One of the most painful truths of being a woman in patriarchy—especially a mother to boys—is not fear or grief. It is abandonment.

The knowledge that you can give your entire life to loving, protecting, and raising others, and still discover that when you are endangered, suffering, or treated as disposable, no institution, no man, no son feels responsible for you.

This realization is almost unbearable.

So women do not face it directly.

Instead, we deny it.

Denial is not stupidity. It is not weakness. It is a psychological survival strategy. Because to fully absorb the truth—that your care was expected but never reciprocated, that your safety was never central to anyone else’s sense of obligation—can feel like psychic annihilation.

I have spoken to many mothers who say the same thing in different words:

“I feel like I lost my son.”
“I keep wondering what I did wrong.”
“If I could just understand the mistake, maybe I could fix it.”

But that question—What did I do?—is often a way of avoiding a far more devastating truth: this is not about a correctable error. And it may not be about you at all.

Denial steps in to protect women from recognizing how conditional their value actually is—how easily love is withdrawn once a woman’s usefulness, obedience, or emotional labor is no longer being actively extracted.

It is often less painful to believe I failed than to believe I was never loved in the way I thought I was.

So women tell themselves stories:

He’s just busy.
He doesn’t mean it.
It’s a phase.
If I’m patient, he’ll come back.
If I explain it better, he’ll understand.

These stories allow women to stay functional. To get through the day. To avoid collapsing under the weight of a grief that has no culturally acceptable name.

Because there is no ritual for mourning someone who is still alive but absent.

There is no language for grieving love that turns out to be thin, situational, or transactional.

And there is very little permission—especially for mothers—to say:

This hurts because I was not loved as much as I was told I was.

Denial is not lying to oneself.

It is refusing to look directly at a wound that has no easy treatment.

A Small, Brutal Example

When I was in Mexico, I was reading tarot cards to survive. All my money had been stolen. I was sleeping outside. I was being assaulted. I was isolated. The cards were barely keeping me afloat, but they kept me alive.

That’s where I met her.

She was eighty years old, a psychologist from New York—brilliant, funny, radiant. She wore bikinis like she’d invented them. She was genuinely beautiful, alive in a way most people never are at any age. I adored her, and she loved my card readings, so we spent time together.

Her son was about my age.

He was cruel, entitled, and misogynistic in the most banal way—sleeping with a much younger woman while controlling money that was not really his. Somehow, he controlled his mother’s finances. That alone told a story.

One afternoon, we were sitting by the beach. She told me—quietly, painfully—that what she wanted most was a male partner. She didn’t understand why she couldn’t find one. She wondered what was wrong with her.

I told her what I believed was true: that it wasn’t her. That she was extraordinary. That when you actually look closely at men—really look—most of them are not good partners. That the problem wasn’t her age or her personality. The problem was the men.

Then her son arrived.

We began talking about physics. I love physics; it’s one of my intellectual homes. And it became obvious very quickly that he was irritated by the fact that I knew more than he did.

His mother mentioned that she and I had been talking about why she couldn’t find a partner.

And he said, casually, flatly, in front of me:

“It’s because you’re crazy, Mom. You’re just fucking crazy. That’s why no one wants you.”

He meant it.
He didn’t hesitate.
He didn’t soften it.
He didn’t take it back.

There was a pause.

Then I looked directly at her and said, calmly:

This is why.

I told her she wasn’t crazy. That there was nothing wrong with her. That what he had just said was hateful and false. That no one who loved her would speak to her that way. That she was brilliant and sane and worthy of love.

That was the last time she ever spoke to me.

Because once the truth was named, something shattered.

In her mind, her son was still her little boy—running into her arms, loving her, needing her. That image was how she survived the reality of who he had become.

And I destroyed that image.

Not by exaggerating.
Not by attacking.
But by naming what was already there.

She could not face the fact that her son did not love her in any meaningful, protective, human sense of the word. And she could not remain connected to anyone who made that truth visible.

So she disappeared.

Where Are Our Sons?

Women are in extreme danger in America.

Men can do whatever they want to us, and this has been amply demonstrated—through courts that fail us, institutions that stall, exposures that change nothing. Powerful men exploit women with impunity. Ordinary men look away. Files pile up. The violence continues.

The question women keep asking—Why is this allowed?—has an answer we are not encouraged to say out loud.

Where are our grown sons?

Because if sons loved their mothers—if they carried even a fraction of the care, loyalty, and protectiveness women pour into their children—this level of normalized harm would not be possible.

It simply wouldn’t.

My son was the light of my life. I adored him. I cherished him. I sacrificed to care for him, to protect him, to center his needs. He is grown now.

And I have had to face a truth that years of therapy did not make painless: he does not meaningfully care about my life.

Not enough to intervene.
Not enough to confront what is happening.
Not enough to risk discomfort.

This is not melodrama. It is evidence-based.

If our sons cared—collectively, structurally—women would not be this unsafe. The scale of indifference required for the current reality is enormous. It cannot be explained by a few bad men. It requires widespread disengagement by men who were once boys we loved.

For many women, it is easier to believe I failed as a mother than to accept my love was not returned in adulthood.

Boys are taught not to return care.
Not to feel responsible.
Not to experience women’s pain as actionable.

That is the only explanation that makes sense.

What Those Videos Don’t Know Yet

There is a genre of TikTok I can’t watch for very long.

Women filming their baby boys. Toddlers laughing. Small hands reaching for their mothers’ faces. And the caption, again and again:

When I’m eighty, this is where I’ll return.
These memories will carry me.

What these women don’t know is that very often, you lose those boys.

Not to adulthood.
Not to distance.
But to patriarchy.

The boy you adore is not who you are guaranteed to have when he is grown.

Very often, what replaces him is someone numb—numb to your love, numb to women’s suffering, numb to the moral weight of harm done in front of him.

And at a certain point, numbness becomes something darker.

When someone can witness cruelty and feel nothing, do nothing, risk nothing, that is not innocence lost. That is moral deformation. That is what patriarchy produces and rewards.

Even when women see this—when it is observable, demonstrable, spoken out loud—many still cannot face it.

Because to face it means grieving not just a relationship, but an entire story about motherhood, love, and meaning.

So women retreat into memory.
Into photographs.
Into who their sons were.

And patriarchy depends on that retreat.

After Denial Breaks

When denial finally breaks, what remains is not false hope.

There is no guarantee of reconciliation.
No promise that sons will return.
No assurance that love, once withheld, will appear.

What remains is clarity.

After denial breaks, women stop organizing their lives around absence. They stop performing optimism for people who have already chosen distance. They stop protecting myths that only ever shielded male indifference.

They grieve honestly—not for a misunderstanding, but for a loss.

This is where abandonment reveals itself as the through-line of everything. Not just personal abandonment, but cultural abandonment—one that demands women’s sacrifice while denying women’s worth.

Patriarchy does not only abandon women through laws and institutions.

It abandons women through their sons.

After denial breaks, what becomes possible is refusal.

Refusal to self-blame.
Refusal to romanticize indifference.
Refusal to keep sacrificing for people who have already decided your life is expendable.

That does not fix the world.

But it returns women to themselves.

And clarity without illusion—grief without lies, love without self-erasure—is the only honest ground left to stand on.