Forty Years And I Never Said So

You have been doing this a long time.

Long enough that you cannot remember the first year. Long enough that the dread has stopped feeling like a thing that happens to you and started feeling like part of the furniture, the way a draft under a door stops being a draft after a while and becomes just how that room is.

And in all that time, you have never said it.

Not properly. You have said you get tired around then. You have said it is a lot, and laughed, and changed the subject in the same breath, which is a thing you got very good at somewhere around the second decade. But you have never looked at another living person and said the plain sentence: I dread this day, and I have dreaded it every year since I was a young woman.

I want to be careful here, because I think you could tell me exactly why you never said it, and every one of your reasons would be a decent one. There were people who needed the day to be lovely. There were years when saying it would have hurt somebody who could not have helped it. There was a stretch when you were the only one holding the whole thing together and a sentence like that would have been a hole in the boat.

Those were real. I am not going to stand here at this distance and tell you that forty years of judgment calls were all wrong. But I do want to say the thing nobody has said to you, which is that a silence you keep for good reasons is still a silence, and it costs the same whether the reasons were good or not.

Even to hoar hairs

There is a promise in Isaiah that people usually hear as a comfort about dying, and it is not about dying at all.

And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you. (Isaiah 46:4, King James Version)

Read what it says about the length of things. Even to your old age. Even to hoar hairs, which is gray hair, which is you and it is me. God is talking to people who have been at something for a very long time.

And He does not say: you should have handled this better by now. He does not say: at your age. What He says is that the carrying does not have an expiry date on it, and that the same One who made a person is the One still bearing them at the far end of their life.

There is nothing in that verse about how much a person has managed to say out loud. The carrying is not a reward for good communication.

You have been carried through every one of those forty silent years, and the written word has never once made that carrying conditional on saying anything. Isaiah 46:4 puts the making and the bearing in the same breath, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that from a nice line and makes it something you can lean your weight on tonight.

That is the ground under this. Not a scolding. Ground.

But now I want to put something beside it, gently, because nobody comes to a page like this to be told that everything is fine.

You are able to say a true thing at seventy that you could not say at thirty, and it is written into Isaiah 46:4 that God has no intention of putting you down before the end. The Spirit of God does not hand a person courage for a life already lived; He hands it for the sentence in front of them.

What forty years of not saying it does

Here is what I have watched the long silence do, and none of it is dramatic.

It does not make you bitter. That is the thing people expect and it is usually not what happens. What it does is quieter than that. It makes you slightly absent on the day itself. You stand there, doing every bit of it, and some part of you is four feet behind your own shoulder, watching yourself do it. People say you seem far away. You say it is just tiredness.

It also makes you an expert at management. You know how to move a conversation. You know which room to be in. You have a whole craft, forty years deep, of getting through a day without anybody finding out how you feel about it, and there is nobody alive who could tell you anything about how to do that.

You were never absent because you stopped caring, and Scripture keeps a whole book of people who felt one thing and did another for years at a time. Isaiah 46:4 speaks to a people God had carried through exactly that kind of long stretch, and the Holy Spirit is the one who names the difference between weariness and coldness in a woman who has confused the two.

And here is the cost, which I think you already know and have never had a name for. A thing that has never been said out loud cannot be helped. Not by anybody. Your family are not withholding help; they are not in possession of the information. Forty years of excellent management has produced, among other things, a household in which nobody knows.

That is not their failure and it is not yours. It is just what a silence does.

You have not been ignored for forty years, and the written word puts a God who says I have made, and I will bear over the whole length of a life. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in a kitchen where somebody is deciding whether to say a sentence for the first time.

What one sentence is actually for

I am not going to ask you to have a conversation. Let me be plain about the size of this.

I am not asking you to explain forty years. I am not asking you to tell anybody why, or to go back over the decades and account for them, or to have the sort of talk where everybody ends up crying in a kitchen. Nobody should hand a woman your age homework, and I will not do it.

One sentence. Said once, to one person, in ordinary words. Something on the order of: I find this day hard, and I always have.

That is the whole of it. No history, no explanation, no request attached.

You are allowed to say a plain sentence without owing anybody the story behind it, and Isaiah 46:4 has God carrying a person who explains nothing at all in the verse. The Holy Spirit is the one who steadies a woman's voice while she says a short true thing for the first time in her adult life.

And I will tell you what one sentence does, because it is not what people expect. It does not fix the day. It does not make anybody understand. What it does is end the specific loneliness of being the only person who knows, and that loneliness turns out to have been carrying a great deal of the weight all along.

You were never meant to be the only one who knew, and the written word does not have one story in it of a person made stronger by keeping a hard thing entirely to themselves. Scripture puts it plainly in Isaiah 46:4 that the bearing belongs to God, and the Spirit of God is the one who brings a person to the point of letting somebody else in on it.