

No, no, no.

I was supposed to be released after my tests. Dr. Chin had even said I could leave in the middle of the night if I wanted.

But I couldn’t stay there all day. I remembered my parents’ many hospital stays, and how doctors always seemed to arrive at the crack of dawn—conveniently before the adult children could show up and ask questions.

Who changed the schedule?

I settled in for a few more minutes of sleep when my phone buzzed.

The insurance company wanted to retrieve my car from the tow lot and take it to the inspection station. The tow lot charged by the day, and it was almost 24 hours since my accident. Talk about efficient!

I assured the representative my husband was there emptying it out. Now was a great time for nap!

Suddenly, a man parked a woman on a stretcher at the foot of my bed. Her legs were splayed open in the traditional yoga butterfly pose, with a giant ice pack on her crotch.

“Hi!” I waved.

She looked at me and moaned.

Oh no.

She kept moaning as they settled her onto the bed. I gathered she had just had surgery.

“You’re okay, you’re okay,” the nurses soothed.

Then they started taking her vitals. They wanted to know if she had ever been depressed, or if she drank alcohol.

“When was the last time you drank?”

Wow. That’s direct.

“Valentine’s Day,” my roommate said.

They don’t give anyone a break here.

With every moan, my panic swelled.

This lady was really sick.

I needed to go home.

I couldn’t be here with all these sick people.

I was not sick.

Was I?

I felt fine.

Casey was busy getting my roommate settled. I asked if the doctors were on their way.

Oh no. They were tied up with three traumas.

They just couldn’t get up here.

My lunch tray arrived with a piece of rubber chicken.

I was now resigned to being there through eternity.

I wasn’t hungry, but I took a few bites because who knew if dinner would be even worse?

Chitchat floated outside my room. Someone announced my age and my name.

Was it?

Could it be?

A man in his thirties walked in. He said something obscure with a totally straight face.

I didn’t know this man, and I wasn’t going to pretend to understand him. The female doctors with him didn’t explain.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know you. Are you joking around?”

“Yes! Yes, I am!”

I had had little sleep and had run out of “nice” hours earlier.

“You’re not very funny.”

The attending doctors burst out laughing.

I realized I might not be a Karen, but perhaps a cranky old woman.

It was inevitable.

He got down to business.

A cyst on my liver had burst. Not a hematoma. The impact of the crash had broken the cyst wide open, but now I was fine to go.

Lift nothing heavy.

You don’t need to follow up.

The most welcome words of all:

“Yes, of course, you can fly to Florida!”

I am fine?

This is no big deal?

Another hour passed before I wished my roommate well and the hospital released me into my husband’s care.

I sprawled on the sofa, clicking on Dr. Robbie’s chaotic ER.

Then I took a two-hour nap.

I was grateful to be home.

The next day, I woke up feeling as if someone had shot me in the liver.

It was hard to breathe.

Hard to move.

I could not go to Florida.

I could not go anywhere.

Izzy's visiting again next week, and it had me thinking about this one — so I'm bringing it back for anyone who missed it the first time.

I found the perfect dress.

It was a Saturday afternoon, and I was combing through the racks at a local consignment shop when a silver Greek key pattern caught my eye. A Tory Burch dress, no less—A-line, flattering, and just right for the big fat Greek wedding I was attending at the end of the week. It was a little short, but I noticed a substantial two-inch hem—a tall girl's dream. With a quick trip to the tailor, I'd be good to go by Friday.

I brought the dress to Jane's shop, where she stood like a queen among mountains of tulle and sequins—wedding gowns, prom dresses, and formal wear in every shade. No one would trip down the aisle under Jane’s craftsmanship.

This was a small job. Could she squeeze it in?

After examining the dress, Jane sighed the sigh of a woman who has hemmed for too many panicked prom moms, then scribbled on a slip: $50. Ready by Thursday.

Fifty dollars. The dress had only cost forty.

Ouch.

I paused, flustered, but told myself to focus on the win: I'd scored the perfect dress, and I'd have it ready in time. I mean, it's not like I could hem it myself.

Except I used to be able to hem it myself.

Standing there, I started thinking about my old sewing machine. Had I been too hasty tossing it?

I learned to sew as a pre-teen at the Singer shop back when I was allowed to walk a mile to the city mall unsupervised. I practiced on my mother's old metal machine—built like a Mack truck and just as loud.

After I got married, I purchased a used sewing machine and started using it. First job? Maternity clothes. There weren't many off-the-rack options for a 5'10" pregnant woman with long limbs and a professional job. My mother and I found some patterns, although fashionable choices were few and far between. The results were ugly outfits that fit well.

From there, I moved on to window treatments for our entire house, which were way easier to sew than clothes, just bulkier. Then on to Halloween costumes for my little girls.

Of course, by the time I bought fabric, notions, and trims, those homemade costumes cost double what they would at K-Mart. But I didn't care. I loved the process.

The day came when I didn't have time for sewing. I didn't have time to brush my hair, let alone anything as frivolous as fairy princess and Snow White costumes.

The machine sat neglected. Its plastic body yellowed like a forgotten Tupperware lid, and when I did pull it out, the stitches were erratic and angry. I hadn't known that sewing machines needed servicing (this seems obvious now, but I was under the impression it was a toaster with thread), and after one last move, I sent it to a landfill.

That marked the end of my sewing era, aside from the occasional reattached button or emergency hem.

My mother, who was German, referred to these domestic skills as Handarbeit or handwork. It was the kind of knowledge passed from mother to daughter, taught quietly and never applauded. Certainly never labeled as creative.

It was women's work, plain and simple.

But now, I had paid more for a hem than I had for the dress itself. And I had a granddaughter who wanted to sew saddle blankets and ear bonnets for her toy horses. It made me wonder: was it time to stitch this part of me back together?

My granddaughter, Izzy, already had a $20 battery-operated kids' sewing machine. It was adorable. It also couldn't sew through felt, flannel, or fake fur.

After a bit of Craigslist hunting and a chat with a sewing machine repair guy, I took the plunge and bought a new Singer 4423.

I was back in business, baby.

Izzy and I headed to Michaels to gather supplies for her new horse. Beige fabric for the body, white for the blaze, green felt for the eyes, and we postponed our decision on the neck rope.

