The Loneliest Woman in the Family Is Often the One Everyone Depends On
You know her.
Maybe you are her.
She is the one whose phone rings first when something goes wrong. The one who sends money before she is asked, because she has learned that waiting to be asked means someone has already suffered longer than necessary. The one who shows up to the hospital, to the meeting with the landlord, to the school when the headteacher calls. The one who holds the family together so quietly and so completely that nobody has stopped to wonder what would happen if she let go.
She does not complain. That is part of the reason nobody worries about her. She has trained everyone around her to believe she is fine, because every time she has not been fine, the burden of her not being fine fell on her anyway. So she learned to carry it alone. It was easier.
She is the loneliest woman in the family. And she is the one everyone depends on.
“She has trained everyone around her to believe she is fine. Because every time she was not fine, she had to deal with that alone too.”
The things nobody sees
From the outside, her life can look like strength. She is capable. She is reliable. She gets things done. People speak about her with a kind of pride that is also, if you listen carefully, a kind of assumption. “She will handle it.” “She always does.” “Thank God we have her.”
What they do not see is what happens after the call ends. After she has promised to send something by Friday. After she has said “don’t worry, I’ll sort it” for the fourteenth time this year. They do not see her sitting quietly with the weight of it, doing the mental arithmetic of how to make the numbers work again, feeling the particular loneliness of being the person everyone leans on when you have nobody to lean on yourself.
They do not see that she has not bought herself anything in months. That her own dreams, the course she wanted to take, the savings account she planned to open, the trip she has been promising herself for three years, keep getting pushed back to make room for someone else’s emergency.
They do not ask. Not because they do not care. But because they have never had to. She always seems fine. And she has never shown them that she is not.
When was the last time someone asked how you are and meant it? Not as a greeting. Not before they asked for something. Just asked, and waited for the real answer?
If you cannot remember, that is not a small thing. That is the loneliness we are talking about. The specific kind that comes not from being alone, but from being surrounded by people who need you and do not truly see you.
Nobody asked her to carry this. It just became hers.
She did not apply for this role. There was no conversation, no agreement, no moment where someone sat down with her and said: from now on, you are the one who holds everything together. It happened the way most invisible labour happens — gradually, quietly, one small handover at a time, until it was simply understood.
She was the eldest, perhaps. Or the one who got the education. Or the one who moved to the city and got the job. Or simply the one who said yes the first time, and discovered that yes becomes a permanent address if you say it often enough.
In many Kenyan families, the woman who is capable becomes the woman who is responsible. For everyone. Indefinitely. Without a conversation about what that costs her, and without a plan for when it stops.
She did not choose this. But somewhere along the way, she stopped imagining that she could choose differently. The need around her became so constant, so loud, so real, that her own needs learned to be quiet. And quiet needs, in a noisy family, go unmet for a very long time.
“The woman who is capable becomes the woman who is responsible. For everyone. Indefinitely. Without anyone asking what that costs her.”
It is not about being alone. It is about not being known.
My sister, loneliness is not always an empty room. Sometimes it is a full house and a full phone and the feeling that not one person in either place truly knows what you are carrying.
It is sitting at a family gathering where everyone is laughing and eating the food you contributed to, and feeling completely invisible. It is being celebrated for your generosity when what you needed was to be asked if you were okay. It is the specific pain of people knowing your bank account better than they know your heart.
It is also this: the fear of stopping. She has held this for so long that she is not sure what happens to the people around her if she puts it down. And that fear, the fear of the collapse she might cause, keeps her carrying it even when she has nothing left.
She does not stop because she loves them. But love was never meant to cost this much.
You are allowed to need something too
We want to say something directly to you, if you are the woman this edition is describing.
Your needs are not less important because you are strong. Your exhaustion is not weakness. Your loneliness is not ingratitude for the family around you. It is the honest result of giving more than you have been given back, for longer than any person should have to.
You do not have to announce it. You do not have to make a speech or cause a scene. But you are allowed, quietly and firmly, to begin making room for yourself. To say no to one thing this month. To spend one afternoon on something that is entirely yours. To let one call go unanswered without guilt eating you alive.
