After decades of reassuring our children that we're "doing great," we've mastered a performance so convincing that the exhaustion from maintaining it has become heavier than any physical ailment we're actually hiding.
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Last week, I caught myself doing it again.
My daughter called to check in, and when she asked how I was feeling, I automatically chirped, "Oh, I'm great! Just got back from my walk!" What I didn't mention was that my hip had been screaming at me all morning, or that the walk was actually just a slow shuffle to the mailbox and back.
The exhaustion I felt afterward wasn't from the exercise.
It was from the performance.
There's a particular kind of tiredness that settles into your bones after 65, and it has nothing to do with age or physical decline.
It's the bone-deep weariness that comes from constantly curating a version of yourself that won't trigger your children's worry alarms.
Every conversation becomes a delicate dance where you're simultaneously the person you actually are and the reassuring parent they need you to be.
The invisible tightrope we walk
When did this start? I remember the exact moment for me.
Three years after my knee replacements, I mentioned to my son that I'd been having trouble getting the garbage cans to the curb.
The next week, he'd arranged for a service to handle it, contacted my neighbor about checking on me, and started dropping hints about "safer living arrangements."
All because of garbage cans.
The message was clear: any admission of struggle would be met with solutions I hadn't asked for, independence I wasn't ready to surrender.
So I learned to edit myself, to present the highlight reel rather than the behind-the-scenes footage.
This selective sharing becomes exhausting in ways that physical tiredness never could be.
Physical fatigue, you can rest from.
But this? This requires constant vigilance.
You become your own PR manager, spinning every ache into a minor inconvenience, every forgotten word into a funny story rather than a concerning symptom.
You learn to time your phone calls for when you have energy, to schedule visits after you've had time to rest and prepare your "everything's fine" face.
When protection becomes performance
The irony is that we do this out of love.
We watched our own parents age, remember? I spent years driving back and forth to help my mother while raising my own children, watching her stubbornly insist she was fine while her refrigerator held nothing but expired yogurt and her pills sat untaken on the counter.
I swore I'd be different, more honest, more willing to accept help.
But here I am, telling my daughter during our Sunday calls that I'm eating well when dinner was crackers and cheese again because cooking for one feels pointless some nights.
Here I am, not mentioning that I've started writing important things down because my memory isn't what it was, or that sometimes I sit in the car for ten minutes after grocery shopping, gathering the energy to carry the bags inside.
Why do we do this? Because we've seen what happens when the balance tips.
We've watched friends whose children swooped in after one too many admissions of difficulty, making decisions that felt like rescue missions but landed like invasions.
We know that "I'm concerned about Mom" can quickly become "Mom can't handle this anymore," and suddenly you're being discussed in the third person while sitting right there in the room.
The cost of keeping up appearances
Shakespeare wrote that "all the world's a stage," but he never mentioned how exhausting it becomes when your audience is your own children.
This performance requires energy I don't always have.
Energy that could be spent on actual wellness rather than the appearance of it.
Some days, maintaining the illusion takes everything I've got.
After a particularly convincing performance during a family dinner, where I stayed bright and engaged while my hip throbbed and fatigue pulled at me like an undertow, I went home and slept for fourteen hours.
Not because of the physical activity, but because of the emotional labor of being "fine."
The mental load is staggering.
You're constantly calculating: Is this complaint small enough to share? If I mention the doctor's appointment, will they insist on coming? Can I frame this challenge as already solved so they don't feel the need to intervene? It's exhausting math that never stops.
Finding the space between honesty and alarm
I've been trying something different lately, inspired by a conversation with a friend who's navigating the same waters.
She calls it "strategic truth-telling."
Instead of the binary of "I'm fine" or "I'm falling apart," she offers what she calls "managed honesty."
"My hip's been acting up, but I'm handling it with stretching and those exercises from physical therapy," she'll tell her kids, or "I had a tough day yesterday, so I'm taking it easy today."
It acknowledges reality without triggering the emergency response system.
I tried it during last Sunday's call with my daughter.
"I've been a little more tired than usual," I said, "so I'm being careful to pace myself.
Got my groceries delivered this week instead of going myself."
She responded with concern but not panic, suggestions but not interventions.
It felt like finding a secret passage between two rooms I thought were completely separate.
The truth is, our children want to know us, not just the polished version we present.
But they also want to fix things, to solve problems, to protect us the way we once protected them.
Finding the balance between their need to help and our need to maintain autonomy requires a different kind of strength than I ever had to develop as a younger woman.
Final thoughts
The exhaustion that comes from performing wellness is real, and acknowledging it doesn't mean we're giving up or giving in.
It means we're human, navigating a stage of life that doesn't come with a handbook.
Some days I manage the performance better than others.
Some days I don't manage it at all, and that's okay too.
Maybe the answer isn't perfect honesty or perfect performance, but something messier and more real in between.
Maybe it's okay to be tired from the effort of it all, to acknowledge that this dance we do is hard work.
After all, the most profound connections often come not from our strength, but from our willingness to occasionally let the mask slip, just a little, and let our children see that we're still figuring it out too.
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