We like to leave room for design evolution.

Her new horse would cost more than the two mass-produced $7.99 ones she already had, but it would be hers. Made with her imagination and with our hands.

And that changed something for me, too.

This wasn't about "practical" anymore. I wasn't sewing because I had to: I was sewing because I wanted to. For joy. For beauty. For connection.

That old word Handarbeit took on a new meaning. Yes, it was a skill. Yes, it had value. But maybe it was never just about chores and holey socks.

Maybe it was always art.

Women's work has a long history of being overlooked—unpaid, undervalued, and unseen (unless you forgot to iron it). But lately, I've started noticing something hopeful. One of my LinkedIn connections, who typically posts about her roles as a realtor and musician, has begun documenting her sewing journey. Her handmade clothes are exquisite, they fit her perfectly, and now people are asking her to sew for them.

She even started a YouTube channel.

It made me wonder: why aren't more artisans posting on LinkedIn? Why is it all "10 Ways to Increase Productivity Before 8 AM" and zero ways to stitch a neckline?

When did we decide that what we make with our hands matters less than what we do with our keyboards?

It's time to change that conversation. It's time to value the artisan alongside the analyst.

And maybe—just maybe—someone out there is looking at their old sewing machine in the closet and thinking, you know what? Let's get back at it.

What do you think?

I discovered something called “visible mending.” It reminds me of the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, except applied to clothing. Check it out!

I loved her flamingos, her shades of pink, and most of all her loose, flowy fit. I met her on a clearance rack a few years ago. She was only $5.99 and she was definitely coming home with me.

Later, after examining her more closely, I realized I’d missed a tiny hole while I was busy falling in love at the store. Hence the clearance tag. No matter. A couple of stitches later, no one would be the wiser.

I wanted to wear her everywhere, but every time I reached for her, I found another reason not to. What if I got cold? Menopause—that petty little gremlin—had turned me into someone who could need a sweater in July depending on which way the wind was blowing. Then there were the less practical reasons. My shoulders looked too bony. My skin too pale. My neck too... wrinkly.

Funny how the weather was never the actual issue.

This weekend, her time finally arrived. We were in the middle of a blazing heatwave, the hottest weather I’d ever experienced. When I slipped her on, I considered trying something different.

No bra.

I looked to see how shrunken my girls appeared. You could barely tell they were there. They seemed perfectly content to stay out of the spotlight. I bent over to make sure neither was planning an unscheduled appearance. Still good. No free show.

As I stood there inspecting myself, a memory floated up. Another house. Another husband. Another time I wore spaghetti straps.

Back then my boobs were just past their prime after birthing and breastfeeding three children. They hadn’t packed up and left yet, but they were definitely considering a new location further south. That day I wore a worthless strapless bra, that spent the entire evening sliding down while I kept shimmying it back into position.

Later my husband casually mentioned that one of his friends, who’d been visiting our home, had quietly asked him if I was wearing a bra underneath.

Until then, I hadn’t realized anyone had been evaluating my body. I thought I was simply wearing a summer top. Turns out I’d been unknowingly entering a panel discussion.

That awareness has never completely left me.

Standing in front of the mirror all these years later, I realized I was still anticipating the same judgment. I’m sixty-three now. By this age you’d think I’d have earned a lifetime exemption from caring what strangers think of my breasts.

Apparently not.

Some part of me still imagines an audience. Men, certainly. Women too. Plenty of women carry water for the patriarchy. Some days I suspect I’ve been volunteering.

The flamingo top wasn’t really about the flamingo top. It was simply this week’s version of a negotiation I’ve been having with my body for decades.

The negotiations don’t stop with bras. Oh no. My forehead would like a word. So would my jowls. And don’t even get my neck started.

Most mornings I stand in front of the mirror conducting what can only be described as a performance review of my face.

Lately, I’ve been watching videos created by a plastic surgeon who critiques celebrity cosmetic procedures.

“Look at the length of her forehead,” she’ll say, measuring the distance between a celebrity’s eyebrows and hairline with one finger. “See how it’s longer in the after photo? That’s aging, not the surgeon.”

Or she’ll point to someone’s eyelids.

“See how little lid skin she has now? I would’ve done a brow lift instead.”

After enough videos, I’ve become surprisingly qualified to diagnose myself.

Botox on the forehead.

A little filler in the cheeks.

Maybe an eyebrow lift if money were no object.

But then there’s my neck.

She never talks about the neck.

I must learn more.

In another strange twist—because apparently I contain multitudes and at least two competing personalities—I also spend time following women who are aging naturally. Women who let their white hair grow, reject the endless messaging that they’re no longer enough, and seem completely uninterested in apologizing for the passage of time.

They’re the women I want to become.

Apparently, I consume both kinds of content with equal devotion, as though one day one side will finally win custody of my brain.

One writer here on Substack, , put words to something I’d only been circling. She wrote about wanting the polish of a woman who’s had “work” while also longing for the freedom of a woman who hasn’t. (Click to read A Sea of Sameness: Why Our Polite Silence is Killing the Pro-Age Movement.)

She questioned whether staying silent about these contradictions—not wanting to judge another woman’s choices, not wanting to seem vain ourselves—is just another version of the Good Girl script.

Wow. That got me.

Even my silence had been performing. I can’t not follow the script.

So here’s what’s true, unglamorously.

I didn’t get Botox.

I didn’t go braless.

Turns out courage and nipple confidence don’t always arrive on the same day.

For the next time I flirt with going braless, I bought Nippies from Amazon—tiny adhesive circles whose entire job description is to let a sixty-three-year-old woman wear a flamingo top without negotiating with a strapless underwire.

They’re less a fashion statement than a cease-fire.

Not full surrender to the bra. Not full defiance either.

Just a woman who’s spent decades bargaining with her own reflection, hoping to spend a little less of the rest of her life arguing with the body that has carried her this far.

Did you miss last week’s Substack Live with Sean Chavis? Don’t worry! I got you. You can watch it below.

Kneeling in the inky darkness, I couldn’t see anything. I listened to the murmurs of the priest aimed at a child on the opposite side of another screen. The sound of the door sliding open, jolting me to full attention. Finally, it was my turn.

