I buttoned a coat in the hallway and felt how much of my love lives in tiny unfinished mornings

Dear Delyara, It was cold, the house was late, one child was still looking for a book, and I was standing there fastening a coat while also listening for the kettle, checking the time, and trying to remember whether I had already signed the form for Friday. That is what my mornings feel like now. Not one event, but twelve overlapping half-events, all of them somehow expecting tenderness from the same tired woman at the centre of them. When the coat was finally done, my child ran out the door without noticing the care inside that one small act. That didn’t upset me. It just reminded me how much of motherhood is made of gestures that disappear into the day the second they are completed.