Before she learned to want the right things

She didn't go anywhere. She just got quiet.

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She Followed Every Rule

Aunt Francis was my rock.

She stood between me and my mother during some of the hardest moments of my childhood. She never judged me. Never scolded. Just quietly loved me, exactly as I was.

She was also my favorite Friday night date.

I’d pick her up and take her to the local A&W drive-in for a root beer float. We’d sit side by side, sipping slowly, letting the world spin without us for a while.

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Many years later, I moved back to my hometown to help care for my dad. He had a ten-piece band that played gigs at nearly every nursing home in the area. Well into his 80s, he performed up to ten times a month. I tagged along as his roadie — setting up equipment, running cables, hauling the sound system in and out of places that smelled like cafeteria food and old carpet.

I had a habit of sitting behind the band and watching the audience instead of the musicians. I wanted to see the music land. I wanted to witness the stories tucked behind every set of eyes.

One of their most devoted fans was Aunt Francis. She lived in one of the homes we visited every month. Her whole face would light up when she saw us come through the door.

But there were times I caught something else.

Moments when she didn’t know I was looking. A quiet sadness. A kind of distant ache that had nothing to do with the music.

I’d study her face, trying to understand it.

She had followed every rule. Stayed in line. Made dinner, paid the bills, raised the kid, showed up the way she was told a good woman should. And now she was in a retirement home because that was convenient for the kid — waiting for the next meal, the next sing-along, the next trip to the beauty parlor where, if she was lucky, someone might ask how she was doing and actually mean it.

Francis had things she wanted. She wanted to write. She wanted to dance again. She wanted to travel, laugh too loud, feel beautiful. For years she’d sold Avon the old-fashioned way — knocking on doors in her neighborhood, talking to strangers, building something small and hers.

But somewhere along the way, she’d come to believe it was too late. That her chance had passed. That those things belonged to the young.

She was wrong.

And I sat behind that band, month after month, watching the woman who had loved me without conditions — watching her wait for a life she’d already decided she couldn’t have — and something in me made a decision.

Not her decision. Mine.

---

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about the women I watched in those rooms.

They didn’t disappear because they got old. They disappeared because they kept following rules that had stopped serving them decades ago. Rules about how much space a woman gets to take. How loud she’s allowed to be. What she’s permitted to want at this age, in this body, at this particular point in her story.

The rules didn’t ask permission to move in. They arrived quietly, early, and they stayed.

And the saddest thing isn’t aging.

The saddest thing is a woman sitting in a room full of music, aching for a life she talked herself out of.

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I don’t know what institution wrote your rules. Could have been a career. A marriage. Years of caregiving. A church. A family that had opinions about who you were supposed to be and never stopped sharing them.

Doesn’t matter what you call it.

What matters is this: the woman who knew what she wanted — before she learned to want the right things — she didn’t go anywhere.

She got quiet. She got practical. She got good at making herself smaller so everyone else could be comfortable.

But she’s still in there.

And she’s been waiting, not for permission exactly, but for you to stop asking for it.

You don’t have to reclaim everything at once. You don’t need a plan or a program or a breakthrough moment. You need one decision. One want you stop apologizing for. One morning where you do the thing that’s been sitting in the back of your chest for years, quietly asking when.

Aunt Francis never got that morning.

You still have yours.

If something in this story stayed with you — if you felt the recognition before you felt the words for it — I want you to know there’s a place for that.

I’ve been quietly building something called the Monirose Soul Circle. It’s a small group of women who are done waiting for their life to feel like theirs again. Not a support group. Not a place to process pain, though we understand it. A place to think out loud with women who have lived enough to know what they’re talking about — and who want peers, not cheerleaders.

We share what’s true. We ask the real questions. We hold each other to the version of ourselves we’re trying to grow into, not the version we’ve been performing.

If you’re just beginning to understand that you’re allowed to want what you want — that’s exactly the right moment to come in.

You don’t need to have it figured out. You just need to be done pretending you don’t care.

Come see if it feels like home.

And if something in this piece made you pause, nod, or feel a little less alone — please give it a heart before you go. That one small tap tells the algorithm this conversation matters. It puts these words in front of another woman who needs to hear them today. She's out there. Help me find her.