Dusty light crept in as I began the familiar prayer, “Bless me Father, for I have sinned...” I can’t remember what sin I had conjured to confess that day as I was just a child finding her way in the world.

One word is seared in my brain from that confession though, and it wasn’t from anything I said. Rather, it was the priest calling me “sonny” when he addressed me. I had recently gotten a shag haircut, and with my long, skinny body and brown-framed glasses, I could have easily been mistaken for a boy. Fire rose from deep within and burned on my cheeks. Despite the darkness, I’m sure my shame was visible to the priest and to everyone waiting outside.

How had Father picked up on my secret fear that I might be mistaken for a boy, even without seeing me?

I didn’t like how I looked, that was for sure. Wearing glasses was non-negotiable to walk without bumping into things, and the frames were not cool back then.

I was a tender shoot that had grown too tall for itself. The nuns lined us up like soldiers in size-order. Being the tallest in my classroom meant I was at the end of the line. If it was an odd-numbered line, I was often riding the caboose solo.

The girls wore shapeless polyester box dresses with saddle shoes and knee socks. As ugly as it was, the navy plaid cardboard dress was a great unifier and equalizer among the girls, mandated at no shorter than knee length by the school. Parents didn’t always get that measurement right because we were growing kids. To save time and expense, busy moms made sure the length was on the uber-safe side so not to invoke the ire of the nuns.

The worst, for me, was how my mom hemmed my skirt an inch below my knobby and very hairy knees. Maybe she thought she was doing me a favor, but handing me a razor to shave my legs could have been a solution. Just throwing it out there.

Then, without any warning, girls started sprouting breasts, and their uniforms became 3-D trapezoids. Mine remained resolutely 2-D.

Oh, how I wanted that third dimension.

Outside of the uniform, my fashion sense was tragically lost. Nothing in the department store fit me. My sleeves and pants were always too short. I lived a mile from a mall with dozens of shops, but there weren’t many choices for a middle-class beanpole like me.

Sometimes we would take a drive out to Neshaminy Mall where the Sears Roebuck purported to carry tall sizes. The reward for the ride was one pair of pants that touched the top of my shoe, but in a fabric that I didn’t really like. I had to make a choice: look pretty-ish (remember the glasses?) or keep my ankles warm.

As I got into high school, I still had to wear a uniform, but I could finally find jeans that fit for my social life. Teen sizes saved the day. By the time I got to college, I had traded my heavy-rimmed glasses for contact lenses.

The girl who had been mistaken for a boy in the confessional was starting to disappear.

I wore what I could cobble together, and my roommate and I were soon swapping outfits for parties.

We were both middle-class kids at Villanova, and we blended in. It was there that I first noticed how differently some girls moved through the world. I remember a classmate, Jennifer, slowing a convertible alongside me as I walked to class. She leaned out from the passenger seat — perfect coiffed bob, stylish boyfriend at the wheel — and offered me a ride. What impressed me most was her leather gloves. Buttery, beautiful, clearly expensive. They had been chosen, not cobbled together.

I understood in that moment that some girls had been curated their whole lives. I had been making do. I was too embarrassed to get into the car. She wasn’t ashamed to be seen with me, and I’ve never forgotten that.

I was feeling better in my clothing, though. Suddenly I was getting more male attention, something that astonished this ugly duckling. When I got my first job working as a civilian at the Navy, I lived at home and the paychecks kept rolling in. I had car payments and student loans, but I had something else, too: disposable income. I need that extra dough for the wedding invitations which arrived regularly, as that was the season of life I was in.

For my friend Patty’s wedding, I found a dress at Bloomingdale’s and it wasn’t on sale. I tried it on anyway, and I knew it had to be mine, even if I had to hide the price tag from my mother when I got home. Sure, I was paying for it myself, but my mom was ready to pounce if she thought I was indulging myself and living frivolously.

It was a red Adrienne Papell peplum dress with a black suede belt.

God, I loved that dress.

I found the perfect pair of black suede pointy-toe pumps to go with it. That dress transformed me from the inside. The peplum gave me a shape I never knew I had. A row of red buttons ran down the back of the skirt — not small, but deliberate, a little bit sexy.

The red said "Look at me!" in a way that nothing in my wardrobe ever had before.

I felt powerful. I felt strong. I was a goddess.

I wore it to my friend's wedding that fall. I remember standing in the reception hall and feeling, for the first time in my life, that I had arrived somewhere. Not the wedding. Myself.

You might think this was a turning point where I became a fashion icon.

You would be wrong.

Fashion kept going for my throat. Try finding maternity clothes in 90s when you’re almost six feet tall. After walking 15 city blocks from my office to get there, I remember containing my disappointment as my last hope for maternal couture limped away. I was foolish to have pinned high expectations on the only store in downtown Philadelphia, the Pea in the Pod boutique, that carried a wardrobe for professional expectant mothers. Turning slowly in the mirror in a shapeless floral tent, I thought, even now, even as I carry this whole new life inside me, I could not find something that fit and was affordable

My mother and I eventually resorted to sewing some career girl outfits. They were functional. They covered my body. That was enough, I told myself.

Then came the years when I was just happy to have clothes without spit-up on them. Fashion be damned.

My mom, knowing my struggle with a lack of time to find functional (not fun) clothing for the office, brought me a rust-colored, ultra-suede structured jacket back from a trip to Germany. When I tried it on, wind hit my wrists and forearms, and not in a good way.

Wear it anyway, she said.

Of course, she said that. She’d been saying that to me my whole life.

I forced a smile and nodded. Little did she know that jacket would never see the light of day. Something snapped inside me — quietly, finally. I made a pact with myself to never wear something that didn’t fit again. I had spent a lifetime being handed whatever was available, whatever was close enough, whatever would do.

I was done with whatever would do.

I found my way to TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and the end-of-season sales at Bloomingdale’s. I searched out the better brands that gave me the length I needed. But money was still the ceiling, and the accessories that pulled a look together always pushed the cost out of reach.

It wasn’t until I stepped into a high-end consignment shop a few years ago — with time to kill and no particular agenda — that something opened up. Tory Burch. Veronica Beard. Anthropologie. Armani. The girl who once drove to Neshaminy Mall hoping Sears had one pair of pants in her size could now try on things that had been curated, refined, chosen with intention. At prices she could actually afford.

