Baba Yaga The Wise

That is how the story begins…

Not with monsters…
Not with villains…
But with women who were taught that devotion meant endurance. Women who believed that if they loved deeply enough, patiently enough, sacrificially enough, they could warm cold hands into tenderness and turn absence into home.

My mother searched for love the way some people search shorelines after shipwrecks —
hopeful,
bleeding…
certain something beautiful must still be floating somewhere out at sea.

The men she found were often hungry… in ways that had nothing to do with food.

Some arrived with charm and sadness folded together like letters kept too long in a pocket.
Some carried wounds they mistook for personalities.

Some with pockets full of lies and vile intent.
Some wanted not a partner… but a harbor… A witness… A woman willing to carry the emotional weight they had never learned to hold themselves.

And because women are so often taught to nurture before they are taught to discern,
many of us confuse being needed with being cherished.

I watched this as a child.

I sat quietly in rooms heavy with cannabis smoke and heartbreak, listening to grown women try to translate disappointment into meaning. Listening to them wonder why love kept arriving dressed as labor or pain or silence… or worse.

And somewhere inside myself, I began building an understanding of romance that had very little to do with joy.

I learned that love meant waiting.
Explaining…

Forgiving…

Shrinking…

Limitless Patience…

Silence…

Self Abandonment.
Weathering moods like seasons.
Making excuses for the disappearing acts of emotionally unfinished men.

I learned that women often become emotional caretakers long before they become equal partners.

The tragedy is not simply that some men fail to grow.
The tragedy is how many women believe it is their sacred duty to raise them.

So they pour.
And pour.
And pour.

Into marriages.
Into empty promises.
Into men who mistake a woman’s compassion for an endless abundant resource that they “deserve” …

And when the woman finally collapses from exhaustion, broken dreams, broken heart, broken spirit… she wonders why she feels invisible despite having given away every visible piece of herself.

What no one tells girls is that self-abandonment can masquerade as loyalty for decades.

Sometimes a man leaves physically.
Sometimes he remains in the house while slowly abandoning the emotional landscape of the relationship.
And somehow the second kind of loneliness can ache even more deeply.

I know women who have cried beside sleeping husbands and still felt utterly alone.

I know women who have mistaken criticism for guidance because at least criticism required attention.
Women who celebrated crumbs because they had been taught not to ask for bread.

And the children —
the children always notice.

They watch their mothers apologize for existing too loudly.
They watch women negotiate with disappointment as though disappointment were simply part of adulthood.
They absorb the tension in the walls, the unpredictability, the walking-on-eggshells rhythm of homes built around fragile masculinity.

Then one day those little girls become women trying desperately not to repeat what shaped them.

Some succeed.
Some almost succeed.
Most of us spend years untangling ourselves from stories we inherited before we even had language.

I think many women are not searching for perfection in love.

We are searching for rest.

For steadiness.
For emotional safety.
For the rare and holy experience of being loved without being consumed.

A love that does not ask us to become smaller in order to survive it.

A love where we are not cast as healer, mother, audience, therapist, and muse all at once.

A love where we are finally allowed to arrive as full human beings instead of emotional infrastructure.

And perhaps that is the grief beneath so many women’s lives —
realizing how often we were taught to perform love rather than receive it.

Still,
despite everything,
I remain tender toward hope.

Not naïve.
Not desperate.
Just open.

Because somewhere beneath all the noise of inherited sorrow and cultural conditioning, I still believe love can be something quieter than chaos.

Something that does not leave bruises on the spirit.

Something that does not require a woman to disappear in order to keep it.

Maybe wisdom is not becoming cynical.

Maybe wisdom is learning to stop calling survival by the name of love.

And maybe healing begins the moment a woman finally understands:

she was never difficult to love —
only taught to build homes for people who did not know how to stay.