You cannot be everything to everyone forever. Nobody can. And the people who love you, truly love you, would not want you to disappear in the process of holding them together.
She gives the most and often saves the least
There is a financial reality that sits underneath this loneliness and we need to name it plainly.
The woman who is everyone’s safety net is often the woman with the smallest safety net of her own. She gives consistently. She saves inconsistently, because something always comes up. She has funded other people’s school fees, medical bills, business ideas, and rent deposits, often without a thank you and never with a return. And while she has been doing all of this, her own pension is thin, her savings account is barely moving, and retirement feels like a subject she cannot afford to think about.
This is not because she is bad with money. It is because she has been using her money as a social contract, maintaining relationships, keeping the peace, being the person people can count on, and the cost of that contract has fallen entirely on her.
The two conversations she needs to have
The first conversation is with herself. What does she actually need to be financially secure in ten years? Not what does the family need. What does she need? A pension contribution. An emergency fund that is not available to emergencies that belong to other people. Savings with her name on them that do not get touched. She needs to write these numbers down and treat them as non-negotiable before any other financial commitment is made each month.
The second conversation is with her family. Not a confrontation. A statement. A simple, calm declaration that she is restructuring her finances and her contributions will be changing. She does not owe a detailed explanation. She owes herself the freedom to make this change without permission.
Both conversations are hard. Both are necessary. The woman who skips them will still be carrying everyone at 60, with nothing saved and nowhere to land.
If she is your mother, your sister, your friend
Maybe you are not the woman this edition describes. Maybe you are reading this and thinking of someone you love.
If that woman is your mother, call her this week. Not to ask for something. Just to ask how she is. And then be quiet and let her answer. She may say she is fine. She has been saying that for years. But the fact that you asked without wanting anything will land somewhere inside her, even if she does not show it.
If she is your sister or your friend, check in. Bring her tea. Sit with her for an afternoon with no agenda. Let her talk if she wants to. Let her be quiet if she needs to. Do not make her perform gratitude for your company. Just be there, the way she has always been there for everyone else.
And if you have been one of the people who has leaned on her without looking back, this is a gentle invitation to look back. To ask what she needs. To offer before she asks. To be, for once, the person she can count on.
She has been holding the family together for a long time. She deserves to feel held too.
“She has been holding the family together for a long time. She deserves to feel held too.”
Stella Wanjohi built a business in the margins of everyone else’s needs
Stella Wanjohi is 44 years old. She lives in Nakuru and works as a secondary school teacher. She is also the eldest of six siblings, the mother of two teenagers, and the person her entire extended family calls when something goes wrong. She has been all of these things simultaneously for as long as she can remember.
For years, Stella’s salary disappeared the same way every month. Rent. Food. School fees for her children. Then the calls. A younger brother who needed help with his HELB loan. A mother whose medication was running out. A cousin who had lost her job and needed something to survive on until she found another one. Stella never said no. She did not know how.
The business started by accident. During the school holidays three years ago, Stella began baking mandazis and mahamri to keep herself busy. A neighbour asked to buy some. Then the neighbour told someone else. Within two weeks, Stella had more orders than she had time to fill, and something shifted in her.
“I realised that for the first time, I was making money that nobody knew about,” she says. “It felt strange. Like I had found a room in my own house that was just mine.”
She kept the business quiet for six months. She opened a separate M-Pesa account. She did not tell her siblings or her mother. Every shilling from the baking went in and stayed in. When the account reached KSh 40,000, she bought a second-hand chest freezer and expanded to supplying a small hotel near the school. By the end of that year, the business was making more than KSh 15,000 a month in profit.
She has since told her family about it. The calls still come, and she still helps when she can. But the separate account remains. The freezer is paid off. She is planning a second one.
“I love my family,” Stella says. “But I needed something that was mine before I had nothing left to give. Now I have something. And somehow, that has made me a better version of the woman they depend on.”
To the woman who holds everything together: you are seen. You are more than your usefulness to other people. And you deserve a life that is also, quietly and firmly, your own.
With love · Mwanamke Jasiri