I could tell you the shoe size of every person who has ever lived in my house.
Cheer shoe sizes. Shin guard sizes. Who is allergic to what. Which one eats the crust, and which one performs a small tragedy about it. Gym locations, practice times, the specific gas station bathroom on the way to the tournament that is worth stopping for.
Ask me my own coffee order, and I will need a second.
Because for a lot of years, I did not have one. I had whatever was fast. Whatever I could drink with one hand while driving someone somewhere. I was the logistics department, the short-order cook, the lost-and-found, and the emotional weather station for an entire household. And I was good at it. That is the sneaky part. I got so good at keeping everyone else that I quietly stopped keeping me.
It does not happen all at once. You just trade yourself away one tiny choice at a time. Skip the thing you wanted because somebody needs a ride. Cancel the plan because the schedule exploded again. Put your own name at the bottom of the list so many times that eventually you forget you were ever on it.
And then here is the plot twist. They grow up. Right in front of you. Not in a tidy movie montage. In real time, one dropped carpool, and one I've got it, Mom, at a time.
And the noise you spent years wishing would quiet down finally quiets down.
And instead of dancing through the empty kitchen like the memes promised, a lot of us just stand there. A little stunned. Because we went looking for ourselves in the sudden quiet and could not quite remember where we set her down.
So let me say this to the woman still in the loud years, and to the one just coming out of them. You are not ungrateful. You are not falling apart. You are just meeting a question that never got a spare minute for two decades. Who am I, when I am not being everyone's everything?
That is not a crisis. That is an invitation.
And no, the way back is not quitting your life to go find yourself in Italy, although if that is on the table, take it and send pictures. It is smaller than that. It is letting yourself answer the little questions again. What music do I like? What would I do with an hour nobody is asking me for? What did I love before there was never any time for it?
If you believe, like I do, here is the part that steadies me. You are a whole person God knew and loved long before you were anybody's mother. That woman did not disappear. She just got buried under the snack schedule, waiting for a little quiet to come back and dig her out.
I am not writing this from some polished, all-figured-out place. I am still relearning my own coffee order. Some days I still catch myself putting my name last out of pure habit.
But I am on the list now. And that is a start.
So, tell me. Do you know your own coffee order? Or have you been keeping everyone else so long that you forgot to keep yourself? Some of us are standing in the quiet kitchen right there with you.
We're in this together.