05/09/2025
I started living at age 58.
Until then, I never thought life could be any different—without the fixed routine of housework, shopping, laundry, meals to prepare, and silences to endure.
Since childhood, I had been taught that the most important thing for a woman was to settle down, marry, have children, and stay with the family.
Do not contradict. Do not argue. Do not complain.
And if you dream—do it quietly, because dreaming is useless.
I married young and had two children.
I was a mother, a wife, a housewife. I washed, ironed, cooked, and ran all day.
My husband worked. He came home tired, ate in silence, and sat in front of the TV. Then he began to criticize: that I was boring, that he had left me alone too long, that I had nothing left to say.
He told me that with women like me, you don’t live—you survive.
And what did I do?
I kept quiet.
Because “family is sacred.”
Because “you have to be patient.”
Because my mother always said, “Be patient. You’re a wife, you’re a mother.”
And so I was patient.
I waited for the day my children would be grown, independent, and then—maybe—my life could begin.
Then one day, he left.
No scenes, no explanations.
He packed a suitcase and never came back.
I was alone.
And strangely, the first thing I felt wasn’t pain.
It was silence.
A true silence, deep and unfamiliar—yet in that silence, for the first time, I heard myself.
At first, I was lost.
I no longer knew who I was.
I couldn’t remember what I liked, or what I wanted.
I walked around my own house like a guest.
I asked myself when I had last laughed freely, or woken up without rushing to the kitchen to make coffee for everyone.
One morning, I woke up—and didn’t make the bed.
I brewed coffee just for myself and sat on the balcony.
I noticed the sunlight slipping between the curtains.
A tiny, simple thing… yet I watched in amazement.
Because it was mine.
Something shifted in me that day.
I enrolled in an English course—simply because I wanted to.
I learned to use my smartphone to buy a train ticket.
I took a trip. Alone. For the first time in my life.
Then I went even further.
I saw the sea in winter—the real sea, not the one in photos.
It smelled of salt, sharp and alive. That day, I understood freedom.
I took off my shoes, sat on the wet sand, and thought:
“Why did I wait so long?”
A neighbor asked me, “Are you out of your mind? Traveling alone at almost sixty?”
I smiled.
Because maybe, at last, I wasn’t lost anymore. I had found myself.
Now, I live alone.
Not because no one loves me—
But because, for the first time, I love myself.
I have no schedules, only choices.
I don’t spend my days in the kitchen anymore.
Instead, I spend hours in museums, on regional trains, in bookstores, or curled beneath a blanket with a novel I left untouched for years because “I never had time.”
Sometimes I look in the mirror. The wrinkles are still there.
But my eyes are different.
There is a new light in them.
Because at 58, I stopped surviving.
And I started to live.
~ The Two Pennies
