The Job You Were Always Supposed to Lose
There's a moment in the first day or two, maybe it's in the hospital, maybe it's that first night home, when it becomes completely, physically clear that you are the most important person in your tiny person's world.
Not philosophically. Practically. They need you for everything. Warmth, food, the reassurance that someone is there. The specific smell of you. Their whole world is you. All of it.
I spent over three years researching what happens in that moment, not my own experience of it, but what women with an intellectual disability describe when they talk about becoming a mother. What I found, again and again, is that, as mothers, we do something instinctive and deliberate at the same time: we position ourselves at the centre of our child's social network.
We become the hub. The person who knows. The one who is there.
And it is overwhelming and wonderful and completely exhausting, and most days I would not trade a moment of it.
Most days.
When I started Dinner on the Table in 2014, my junior recipe testers were 6, 5 and 2. I was deep in those years. The years of ferocious involvement. I wrote about these issues years ago, with more honesty than dignity: Having to know the location of every shoe (the answer is consistently evasive and aggravating beyond measure). The machinations of the school day and just trying to get out the door. The tooth fairy's persistent failure to attend to her professional obligations on time. The discovery, through extensive, eye-twitch-inducing field research, that logical argument with an eight-year-old is a closed system impervious to adult reasoning.
I was the hub. I knew things. I was consulted on things. Things did not happen without my involvement, or at minimum my awareness that they were happening.
My junior recipe testers are now 17, 16 and 13.
Something has shifted.
There's a point in the teenage years where you notice that you are no longer automatically in the loop. Plans happen that don't involve you. Opinions form independently. There are conversations in progress that you weren't part of, friendships you know only by first name, jokes you don't quite understand and you know someone is trying to ensure that you aren't entirely supposed to.
This is, I know, developmentally normal and appropriate.
It is also, if you're anything like me... it's not nothing.
Here's what the research also told me, though I may not have fully absorbed the personal implications at the time: the job of the mother-as-centre is, eventually, to make herself less central. The de-centring isn't a failure of the relationship. It's the evidence of its success. Your child is building their own social network, with their own people and their own inner life that belongs entirely to them. You helped make that possible. All those years of being the person who was there helped make this: a person capable of having a life of their own.
This is right. This is the whole point.
But, like treading on lego bricks in the middle of the night, it still stings a bit.
I want to be fair and acknowledge the upsides. I spend considerably less time looking for shoes. I can finish a thought without being interrupted by someone who needs something urgently and immediately and right now (although being a woman of a certain age, finishing a thought isn't necessarily a given... it's just not the juniors fault any more). Dinner now sometimes involves a conversation that isn't about what day the truck is going to deliver the dirt for the building project at preschool.
But there is something nobody quite prepares you for, in all the books and the advice and the well-meaning observations: the particular feeling of watching what you built, slowly and by design, become less about you. The centre of gravity shifting. The network reconfiguring.
They're not gone, obviously. They still appear at dinner and, happily, at other times of the day too. They still have opinions about what we're eating (the 13-year-old has become a surprisingly rigorous food critic, which is, at times, very inconvenient). They still tell me things, and need me. Just different things, and sometimes hours after the fact, once the information has been processed and deemed shareable.
But I am no longer the hub in the way I was.
And if you are in the thick of those early years, the toddler years, the primary school years, the years of having to know where every shoe is and being the person consulted on every small crisis (and dirt delivery), here is what I want you to know:
It counts. All of it. Every night you got up. Every time you were there. Every moment of ferocious, exhausting, occasionally chaotic involvement. The return on investment is slow and invisible and then one day it isn't, and you see a person, an actual whole person, and you realise you were instrumental in making that happen.
Happy Mother's Day to everyone doing that right now. We see you. And we celebrate you.
And if the person doing that in your life could use a week off from also working out what's for dinner, that's something we can help with. We make meals from scratch, the kind you'd cook yourself if you weren't already doing seventeen other things. They go straight from the freezer to the oven to the table. Real ingredients, no preservatives, one less thing to think about.
Or the gift of cake→ (also excellent when dealing with overwhelm in all its forms).