Field Note No. 13
The Impossible List
There is a running list on the island.
Work.
Manage the family.
Buy the groceries.
Plan the meals.
Raise the children.
Have hobbies.
Hobbies feels… ambitious.
What hobbies? When hobbies. In what spare dimension.
At what point, exactly, am I meant to develop a personality outside of this? Somewhere between the grocery store and bedtime negotiations? During that five minute window when no one needs anything and I briefly forget who I am and just stand in the kitchen like a Victorian ghost?
I do have hobbies.
They include:
reheating coffee
remembering appointments at the exact wrong moment
keeping small humans alive
I’m highly skilled. Award-winning, even. No one has formally acknowledged it, but still.
The truth is, they are my whole life right now. These children. This house. This strange, loud, sticky little island. And most days, that feels right. Like I am exactly where I’m supposed to be, doing something that matters in a way that is both invisible and all-consuming.
I am deeply invested in their growth, their snacks, their emotional regulation, their ability to locate their shoes. I am a full-time curator of small human lives and somehow that doesn’t count as a personality.
And I see the future. I see it so clearly it feels like a threat.
One day they will be big. They won’t need me to cut their grapes or find their missing left sock or sit beside them while they sleep like I’m a human weighted blanket.
They will leave. Not dramatically (I hope). Not all at once. Just gradually. With backpacks and car keys and lives that don’t require me to witness every single trick they can do from the couch.
They are supposed to leave. That is the goal. And I’ll be standing here like, hello yes I once ran a small, emotionally complex organization. We specialized in snacks and conflict resolution and locating missing shoes. We really changed lives.
Successful motherhood is, apparently, working yourself out of a job. And then what? Do I just… pivot? Rebrand? Pick up pottery? Become a woman who “enjoys a quiet cup of morning coffee” without anyone asking me for a snack or hearing “Mommy, guess what” half way through?
This is how it happens. We become those lonely, slightly unhinged mothers texting their adult children “just checking in :)” at 9:14 a.m., 12:32 p.m., and again at 3:07 because what if they didn’t see it.
It makes sense, I think, how mothers become a little… intense.
How love, poured out so steadily for so many years, doesn’t know where to go when the house gets quiet. It just paces. It reorganizes cabinets. It considers sending another text in case the first ones felt too casual.
But maybe that’s not the whole story.
Maybe this isn’t the losing of a life, it’s the building of one.
One that is being stretched and shaped and expanded by all of this love.
Maybe it doesn’t leave with them. It won’t.
Maybe it stays quietly in the walls and in me.
Maybe one day I’ll remember how to be a person with hobbies. If not, that’s okay too.
Anyway. I will be here on the island, building a life entirely out of love and routine and small hands in mine, pretending I’m not already grieving the day it all changes.
Dinner is at 6. No one will eat it.