I was in my sixties. Was I too late for my style revolution?

Nope, I was just getting started.

I think about what a feminist Instagram creator, (here’s the link to the reel by hope_peddler) who said recently that bringing mindfulness to the way we decorate ourselves for the world is a political act. That how we compose ourselves is communication.

People will be repelled or drawn in. I believe her.

A woman who spent decades invisible — in clothes that didn’t reach her hands, in uniforms that erased her shape, in a jacket her mother said to wear anyway — has something to say when she finally walks into a room looking exactly like herself.

Curating outfits takes intention and time, and now I indulge myself in them. I think about mixing a plaid with a polka dot, pairing a vintage skirt with a t-shirt and a beaded belt. I compose myself the way a painter approaches a canvas — deliberately, joyfully, with full knowledge of what I’m doing and why.

I was always her. She just needed something red.

If this essay resonated with you, I'd love for you to join me on Tuesday, June 23rd at 11am EST for a Substack Live conversation with of . Shaun is a former cookbook editor, committed secondhand shopper, and a woman deep in her own radical act of reinvention. She's recently relocated to Mexico City, having shed 140 lbs. and almost everything she owned to get there. She writes about fashion, identity, and dressing yourself intentionally at every age and size with humor, practicality, and zero apology. We're going to talk about clothes, reclamation, and what it means to finally show up looking exactly like yourself. I have a feeling it's going to be a conversation your closet needs to hear.

My ability to comprehend the invisible is expanding. I think I have reached a new level of awareness of what that means.

As a person of a certain age, whenever I visit my doctor, he’s far more concerned with what’s happening internally than what’s on the outside. (Hey, did you just say “duh”?)

This epiphany hit differently in February, when I was in a car accident. An MRI revealed that a cyst on my liver had burst, and that I had “other” stuff going on inside. Technology that allows a look at your invisible innards is quite the mind-fuck.

My organs were a silent mob.

When I was young, I could ignore what was happening inside my body, unless I got a pounding headache, severe menstrual cramps, or an upset stomach — in which case I demanded answers. What was happening to me?

I’ve heard anyone, including me, say words of gratitude for their heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, or spleen for the indispensable work they do. That is our way, isn’t it? Out of sight, out of mind.

Except the mind is also out of sight, so...

It wasn’t until I was lying on Tobi’s acupuncture table that I started to have a clue about Chinese medicine’s emphasis on the organs and how their condition contributes to disease and wellness.

I have been seeing Tobi for years — first for massage, then for acupuncture. She told me a story of her acupuncture professor and how she asked him where he placed the needles for treating himself.

“Nowhere” he said. “I just do Qigong.”

Say what?

What is Qigong?

It’s been a strange mystical journey since asking that question. I will spare you the months of research and rabbit holes and share my definition.

Qigong (pronounced Chee-gong) is a body movement practice that includes mobility exercises, breath work and meditation. Its goal is to bring focus on your internal energy — Qi — throughout the body and release any areas where it may have gotten stuck.

If you read anything about Qigong, the Qi is subject to a variety of definitions. I will tell you the one I landed on and am currently embracing: Qi is the functional energy responsible for your body, mind, and spirit.

Gong means work. Qigong is the work of managing your life force energy.

We are born with the energy of our parents, but it isn’t a lifetime supply, and we can’t make more of it. We can only protect it by building our own Qi through food, air, sleep, and the way we choose to live. And here is what I know about midlife women: we have not been living that way. We have been spending.

We have been recklessly generous in giving our energy away for decades. To our children, our partners, our jobs, our aging parents, our communities. Society taught us, the good girls, to pour out and keep pouring, without ever asking if we had anything left in the vessel.

I spent the better part of this year studying, practicing, and eventually getting certified as a Qigong teacher. Last Saturday morning, I stood in Tobi’s beautiful studio in Asbury Park — the same place where my healing began — and taught my first class.

I won’t pretend I wasn’t a little bit nervous. But the moment we began moving together, something settled. The room grew quiet in that way that only happens when people are actually present in their bodies. I looked around and thought: This is it.

If any of this is calling to you, I’d love to have you join me.

Starting this Sunday, June 7th, I’m teaching a weekly Qigong class online — every Sunday morning at 9:30am Eastern. Think of it as our Sunday church of replenishment — a weekly ritual for refilling the vessel.

If you’re new to practicing Qigong with me, your first class is free. Come and see if it speaks to you.

No special equipment. No special clothing. You don’t need anything you don’t already have.

If you’d like to join me for either, just reply to this email and I’ll send you all the details.

Come curious. Come as you are. Just come.

You may have noticed we’ve been spending some time with death lately.

My father’s passing. Mary McGreevy’s obituary obsession. Kacie the Death Doula on last week’s Substack Live, where the comments and messages told me we struck a nerve.

I want to acknowledge that, and I also want to tell you I’m not planning to rename this newsletter The Daily Obituary.

But I’ve stopped apologizing for where the writing takes me. And lately it keeps taking me here, to the edges of things, to the moments when the performance finally stops. And I think I know why.

Death is where the good girl rules go to get exposed.

You can fake your way through a lot of life. You can smile when you’re exhausted, shrink when you’re angry, say I’m fine when you are very much not fine. But you cannot performance-manage your way through dying.

Kacie told us about the good girl who dies without acknowledging what she wants. That made me realize I had been doing it too — not on my deathbed, but in my planning for it. And that’s what this essay is about.

It was six long years.

Six long years of managing my mother’s every earthly need. After she ran away from her home, I knew my plan to keep her in familiar surroundings wouldn’t work. Especially not with my full-time job, one kid in high school and two in college, a new house and a new marriage.

I just couldn’t cut myself into any more pieces.

I had to find a place where she couldn’t elope — managed care lingo for a senior runaway. After visiting multiple facilities, I settled on a place that could manage dementia and her mental health needs.

Having both conditions meant she needed a lot of oversight. The staff assured me they could handle whatever behavior my mother exhibited. Immediately after moving in, my mother began packing all of her belongings from her new room that I’d just set up, and demanded to go home. Every time I visited her, she would beg to leave, her things often re-packed, and would try to follow me out through the locked doors. Sometimes the staff helped calm her; other times I was on my own.

