The Woman Who Leaves
Definition
She was told to stay. By the expectation that women maintain, that women endure, that women find a way to make the situation workable rather than acknowledging that the situation is not workable. She may have stayed for years past the point of truth. When she left, it was called failure, or selfishness, or not trying hard enough. The woman who leaves a marriage, a family system, a religion, a career, a country, a friendship knows something about the cost of honesty. She did not leave because it was easy. She left because staying required her to be someone she could no longer be. That distinction matters enormously.
Origins & Context
Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women Who Run With the Wolves names the capacity to leave the life that no longer fits as one of the essential attributes of the wild woman: the instinctual knowing that this is no longer the right place, and the willingness to trust that knowing even when everyone says to stay.
Harriet Lerner in The Dance of Intimacy and Mary Oliver in her poetry both honor the departure that is not abandonment but completion: the recognition that the container has been outgrown, that continuing inside it would require self-betrayal, and that leaving is a form of integrity.
Christiane Northrup in Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom traces the physical health implications of staying past the body's truth: the chronic illness that develops when a woman remains in a life that is fundamentally wrong for her, and the recovery that often accompanies the courageous departure.
She did not leave because it was easy. She left because staying required her to be someone she could no longer be. That is not failure. That is one of the more honest things a woman can do.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
The woman who is ready to leave but has not yet shows up as: the split between what she presents to the world and what she knows privately. The public story is fine. The private knowing is that she has already left in everything but form.
She shows up as the exhaustion that does not respond to rest. Because what is exhausting is not the activity but the performance of staying when she is already gone.
The woman who has left shows up as the guilt and the relief existing simultaneously. The grief for what was and the surprising spaciousness of what is now possible. Both are real and neither cancels the other.
She shows up as the model for the daughters, sisters, and friends who are watching. The woman who leaves when leaving is the honest thing gives other women permission they could not have given themselves.
Generational Transmission
Through the maternal line: The mother who did not leave, who stayed past her truth in service of stability or expectation or fear, is part of the daughter's inheritance. The daughter who leaves what her mother could not leave is completing something for both of them. She is also, sometimes, living out the leaving her mother secretly wanted and could not choose. This is both a gift and a burden. The leaving should be for the daughter's own life, not only as a completion of her mother's unlived one. Both can be true.
Through the paternal line: The father's response to the women who left in his life shapes what leaving means in the daughter's internal world. The father who punished departure, who made the women who left pay for their leaving, installed a prohibition. The father who respected the leaving, who could honor a woman's need to go even when it cost him, gave the daughter a very different permission. The father's model of female autonomy is always part of what the daughter is navigating when she considers whether she is allowed to leave.
Nikita's Note
Every time I have been in the presence of a woman who has just left something that was no longer hers, the thing I notice first is the way she breathes.
Not relief exactly. More like: oxygen returning to a system that had been running on less than it needed.
The leaving is always costly. There is always something real that is lost. And the leaving is often also the beginning of the woman who was always there, underneath the performance of staying.
From the work
She did not leave because it was easy. She left because staying required her to be someone she could no longer be. That is not failure. That is one of the more honest things a woman can do.From Healing the Mother Wound by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Daughter's Lexicon
See all in The Daughter's Lexicon →I wrote about this in Healing the Mother Wound — available on Amazon.