Wife & Mother: A Woman’s Role or Cage?

When reality hits

Wildflowers Grow is a Mental Health publication, featuring memoir and fiction writing by Alice Wild for women and survivors. It is a safe space to rest and grow—flourish and connect. And also a publication to amplify the light within the voices of those who have been silenced.

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🎧 Click to listen to a preview of this post’s audio voiceover:

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“If you could go back to when you were eighteen, what would you do differently?”

The voice on the other end of the line was my mother’s. And the question sprang from a deep well of inner conflict brewing within me. My mother is always the one I go to about these, and I realize how fortunate I am to have a mother like this.

I had been reading

Elizabeth Gilbert

’s Eat Pray Love again. The first time I read this inspiring book was when I was eighteen. I had just transferred colleges to peruse a major I felt was more suited to me (graphic design) and a high school relationship that I felt was unraveling (it was).

Later, both would become equally detrimental.

In fact, my whole twenties would be a time of unraveling. Escalating into my thirties until the mess of unraveled threads, I tried so desperately to put back together, would threaten to break entirely.

“Why the f—ck hadn’t I listened to this book when I was eighteen?! What happened?” I said aloud to my mother, waving my hand in the air—to the universe as I clutched the phone in desperation.

Eat Pray Love is all about a woman on a quest to find who she is, after a terrible divorce—realizing that she had been living her life for others. The flame inside of her had warmed everyone else but herself. And this poor flame had given of itself so extensively, the last remaining embers threatened to go out entirely.

How deeply this had hit me then. How much deeper it hits me now.

I understood this burning out and giving away, even at the ripe age of eighteen. I had ugly cried—clutching the book after I read about Liz’s middle of the night, tearful bathroom floor experience: when everything had come crashing down around her. After the midnight pool of tears cascaded across her tile floor, Liz had been gifted with knowing in that space.

I hadn’t.

I can only imagine how differently my life would have been if I had turned things around when I read the book at eighteen and followed in Liz Gilbert’s awakened footsteps.

If I had understood how to listen to my own self-knowing (my own flame) and rejected the roles I had been expected to play.

But it was as if I hadn’t read the book at all. I kept living my life the same way I had been taught to, kept making the same choices within the same conditioning. I thought I was breaking away, but I continued to live by the rules and abusive framework I was taught.

That poor little eighteen-year-old girl just didn’t know any better.

My life would continue to burn out in waves, each time leaving deeper scars. And then, two years ago, I nearly didn’t make it through the night. Unfortunately, it was’t Elizabeth Gilbert’s words that would begin my awakening (this would have saved me so much pain), but the sterile brightness of hospital lights nearly two decades later.

It just goes to show how strong conditioning can be: the framework by which we live our lives. The lens by which we were taught to see the world. How we’ve come to understand ourselves, how the world works and its relation to our existence. So much of mine was programmed.

“What went wrong?” I said the words quietly to my mom, tears nearing the surface. “How did I end up here?”

And that’s when she asked that knowing question: What would you have done differently?

Liz’s answer (in Eat Pray Love) was that she didn’t want to be married anymore. That she did not want to have kids. And she would go on to travel the world, write and find herself.

Fortunately for Liz (and unfortunately because she went through hell), this existential crisis came shortly after her marriage and before having children—a gap of opportunity, for a woman to find herself. One she fought hard for, through years of a divorce and sinking even lower in despair.

But she broke free and found herself.

What about for those of us who are a decade into marriage and having children and feel trapped? How do we claw our way out of the cage we have built because everyone told us this was our role?

What would you have done differently?

What can you do about it now?

I knew my gut response to my mother’s question might break me. I knew what a part of me was screaming to say, but was absolutely terrified to say out loud.