Every visit was gut-wrenching as my nerves crescendoed the longer I sat there dreading my exit. My mother wasn’t the type to make new friends; her mind focused only on getting back home.

Her time in dementia care ended up being six years.

Much of her time there was rough. She had days when she fought with the staff, becoming violent, and had to be subdued. It was awful to hear screams when I entered the secured wing. I recognized who it was. I knew what her rage sounded like. One time after walking in and hearing her, I couldn’t cope and just turned around and left.

They do not pay aides and nurses nearly enough.

I held every medical staff member who took care of my mother with the highest regard. I had a team helping me. They did what I could not. I needed every single one of them.

My mom died two months into the pandemic, not from COVID, but from her disease. Watching the slow progression over six years had been terrifying and relentless. They say dying from dementia is like dying from a thousand paper cuts. They are right.

During and after my mom’s health odyssey, I vowed to myself that I wouldn’t go out this way. I don’t want an audience watching my mind and body deteriorate. At least my father died within three months of his lung cancer diagnosis. At the time it seemed too quick, but in retrospect, six years is an eternity. For the last year and a half of her life, she was on hospice, which was very confusing when she didn’t die right away like my dad did.

In the thick of my mom’s disease, I told my two oldest daughters to put a pillow over my face if that happened to me.

“MOM!”

Their shrieks assured me they wouldn’t be doing that.

There goes that option.

I totally understand the burden it would be to ask a third party to end my life for me. Instead, I’m putting my wishes in writing, like an Advanced Health Directive and a Medical Aid in Dying patient form, if it applied. (The MAID form with the proper authorization from doctors, allows you to take autonomy over your death.)

My living will is much more detailed than my parents’ was. For example, I put in a “do not hospitalize” statement in case I am already a diagnosed terminal patient from disease A, and then something unexpected, like disease B, tries to take me out.

I learned this lesson the hard way when my mother had sepsis while in the nursing home. The staff called an ambulance when they found her unconscious. The hospital doctors made her better so she could be a paying customer at the nursing home for another two years in a near-vegetative state.

No, thank you.

It’s all very morbid, but since you’ve made it this far, my conversation with Kacie on last week’s Substack Live stirred up some thoughts.

said women are not done being good girls on their deathbeds. They are still managing everyone else’s comfort. They are apologizing for taking up space, even as they’re leaving it.

As I was writing all of this down for you— the detailed Living Will, the do-not-hospitalize clause, the Medical Aid in Dying paperwork I intend to get in order — I realized how very practical, very organized, very me, it all sounded.

And underneath all of it, if I’m being honest, was one quiet, driving thought:

I don’t want to be a burden.

Not: I want to live fully until I can’t.

Not: I want to die the way I actually want to die.

Just don’t make it hard for them. Don’t make it what it was for me.

That’s the good girl. She didn’t go anywhere. She just learned to file paperwork.

Here’s what I’m thinking about now.

There is a difference between planning and disappearing. Between taking care of things and making yourself small before anyone has even asked you to. Between I want to die on my own terms and I just don’t want to inconvenience anyone.

My paperwork is real. My wishes are real. But if I’m honest, I built most of them around my children’s workload, not my own peace.

And what does my peace actually look like? I know exactly. I’ve seen it in my mind a hundred times. A house with French doors thrown open to the beach, with sheer curtains lifting in the breeze. The smell of salt air. The sound of waves, and above them, the laughing of seagulls. Sand. Light. The ocean doing what it always does, indifferent and eternal, while I simply watch it and breathe.

That’s my death. That’s what I actually want. But I had to write an entire essay to find it.

Kacie sees women continue in their good girl roles until the very end. Not just planning. Apologizing. Managing. Keeping the mood light. Making sure everyone will be okay before they go.

The good girl doesn’t die. She just gets quieter.

So here’s the question I’m leaving with myself — and with you. When you imagine the end of your life, who are you picturing? Who is the plan actually for?

Because not wanting to be a burden is not the same thing as knowing what you want. And you are allowed — you have always been allowed — to want something for yourself. Even then. Especially then.

Let me know in the comments what your beautiful death would look like.

My dad was the fastest gun in the West.

This is the photo of him somewhere in the New Mexico, wearing a cowboy hat, holding the reins of a horse, looking like a man who would never wait around for anything.

And he didn’t.

If my mom gave him a honey-do list, he finished it before the ink dried. There was no lollygagging. He was all action, no matter what you asked.

Except.

There is always an except, and this one had to do with his health. It’s not like he never went to the doctor. He took care of himself, going for the necessary checkups before my mom became disabled and dementia took control of their lives.

Taking care of her became his sole priority.

This was nothing new, really, as she’d always been his number one concern. Dementia took hold of my mom with a vengeance after surgery to mend a broken bone. My dad blamed himself for what happened to her, and caregiving became his penance. All of his time and attention were dedicated to taking care of my mom.

So when he was told to get some follow-up tests for the spot they saw on his lungs, he was beyond slow. He just never went.

I don’t remember when the coughing started, but it wouldn’t go away. He coughed all the time.

Finally he made the appointment.

He received a stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis in December. The doctor reassured him that there was hope and treatment possibilities. The doctor knew people who were walking around with stage 4 and living fully.

My dad felt confident that would be him, too.

I took care of my mom while my dad went to the hospital down the street for chemotherapy.

More and more though, he struggled to breathe, and it became clear one Friday in early March that the treatments weren’t working. A visiting nurse told me that the oncologist was admitting my father to the hospital.

The doctor was blunt about it. “You will not be going home again.”

He told me that my dad had only a couple more weeks to a month left, a shockingly short and grim life expectancy.

That night, from his hospital bed, he called me.

“Do you think I should get a second opinion?”

This was the same man who had no interest in pursuing one in December when he received the stage 4 diagnosis.

“Dad, I think it’s too late for another opinion.”

I hated saying those words. I hated to give up hope. I hated the thought that he would not be here much longer.

The next morning, his ability to breathe declined precipitously, and the nurses began administering morphine. Before the sun came up on Sunday morning, hospice called to tell me my father didn’t have much longer and to come in right away.

“His skin is mottled.”

