If I Had Known… I Am So Much More Than “Someone’s Wife”
Updated: 9 hours ago
“I lost myself along the way. I don’t know who I am anymore.”
That is how Juliette begins our first coaching session.
Approaching fifty, she is going through a stage she had not anticipated. Her youngest child has just left home. Her husband continues to enjoy a brilliant career. And she finds herself facing a question that deeply unsettles her: what is her place now?
When Juliette met her husband twenty years earlier, she was a young consultant, happy in her work and full of plans.
Then her husband’s career led them to move several times, sometimes abroad. Children came along. Between expatriate assignments, changing schools, and settling into new homes, returning to work became increasingly complicated.
So Juliette chose to put her career on hold. It is a choice she doesn’t regret. She loved raising her children, creating a home, and supporting her family through their various adventures. She was proud to contribute, in her own way, to her husband’s professional success.
For twenty years she organized, supported, anticipated, and reassured. She helped the entire family find its feet with every move. But now the children have left. Her husband continues working and taking on new challenges.
And Juliette?
“When people introduce me, I’m always ‘so-and-so’s wife.’ Before, I was also the children’s mother. But now that they’ve gone… who am I? What am I?”
Juliette does not feel that she has failed at life. She does not reject her marriage or the years she devoted to her children. What hurts is no longer knowing how to define herself beyond the roles she once fulfilled. For years she was indispensable.
Today she feels invisible.
There is a kind of work that never appears on a résumé: keeping a family together through change ; enabling a spouse’s career ; managing the thousand details of daily life, and creating stability when everything around you is shifting. This work requires considerable skills. Yet it is rarely recognized as such. And when it is no longer needed in quite the same way, the women who performed it may find themselves facing an emptiness that is difficult to name.
Over the course of our sessions, Juliette begins to see her journey differently.
She realizes she did not simply “follow” her husband. She too navigated transitions, developed adaptability, built relationships, made decisions, and carried responsibilities.
But Juliette also expresses a very clear wish: she wants to regain a professional identity of her own.
And we take time to explore what that means to her.
Is it a desire to build a career? To be recognized for her own abilities? To regain a degree of independence, particularly financial independence?
It would be naïve to ignore the place money occupies in our society. Earning a living is not just about receiving an income. Sometimes it is also a way to feel legitimate, autonomous, and recognized by others. One way, among others, of giving ourselves a sense of worth.
But what truly matters to Juliette? What is she looking for in her desire to work again? Now that her children are grown, what might still be stopping her from taking that step?
These are all questions we explore together, without rushing toward answers.
The point is neither to disown the last twenty years nor to assume that a professional career is the only way for her to rediscover the person she believes herself to be.
It is about understanding what Juliette needs today, how her aspirations have changed, and what she wants to build in the next chapter of her life.
You can be proud of the life you chose and still, one day, feel the need to make different choices.
For twenty years, she was “someone’s wife” and “someone’s mother.” Today, she simply wants to “be Juliette.”
