I'm 70 and my daughter said something at dinner last month that made me realize I'd spent thirty years earning a love I already had — I just couldn't feel it through all the performing

"Mom, you know you don't have to earn our love anymore, right? You haven't had to for decades. We just love you."

My daughter's words stopped me mid-bite, fork hovering over my mother's pot roast recipe. We were sitting at my kitchen table last month, the same table where she'd done homework thirty years ago, where her children now text their friends during Sunday dinners. Wine glasses caught the evening light, and suddenly I couldn't swallow.

At 70, you'd think I'd have figured this out by now. But there I was, still performing a role I'd written for myself when she was just two years old and her father walked out the door.

The performance that became my identity

Have you ever caught yourself in the middle of an exhausting routine you can't remember starting? That was me, three decades deep into a one-woman show called "Earning My Right to Be Loved."

The script began the night I became a single mother. My son was five, my daughter two, and overnight I transformed into someone I didn't recognize. This new character could stretch a chicken into three meals, smile through parent-teacher conferences after working a second job, and read bedtime stories when her own eyes were burning with exhaustion. She was magnificent, this woman I played. She was also slowly disappearing the real me beneath layers of trying too hard.

The thing about performing is that once you start, it becomes addictive. Each successful act—each bill paid on time despite the odds, each school event attended despite bone-deep tiredness—felt like a deposit in some cosmic bank account where I was saving up for the right to be loved. As if love was something you could earn with enough overtime.

When trying harder becomes your only strategy

I spent thirty-two years teaching high school English, telling teenagers their worth wasn't tied to their test scores while secretly believing my own worth was entirely tied to my performance reviews. Isn't it strange how we can teach truths we can't accept for ourselves?

Even after winning Teacher of the Year twice, that voice in my head whispered "fraud" every September. So I stayed later, graded more carefully, cared more visibly. If I could just be the perfect teacher, the perfect mother, the perfect survivor of divorce, then maybe I'd deserve the love that was offered to me.

When I met my second husband at a school auction—I'd accidentally outbid him on a weekend getaway I couldn't afford—the performing continued. Three years I made him wait before meeting my children, pretending I was being cautious when really I was terrified. What if they saw through my act? What if he realized I wasn't the strong, independent woman I was playing but just someone desperately trying to hold it all together?

He saw through it anyway. "Stop trying so hard," he'd tell me, fixing something around the house without being asked, making lunches I hadn't requested. "I just love you." But those words bounced off me like rain on a windshield. I couldn't let them in.

The exhaustion of never being enough

You know what's exhausting? Believing you're one mistake away from losing everything. Every birthday cake from a box mix felt like evidence of my inadequacy, even when I added extra vanilla to hide its origins. Every school play I missed while teaching night school felt like a mark against my motherhood account.

"I made you be the man of the house," I told my son years later, both of us crying in my kitchen. "You were just a little boy, and I made you grow up too fast." He said there was nothing to forgive, but forgiveness from others doesn't mean much when you're committed to punishing yourself.

The performances became more elaborate as the years went on. During my mother's decline with Alzheimer's, I performed Capable Daughter while drowning in grief. Through my husband's seven-year journey with Parkinson's, I performed Grateful Caregiver while rage and fear ate at my insides. After his death, I performed Graceful Widow when all I wanted was to disappear.

Even with my grandchildren, the show went on. I'd let them destroy my kitchen making cookies, smiling through my aching knees, never mentioning how much the mess overwhelmed me. Because good grandmothers don't get overwhelmed. Good grandmothers are endlessly patient, endlessly available, endlessly delighted. Right?

What love actually looks like

"You were always enough," my daughter continued that night, her hand reaching across the table to cover mine. "Even when you were falling apart. Especially then. That's when we learned what love really looked like."

Do you know what happens when someone tells you the performance you've been killing yourself to maintain was never necessary? It's like learning you've been holding your breath for thirty years.

She went on to tell me how my struggles hadn't diminished me in her eyes—they'd shown her what strength really meant. Not the performed kind, but the real kind. The kind that shows up imperfectly but consistently. The kind that makes birthday cakes from boxes and apologizes for missed plays and cries at kitchen tables and keeps going anyway.

All those years I spent believing I was failing, my children were watching me survive. All those moments I thought proved my inadequacy, they saw as evidence of my love. The very struggles I tried to hide from them became the lessons that shaped them.

Learning from my own roses

Yesterday morning, I stood in my garden looking at roses I've tended for decades. They don't perform for anyone. They bloom when they're ready, rest when they need to, die back without apology and return without fanfare. They don't earn the sun or justify their thorns. They simply exist, and that existence is enough.

Why is it so hard to grant ourselves the same grace we extend to flowers?

Virginia Woolf once wrote, "No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself." Easy to quote, harder to live. But at 70, I'm finally starting to understand that love—real love—isn't a transaction. It's not a wage you earn through perfect performances or a prize for never showing weakness.

It's a gift, freely given, asking only that you receive it.

Final thoughts

This morning I sat with my tea and journal, but instead of listing gratitudes to earn another good day, I wrote something different: "I am loved. Not because of what I do, but because of who I am. I always have been."

The performance is over. The exhausting, decades-long show has finally closed. And you know what? The audience—my children, my grandchildren, the ghost of my late husband, my closest friends—they weren't there for the performance anyway. They were there for me. The real me. The one who was always, always enough.