The nurse thought those words would explain her urgency. To me, her words made no sense.

This was happening too fast.

Didn’t the doctor say he still had a month left? What does mottling mean anyway? No one had ever taught me the vocabulary of the dying.

I got my mother up and dressed, wheeling her chair through the quiet corridors of the hospital’s hospice unit by 6 a.m. A white blanket covered my father up to his chin. He seemed at peace, in a deep sleep from which there was no rousing him.

Unlike the day before, there was no oxygen mask, no IV, and no heart monitor beeping. His breathing was loud and jagged, with long pauses between breaths. The sound reminded me of the nights I used to clamp my pillow over my head because he snored so loudly from their bedroom across the hall.

Now it seemed like he was gasping. Sometimes I wondered if he might take another breath, but then he eventually would.

I had positioned my mother next to his bedside right near his head, but she didn’t seem to understand why we were there or who it was laboring to breathe in the bed next to her.

We were in the third hour of our vigil when I called my best friend to update her on my family’s situation. Mid-sentence, I noticed a sudden, terrible silence.

My dad had stopped breathing.

He had taken his last inhale while I was talking about him on the phone, and then…nothing.

Why had I thought I had the luxury of a few minutes to talk on the phone?

I thought I had time.

Deep down, I hadn’t imagined that he would actually die. Or that there would be no warning — that he could just stop breathing without an announcement or the consideration of allowing me to be ready.

I wasn’t ready.

A nun came in at the moment of my bewilderment. I announced he’s not breathing. Like an irrational child, I hoped she could fix something or tell me the obvious wasn’t true.

She took a stethoscope out of her pocket, placed it on his chest and listened. She turned and told us he was gone.

I looked at my father’s lifeless body. He looked like his old self, except his mouth hung open. I asked her if we should close his mouth. All the people on TV always had their lips pressed together when they died.

Maybe he had done it wrong.

Sister was kind and told me the facts of how real people die. The muscles all relax, including the jaw.

Even though I was in a hospice unit with a man who’d been given a death sentence two days earlier, I was in shock. I never thought my father would die. Not really.

He would never leave me to take care of my mother alone. He knew I wouldn’t do it right, that I couldn’t manage her. That had been his job.

But he was gone, and he had left so quickly. No two weeks languishing in a hospital. When he realized he was dying, he did it like he did everything — quick and in a hurry.

The fastest gun in the West, one last time.

I was a 50-year-old woman the day my father died, and I didn’t know what any of it should look like. No one had taught me the vocabulary of dying, or told me there would be no warning, or explained that the body knows how to let go even when the people in the room do not.

My dad held the reins of everything — the house, my mother’s care, every list he was ever handed. And then, without waiting for permission or an audience, he let go of those too.

I think we deserve to know what letting go looks like. Not to be afraid of it, but to stop being surprised by it.

That’s why I’m talking to Kacie Gikonyo, a death doula, on Substack Live — Tuesday, May 19th at 11 a.m. EST. She will talk about preparing the dying and their families for death, and I want to hear what she knows that no one ever told me. I invite you to join us.

Check Kacie out below.

Mark your calendar and I look forward to seeing you next week.
PS (I will send out a reminder on Monday with the link.)

This is the story about how I gave up my autonomy, sense of self, my freedom and instead became enmeshed with the dogma of the Catholic Church for 16 years.

No one forced me to do this. I did this to myself. I’m telling you this not because my story is unique, but because I don’t think I’m the only one.

Early in my marriage, I realized my husband and I were incompatible. The red flags had been there while we were dating. I saw them and looked the other way. They're not the point of this story.

I had already decided he was the one.

I was tired of being single. The love of my life, my boyfriend from college, had gotten away. There was no one who compared to him. I had had steady boyfriends since our break-up, and this relationship checked off important boxes. He provided enough to make a potential marriage work: a good job, steady income, attractive, and he came from a loving blue-collar family much like my own.

We had a lot in common, and fell in love.

I explained away his shortcomings, God knows I had plenty myself. Instead I focused on his positive attributes. I’d already had way too much negativity in my life with my mother’s harsh words and inability to be pleased. She thought all my boyfriends sucked, so it was easy to dismiss her complaints about this one.

Once the dust settled after a whirlwind romance, I found myself married and gave birth to two daughters in quick succession. Despite living in a family of four, I felt inexplicably alone. My spouse was physically there, but he had not woven himself into the emotional fabric of our family.

Our marriage appeared intact from the outside. It was an image we both cultivated and people expected to see.

I had achieved the dream of a suburban home with a white picket fence, but I was the one running things: the bills, the kids, the decisions. He didn’t fight me on it. He just let me. And I mistook that for a partnership.

Financial insecurity made our union worse. We’d bought a house that we had to stretch for and were now saddled with a big monthly mortgage payment. It was difficult making ends meet.

Instead of divorcing, which barely crossed my mind, I took the path of least resistance. I stayed put. Taking note of my situation, I concluded I could no longer trust myself to make important decisions. Clearly, I had settled, and now too much was at stake with two babies for whom I longed to provide the very best.

The church became a logical place to land. The building was a short walk away. We went every Sunday morning, as was my training. My mother did not allow skipping mass. It was a sin after all. I fell away from church during the free-wheeling lifestyle of a college student, but moving home landed me back in a familiar weekly pattern. Every Sunday without fail, we attended mass for the next 16 years. It gave the week its rhythm. It was what I knew.

I didn’t dive deeper into Catholicism right away because mostly I was trying to get through the day with two toddlers. Then my son came along, and my energy stretched across three people who depended on me for everything. For a long time, that was enough. They were the salt of the earth, filling my cup with joy.

As they grew up, the hollowness of the marriage confronted me. I had come up for air and found out there was no ‘there’ there.

My solution was to attend daily mass after the kids got on the bus. I was the youngest in a group of gray-haired folks. If I got there early, I could say the rosary in my pew before mass started. It comforted me to be in the church’s quiet. I thought it was God who drew me there. He saw me. He could fix this.

I journaled during this time, and when I read those entries back, I could see how despondent I was. I begged God to heal my husband. To make him come back to us. Even though his body was there, his mind and heart were not.

