I ate my dinner after everyone else had finished and noticed how normal that has become

Dear Delyara, They had eaten. They had asked for sauce, then more water, then the other fork, then whether something was happening on Friday, then where their homework sheet was, then if I had seen the school email. By the time I sat down properly, the room had already moved on from the meal. My plate was warm enough. That wasn’t the point. The point was that I had once again arrived to my own food after everybody else’s needs had already taken their turn from it. And what frightened me was not the sadness of the moment. It was how ordinary it felt. There are forms of self-erasure so socially common they stop looking like erasure at all. A mother eating last is one of them. Still, the body knows. My body always knows.