The church gave me language for my suffering that made it feel sacred instead of senseless. I wasn’t lonely — I was carrying my cross. I wasn’t trapped — I was honoring my vocation. I wasn’t unhappy — I was being tested.

Once I had those words, I didn’t need my own anymore.

I listened to Catholic AM radio and cassette tapes whenever I could — running errands, folding laundry, waiting in the pickup line. I filled every quiet moment with the church’s voice so there was no room left for my own. I called it studying.

Now I see it for what it was: I was drowning out the doubt. I thought it would be my salvation and the key to staying in my marriage. I would somehow rise above the dysfunction.

I enrolled in a Catholic lay program to take a deep dive into the faith. The pastor had to approve it, and I felt lucky when he did. The course was a series of classes over a couple of years. I had to complete a project for our local church in order to graduate.

I became a Eucharistic minister, and when that wasn’t enough, I became a teacher in the RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults), a program for people converting to the faith as adults. I headed a regional Catholic women’s annual retreat called MOM (Mary Our Mother) – Heart of the Home.

I didn’t think of those things as work. I thought of them as service. But I was staffing the church for free — training their new members, standing at their altar, completing a project for the parish just to earn a certificate. The more I gave, the more invested I became, and the harder it was to imagine walking away from everything I’d built.

That’s how it works. They don’t have to lock the door. You lock it yourself.

By then, the church had become the lens through which I saw everything. People outside the faith weren’t just different — they were lost. Ours was the one true faith.

Friends who slept in on Sundays, who questioned doctrine, who trusted themselves over scripture — I pitied them quietly. I didn’t realize that the wall I’d built between us and them was also the wall keeping me in.

The full story of why I left my marriage is one I’ve told before and won’t retell here. What I’ll say is that love came back into my life, and it reminded me what it felt like to be fully seen. That was the jolt. Everything I’d been holding in place started to unravel.

When I finally left, I thought the church would catch me. I’d given it sixteen years. I’d walked to daily mass. I’d trained converts. I’d stood at the altar and placed the Eucharist in people’s hands.

Surely that counted for something.

I went to the pastor. He told me the failure of my marriage was my fault — something I’d set in motion as a reckless twenty-year-old. There was no curiosity. No compassion. Just a verdict.

After that, I was shunned. Not dramatically — no one stood up and pointed. People just stopped talking to me. The women I’d run the retreats with, the ones I’d trained alongside, they looked through me.

I was trouble. I had broken the rules, and the rules were all that held us together. There was no fabric underneath. I’d mistaken structure for love.

I didn’t make a dramatic exit. I just stopped going. It wasn’t a door slamming. It was more like finally putting down something heavy that I’d convinced myself I needed to carry.

What took longer was understanding what those years had actually been. I used to think my time as a Eucharistic minister, an RCIA trainer, a student of the faith — I thought that was devotion.

Now I see it differently.

I was grappling. I was circling the things that never made sense to me, hoping that if I got closer, studied harder, gave more of myself, the belief would finally take root.

Someone once told me, “If it all made sense, what would be there to believe?” And I accepted that. I let it quiet the questions. But the questions never actually stopped.

The truth I couldn’t admit, not to the grannies at daily mass, not to the converts I trained, not even to myself, was that I never fully believed. Not deep down. I gave it lip service. I performed belief the way I performed a happy marriage, convincingly enough that even I almost bought it. And when the belief didn’t come, I did what I’d always done: I blamed myself. If I just studied more. If I just prayed harder. If I were smarter, more faithful, more something, it would click.

That’s the trick, isn’t it? The system tells you that doubt is your deficiency. Not a sign that something doesn’t hold up; rather, a sign that you don’t measure up. And for a woman who had already decided she couldn’t trust her own judgment, that was the perfect trap.

I found the word for what I’d been doing on TikTok, of all places. A woman was talking about religious deconstruction — the process of pulling apart the beliefs you were handed and deciding which ones, if any, are actually yours. I didn’t even know it was a thing. But listening to her, and then to others — atheists, former evangelicals, ex-Catholics — who methodically picked apart the very doctrines I’d been asked to swallow whole, I felt something I hadn’t expected. Not anger. Relief. Someone was finally saying out loud what I had been too ashamed to whisper: this doesn’t make sense, and it’s not because something is wrong with you.

I’m still in that process. I put up a tree every December, not for the birth of Christ, but for the winter solstice — for the pagan roots underneath the story I was told. I keep what I choose to keep. I leave the rest. That’s not rebellion. That’s autonomy. And it’s taken me a very long time to know the difference.

What are you not allowed to question? Start there.

If you found something here worth keeping, pass it on. A like, a comment, a restack — it's how The Pebble in Your Shoe finds the people who need it most. And if you have wisdom of your own to add, the comments are open. I'd love to hear what you'd put on your list.

Who agrees that grandmothers have more than earned their own research study?

Dr. Neal K. Shah, a Johns Hopkins and NIH-funded researcher, certainly does. In an Instagram video, he speaks about why grandparents seem more joyful with their grandchildren than they were with their own children.

My children haven’t expressed this thought to me, but they see a different version of me than when they were growing up.

Emory University scanned the brains of grandmothers looking at photos of their grandchildren. The emotional center fired instantly. Scientists called it “Grandma Brain.” When the same grandmothers looked at photos of their adult children, their brains responded totally differently, not with less love, but with a different kind. The brain fired in a more thoughtful, complex way. (Translation: still love you deeply, just with a side of “have you paid your taxes?”)

The lead researcher asked the same grandmothers what was different. Not one of them talked about love, but said, “This time I’m not scared, I’m not exhausted, no one’s judging me. This time I get to show up and feel every single moment without the weight of the world on my shoulders.”

Grandparents don’t love their adult children less, but love their grandchildren in a way they wished they could have loved their own children: freely, lightly, and without the weight of the world on their shoulders. This is their second chance. And watching them take it is one of the most beautiful things a family can witness.

I watched that video three times because it named something I hadn’t found words for yet.

I was a good mother. I was also scared, exhausted, and carrying more than I knew. My children got my best and also my worst moments, my unfinished edges, my fears I hadn’t yet faced.

My grandchildren get what’s left after I put all of that down. Turns out, what’s left is actually the good stuff.

So this birthday (I turned 63 last week) I wrote some things down. Not a confession. Not an apology. A few things I know now that I wish I’d known then. The weight I’ve finally set at the door. And the things I’m still, honestly, wrestling with.

I’m writing it for my kids. None of us should have to wait until we’re gone to pass on what we know. But if you find something here, that belongs to you, take it.

1. Your house doesn’t need to be perfect.

It doesn’t have to be sterile or pass a white-glove test. It doesn’t have to look like the soft hues of a Pottery Barn spread. It doesn’t need to impress anyone. Your kids don’t care what your house looks like. They don’t need color-coordinated sofa pillows. They only need their home to feel safe, like a warm embrace, a refuge from the outside world.

So keep those pencil marks on the wall to show how much they’ve grown, frame their crayon drawings, and display their dandelion bouquets.

2. People will come and go in your life.

Your childhood friendships may not last until you’re 40. That’s normal and totally ok.

I think of the friends you made in those years on the cul-de-sac — how close you all were, how permanent it seemed. And then life moved everyone like a handful of dice thrown in the air. Not all friendships survived the distance, and I know that hurts. Childhood friends know where you came from. Later friends will know who you decided to be. You need both, but the second kind you have to go find.

What I know at 63 is that new friendships can happen faster than you’d expect, and go deeper than the ones you spent decades building. You get pickier. But you also get braver about saying, ‘I want to know you better.’ I never had that courage at 30. There’s less pretense — you show up as you actually are, not who you think they want to meet. And if it doesn’t work out, you’re okay. You’re not devastated. You’ve learned that some people are for a season, and that’s enough.

3. Don’t waste your time drinking.

I used to inventory it, shop for it, spend my hard-earned dollars on just the right bottle, and then choose the best occasion to drink it. The amount of mental energy I gave to “what should we open?” could have powered a small village. It was nothing but a means of escape. I never spent as much time chasing the ripest mango, which is food that was actually nutritious.

Looking back, I can’t name one positive thing about the experience of drinking. Back then, I didn’t know that it was a carcinogen. Now its widespread knowledge that alcohol contributes to 7 types of cancer and many diseases.

If that’s not enough, it causes you to say or do regrettable things you normally wouldn’t if you were sober. You will make plenty of mistakes on your own, don’t let drinking make you add to your list.

Plus, you feel like crap the next day. A truly inefficient hobby.

4. Your body keeps the score, but it also keeps showing up.

The body that annoys you with its allergies and menstrual cramps is a friend, not a foe. It gives you data which you should take seriously.

Think about what this body does without being asked. Your heart has beaten roughly 100,000 times today alone without a reminder, without a thank you. It grew your children from nothing. It has carried you through every hard thing you’ve ever survived, and it is still here, still showing up, still asking only that you pay attention.

When it speaks — an ache, a flutter, an exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix — listen. It’s not betraying you. It’s trying to tell you something.

5. You are enough. You are perfect inside and out. Really.

You’ve heard this before, but I want you to really hear it. Corporations trying to sell you something invented the standard you’re measuring yourself against. The diet and beauty industry alone is worth over a kajillion dollars, built entirely on making you feel you’re not thin or pretty enough. No one actually looks like the magazine cover. Not even the woman on it! She’s been smoothed and shrunk and lit within an inch of her actual humanity.

Ok, that’s five things. I could have written fifty. But you have lives to live, and so do I.

What I can tell you is that I’m not done learning. The list of what I’m still wrestling with is probably longer than the list of what I know. Fear, for instance. Fear and I have reached a truce, but negotiations are ongoing. She still shows up uninvited, but she no longer runs the meeting.

Rest still feels like surrender some days.

And there’s a voice that occasionally asks, “Who do you think you are?” She’s quieter now, but she hasn’t left the building.

But I’m not waiting until I’m gone to say what I know. None of us should. I hope you take these words to heart.

Which brings me to this coming Tuesday.

I’m so excited to welcome to Substack Live — creator of Tips from Dead People, where the departed pass on what they wished the living knew. Join us Tuesday, April 21st at 11 a.m on Substack Live. Because this conversation — about what we carry, what we pass down, and what we finally set at the door — is one worth having while we’re still here. Just click here on Tuesday. Don’t worry, I’ll send you a reminder on Monday.

In the meantime, you can check out Mary’s Substack out below.

Tips From Dead People

Welcome to the inside of my brain, stuffed full of potato chips, semi-colons, and obituaries.

By Mary McGreevy

If you have Instagram, you can follow her there.

Can’t wait to see you on Tuesday!

On Saturday, I went to the No Kings Rally in Toms River, New Jersey.

I brought a homemade sign that caused some enthusiastic honking. (Scroll all the way down for a peek.)

There were so many amazing signs, but one impressed me the most. The sign belonged to a 94 year old, in a wheelchair, and read: NO KINGS. (Not in my 94 years — NOT EVER.)

I don’t know her name. I know she showed up. And I know that when a 94-year-old woman wheels herself to a rally, the least the rest of us can do is get off the couch.

This was the biggest turnout yet — over 8 million people at more than 3,300 events across all 50 states. Organizers are calling it the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history. The first rally drew 5 million. Then 7 million. Now 8 million. Something is growing.

Was it fun? Yes. Was it energizing to be surrounded by people who are paying attention? Absolutely. But I want to be honest with you: a rally doesn’t save democracy. Showing up on a Saturday feels good. The harder work happens on the other days — in the conversations you don’t walk away from, with the people you can’t quite avoid.

Last fall I wrote Why Good People Must Stop Being Quiet — with actual scripts for those moments when someone drops a lie at the dinner table and you freeze. If you haven’t read it, now is a good time. If you have, it might be worth another look.

P.S. April Fools! There is no 94-year-old. There was no rally. Democracy is fine. Everything is fine. (It's not fine. She was real. Go read Why Good People Must Stop Being Quiet and get those scripts ready to play a part in saving our democracy.)

A few things going forward:

I’m writing twice a month now — a choice I made intentionally, not reluctantly. You’ll still hear from me, and when you do, it’ll be worth opening. I’m also hosting a monthly Substack Live. If you haven’t joined one yet, keep an eye out — the next one is coming soon.

Show up when it matters. See you in two weeks